Turning 20 Again

I’m a long-time fan of the Turning 20 quilts, in part because they make such efficient use of fat quarters. (And who can resist fat quarters?) The original patterns came out many years ago, and there are a number of new ones since. If you don’t know about them, you can find them here, at Tricia Cribbs’ website.

Anyway, I recently made my upteenth version of her Turning 20 Again pattern, in part because I just had to use this gold fabric.

The quilt is straight; my picture is not!

The quilter did some wonderful swirls on it.

I’m blogging about this many weeks after finishing it–that’s the way it goes some days! It’s a donation quilt.

Quilt Stats

Name: Turning 20 Again

Pattern by: Tricia Cribbs (available here)

Made by: me

Finished size: 55″ x 55″

Quilted by: Linda

Improv Quilt-Along Continued

I’ve already posted about the first week of the quilt-along, which was focused on strips. Here are my blocks again.

The second week’s suggestion was polygons but not triangles. I found it difficult to like most of my attempts for this, though I did finally use EQ to design a block that I paper pieced. I thought that many of the others lack focus, so there was a lot of cutting up and re-designing. Still not my faves, but here they are:

The third week focused on triangles. I still did much of my cutting without a ruler, but I stuck to simpler designs and I’m much happier with this collection of blocks.

The quilt-along is called “30 Days of Improv” so we’re only about half way through. Here’s a link to the first post for the QAL if you want to join in. I’m looking forward to next week’s prompts.

Why Does This New Quilt Count as Finishing a UFO?

I hate the recursive nature of most social media, including Pinterest. You don’t dare click on what looks like a good pie recipe, because you’ll be fed pie recipes for at least 6 months, probably longer. HOWEVER, I do remain a fan of Pinterest, where I still find a lot of fun quilt ideas. Recently I found this pattern via Pinterest and just had to have it:

The pattern is available on Etsy, here.

I had just the place for the quilt, having decided a while back I wanted to make a “summer rain” quilt to go over the stairs. We’ve had this lovely Japanese silk scarf over the stairs, but it was time for a change.

I got the blocks made. Oops, I got the blocks made following her directions and then made a number of my own design. Anyway, I liked the way they all looked together.

This is a small quilt, so I decided to use a sort of baste-as-you-go construction by sewing rows down to the batting and backing, sort of like you’d do if you were making a QAYG place mat using strips. Then I quilted it in vertical lines. Not my favorite thing to do, but it worked fine.

I think you can see the vertical quilting here. The lines were marked with blue painter’s tape, and are at pseudo-random distances apart.

Oh, and why does it count as finishing a UFO? Because I had started an improv quilt with this in mind but never finished it! I got out the blocks I had completed for that and combined them with blocks made using Maryline’s pattern, and got rid of another UFO 😀

Quilt Stats

Name: Summer Rain

Pattern: City Quilt by Maryline Collioud-Robert, plus some blocks I improvised

Made and quilted by me

Finished size: 39″ x 50″

And BTW, I recommend this pattern. It was a lot of fun!

 

An Improv Quilt-Along

My blogging friend Linda, over at Flourishing Palms, posted about an improv quilt-along and I got hooked in too! Here’s the link if you want to know more about it:

And here are the fabrics I selected.

The first week’s prompt is strips/stripes. I’ve already done a bunch of what Maria Shell calls “mat cut strips” when I took a class with her, so I tried this time to go beyond what I did with Maria.

Here are a few of the strips

And strip setsAnd some final blocks

To be continued…