Happy Easter!

Hope you all enjoyed a beautiful Easter Sunday! We had gorgeous weather in our corner of the world.  Love these little chickens on their nests of selvages. Can you see their "eggs"? Cute huh? This was on a quilt by Judy Irish I saw at the QA show in Monroe. Fun and creative.
Happy spring stitching,
Tonya

Quilts of Valor

Hope you are all enjoying President's Day weekend and fitting in a little sewing time. It definitely feels like the right time for a patriotic quilt. I'm a little late to this party but have just recently agreed to do a quilt for the Quilts of Valor program. We had a lovely local quilter come to one of my quilt groups and share about the program and put out a call for quilts to be displayed the month of May at our local library and then be donated to the program. There are lots of great opportunities for us as quilters to share what we love to do with others and QOV is a great example. Quilts are made and donated to wounded servicemen and women as they return home to heal and to move on with their lives - no small task to be sure. QOV has given out over 80,000 quilts since 2004. That is A LOT of wounded veterans.

The quilts are made and given anonymously so I have no idea who my quilt will be going to. Patriotic themes and colors are popular among the recipients so that is the direction I am going. I have to decide on a quilt design though and could use some help. Here are my two current ideas, scrappy, of course! (Please
excuse my very low-tech design mechanism - that's just how I roll!) I'd like some help deciding. Any input?

Here's Plan A...

Or Plan B...

I am proud to say we have several veterans in our family and I am even more blessed and thankful to say that they all came home safely from their time in service. There is a lot to be said for that. If you are looking for somewhere to donate your next quilt, I hope you'll consider these fine men and women through the QOV program.

Happy stitching,

Tonya

Seeing Red

I am definitely seeing RED lately. I have so many different red projects going right now it's hard to say exactly how far I am behind but let's just say it's more than a couple and less than a lot! It's a good thing it's my favorite color.

This is a pattern called "Double Hearts" and it's done using the Hawaiian style of applique. This is my first try at this technique but it's really fun. It's like making big fabric snowflakes and then using needle-turn applique to stitch them down. If I really get my act together I will put up an easy tutorial for the technique.

I am starting to see a glimpse of the finish line on this one. There are 18 blocks and I have 14 done and 4 left to go. I started this around Valentine's Day last year when all the gorgeous red and white fabrics were out tempting me in the quilt shops. It's based on a quilt originally done around 1850 that I saw in the book called "Treasury of American Quilts" by Nelson and Houck. I scaled down the pattern a bit to be able to use a bunch of fat quarters that I had. The original pattern calls for 20" blocks and mine measure at 18". Plenty big enough and here's how it's looking so far:

Hard to tell in the pics but the reds are all different and the background blocks are all different red on white prints. The finished thing will have sashing (haven't picked that yet) and partial blocks for the setting squares. With only four more blocks to applique, the end is in sight! My Red Resolution is to finish and possibly get the top pieced by this Valentine's Day. We'll see....

Happy stitching,

Tonya

Christmas Crunch

Black Friday is not just a stressful retail day. It's also apparently when I officially begin to panic about my Christmas projects. Every year, I try to go into the holidays with a plan for any quilts that I'm making for gifts. I try to be realistic. I try to have restraint. But then comes November and two things happen:  1. that's when I get my hair-brained, last minute projects way too late in the game. I think "That would work, I could totally do that by Christmas".  And 2. nothing realistically gets done in December. My sewing room transforms into the guest room and December disappears and I get swallowed up in all of the holiday fun with family and friends. I want to be out having fun!

I feel like I need to join a group like "QFDLQFSCPN"(Quilt Friends don't let Quilt Friends Start Christmas projects in November.) I think I would have good company. Fortunately for me, I have other quilty friends who could also be founding members of this group and one of them came over for a fun sewing/eating/project/post-Thanksgiving kind of day ;)

Without giving too much away and spoiling any gift-giving plans I may or may not have, here are just a couple of sneak-peeks at some projects I'm working on.

Added to the normal November-melt down this year, I am happy to report that I have other deadlines. For the first time, I have three quilt patterns being published in the Spring. And when is the logical time for the delivery deadline to the publisher for photos? You guessed it, November 30th! I'll share more on that exciting news when I can but for now, I have to get back to it!

Happy holiday stitching,

Tonya

One stitch at a time

Do you hand quilt? Most of my projects are machine quilted. Manageable sized ones I try to do myself, big ones go off to my trusty long arm quilter. But I like to have one hand quilting project going so I have it to work on when the impulse strikes. Those impulses used to be never, then gradually, maybe because I'm getting older, I'm finding it more enjoyable and I seem to have the patience I didn't previously have. It always seems like a big race to finish a project and move on the next one. But I have to say that the quilts I have quilted by hand are really high up on my list of favorites. Especially when it comes to cuddling up under one for a nap!

While I think of hand quilting as the "traditional" version of our craft, of course I can't leave well enough alone. Bigger, brighter, and bolder apparently extend past my choices in fabric and design. I have tried over the last couple of projects to get my stitches ever-so-small and close together. I have taken classes and tried special thimble techniques. To no avail. My stubborn inner quilt diva, naturally gravitates toward this bigger, chunkier style of stitching. This project seems o.k. with it. I think the stitches are bold enough to stand up to the fabric choices. I also really like using Perle 8 cotton thread instead of finer quilting thread. It adds a dimension and weightiness to the project that I like.

So I've given up the fight and decided to accept my natural rhythm of big, bold stitches and be o.k.with it. I won't be winning any hand quilting contests anytime soon but I'm sure there's a good nap in my future!

Happy Stitching,

Tonya



Out of the Box with Judy Irish

I recently had the opportunity to take a really great workshop from Judy Irish. She's an amazingly creative quiltmaker and a long-arm quilter extrordinaire. Namedrop alert...she quilts for Kaffe Fassett and Liza Prior Lucy for all of their books! Kaffe and Liza are the top of my fabric craziness pyramid and I LOVE their work. I have done several of their quilts and I have a serious fabric addiction when it comes to anything "Kaffe."

It was more like a triple workshop since Judy managed to teach three different workshops at the same time! Woven quilts/collage, her lonestar method and free motion quilting. She also did a trunk show and shared many of her beautiful quilts. We also got the chance to pump her for lots of good Kaffe insider-stories. His new autobiography "Dreaming in Colour" is on my Christmas list!

I chose to focus on the woven quilts, something I had never done before and it turned out to be great fun. Really a stretch for me since I would never venture to consider myself an art-quilter, by any means. Here was my end result with the collage and free motion quilting completed.

Here's the woven piece before starting the collage layer.

It was really a very fun and surpisingly do-able technique. My head is already swimming with ideas for others. Maybe more valuable than the techniques learned, was the encouragement to stretch and create and to have fun while doing it. Thank you Judy!

Happy stitching,

Tonya

Back in the Red & White saddle

I just spent a beautiful and productive day in my sewing room. It was so long in coming. August was a fun summer blur and then September came and went in a back-to-school frenzy. I haven't been able to squeeze in a solid two hours of sewing time and I needed it!

No better way to get back in the saddle than diving into my monster red & white project. Here is some of today's piecing progress:

This is a project called Just Takes 2 put together by Sentimental Stitches and Dear Jane in honor of the fabulous Infinite Variety: Three Centuries of Red & White Quilts exhibit held in New York City last year. Two color quilts are eternally popular and this project pulls blocks from all of the quilts in the Red & White exhibit into a HUGE sampler. It's basically a block-of-the-month project on steroids. I decided to stick to the red and use different shirting fabrics for my backgrounds.

Someone thought this was a good idea in January (Tracey!) and red is my favorite color so it seemed like a good idea at the time. Well, 75 blocks into it (I think I'm behind by about 20 at this point) and still three more months to go! I can't even begin to think how I'm going to quilt this sucker. I'm just trying to make it to the finish!

One of the great things about this project is that it has made me appreciate more than ever the skills of quilters past. RESPECT! I mean, no rotary cutters, no Omnigrid rulers, no Ibuprofen, etc., etc. There's everything in this project from hand piecing, to applique, to regular piecing, to a never-ending amount of paper piecing. Tons of blocks that I have never even heard of, let alone tried before. Good learning experience!

The real test will be if red is still my favorite color by the end of this project!

Happy stitching,
Tonya