Author Archives: zippyquilts

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About zippyquilts

I quilt for pleasure but I also teach and write about quilting.

Personal Favorites from 2023

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Here are my personal faves of the quilts I made in 2023.

This is my version of the Bloem pattern by Libs Elliott. I think I showed in-progress photos but forgot to show it once it was finished!

I made this from a panel I just had to have. I especially enjoyed making the balloons and trees the opposite of each other.

This is made from Rachel Hauser’s Oodalolly pattern, which I’ve admired for years.

Swedish Sunrise is one of several quilts I’ve made with a sunrise theme. When It’s art we call it “working in series” rather than “perseveration” 😀

I made “St. Agatha in Venice” to use this beautiful print fabric.

Yes, it’s being held out a window by hand, so the picture isn’t as nice as the ones taken by the magazine folks!

The Tilda fabrics are beautiful, but so similar in value that they needed structure when they were all mashed together.

The “Wish” pattern from Cluck Cluck Sew was perfect for a Quilt of Valor

“Mod Owls” made a good teacher gift because the mascot at my grandsons’ school is an owl

Aha! Orphan blocks can be cut up to make new blocks, as I did with my Giant Circles quilt, here

Next post will be the “on to 2024” edition 😀

Classes, First Quarter 2024

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Here’s what I’ll be teaching at Studio Stitch in the first quarter of 2024.

Strip Swirl, January 18 & 25.

I made this quilt from scraps (of course!) but it could be made from a jelly roll for a more coordinated look.

Make Your Own Tilda Quilt, January 23 and 30.

Tilda fabrics are just beautiful! But they’re almost all mid values, which makes them challenging to use in a quilt. I designed this block and then made the entire quilt top a replica of the block! Learn how I did it and either use my design or make your own design in class.

Love Pillow, February 2

This is a chance to use your zipper foot, walking foot, and zigzag foot if you’d care to! And you get a cute pillow in time for Valentine’s Day.

A Little Orange, February 10

Yes, it’s being held out a window by hand, so the picture isn’t as nice as the ones taken by the magazine folks!

This is the quilt I had published in Quick + Easy Quilts recently, though their quilt was in holiday colors. This is the orange one I made to test the pattern before submitting it. It’s easy and would make a great second quilt for a relative beginner.

NOT Paper Pieced, March 5.

This is a quick and fun quilt that I made to use up a group of coordinating fat quarters.

Help! (UFO Rescue), March 15 and/or 16

This is my quarterly class for customers to bring anything unfinished and I’ll try to help. Some people sign up just to get some dedicated sewing time away from household chores!

And that’s it for the first quarter! Best wishes to you for the coming year!

 

Enjoy Your Holiday

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These little angels were purchased by my Mother just after WWII, when she married my Father and “set up housekeeping”. I have gotten rid of most of the holiday dreck, but I love these so they are on the dining table.

Here are a few projects I’ve been working on.

I took a class and made a bowl

I made some little pods for friends. Pattern is Sweetpea Pods, available here

I love Libs Elliott’s quilts, so I’m working on La Fin du Monde. So far it seems to be a hot mess. Pattern available here.

To paraphrase Kinky Friedman, may the holiday of your choice bring you blessings. Happy holiday, whatever it may be!

Retreat!

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Jerri’s Retreat Group has been going for many years now, and recently we met at my house. Here are a few of the projects other group members were working on. What’s not shown are the multiple trips to quilt shops in the area 😉

Here are some of the projects made by group members.

This quilt, made from a pattern by Elizabeth Hartman, will go to a camp for seriously ill children

This quilt was made to use up Kaffe scraps. I don’t know whether there was a pattern.

This block will be part of the Rock Star Granny quilt, pattern by Crystal Manning

I don’t know the pattern for this one.

This quilt to be given to a veteran was made with the Ray pattern, free on the Robert Kaufman website

This block is the start of the Simplify pattern by Cluck Cluck Sew

This is the start of the BQ2 pattern, using fabrics from the Desert Oasis collection from Moda

I am so lucky to have generous and inspiring friends to quilt with!

 

Changing the Artwork

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I’ve been in my “new” studio a couple of years now, so I decided to change out the art quilts I have on the walls. Some of the newly-hung items are from years ago, but I found them in the closet, so here they are.

I had forgotten about this little leaf-pounding piece that I quilted by hand.

I made Atomic Sunflower only two years ago, but I’d forgotten about it, too.

I did make this one self-portrait quilt in a class years ago, but that’s it for people in my quilts.

I designed and made this little neighborhood after seeing similar projects online. Isn’t the internet a great source of inspiration?

I made this many years ago from a pattern designed with tiny pieces. I don’t think that designer is still publishing patterns.

I made this when I was first experimenting with stripes and curves. I still love the colors.

These little wall hangings were made just for fun. That’s a money tree at the bottom of one of them 😀

There isn’t room for all the small quilts to be up at one time, so I probably need to change things up more than every couple of years!

Dreamlines: A Year-Long Project Finished

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I learned of Brenda Gael Smith’s Dreamlines project from a fellow blogger and signed up early in 2023.  It’s a free monthly art project that has had international participation, and I’ve enjoyed it. Here are my pieces from all the months sitting on the design wall so I could think about what to do with them.

I accidentally made one month’s project in the larger size, but I figured that would be OK.

The plan for November was to finish the piece, and here’s mine.

I left out some of the pieces I’d done, cut one of the big pieces in half, and added some solid strips. I quilted it with horizontal lines in threads to match the various pieces.

You can go to the Dreamlines Gallery on Brenda’s site and look at the variety of finished pieces from around the world. It’s really fun to see the variety of compositions and all the different places where people participated.

I’ll be watching to see if Brenda offers a project for next year, because I enjoyed this one. She also offers some online classes and a friend who took them says they are good.

What Was I Thinking?!?

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I found this unusual pattern at Five Little Monkeys and liked the look of it.

The pattern wanted me to buy a 120 degree triangle ruler, but after discussion with a math-loving friend I decided to try cutting those 120 degree angles using the 60 degree line on my long ruler.

It worked, sort of. After making a few blocks that way I concluded that the price of the recommended triangle ruler was less than the price of the fabric and time I wasted trying to get the triangles right.

The result was that some of the triangles for the quilt were cut with one method, some with the other. However, the real oversight on my part was failure to notice that there are places in this quilt where TWELVE points come together! Or don’t actually come together, in my case. Yikes!

I do love this quilt. It is a striking design that works well with these bright fabrics.  So I’ll make do with these points that don’t match and use my own little trite saying for this situation: “A good quilt is a done quilt!” (Thanks, Diana, for this insight years ago in another context!)

Quilt stats

Name: Oops

Finished size: 54″ x 63″

Pattern: Henry’s Humongous Hexagons by Carl Hentsch

Made by: me

Quilted by: Linda Nichols

Tamarack Center, West Virginia

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We recently travelled to West Virginia on vacation, and I thought I would share some of the quilts displayed at Tamarack Marketplace, the state craft shop and travel center near Beckley.

Of course I was interested in the quilts displayed there. Here are a few pictures to give you the idea.

This is a large quilt, along with some hand-crafted tables in the foreground

I had to get between two sculptures, impinging on the sides here, to get a photo of this large quilt

This is one block of a quilt that was quilted by hand and had a 3-dimensional flower superimposed on a star in each block. It looked like a lot of work!

Most of the quilts were traditional in design. You can see a display of lamps in the background.

This quilt was especially well made, and was hand quilted. The price was $3000.

This lively quilt of Hawaiian themed fabrics was the closest I saw to a modern quilt at Tamarack

Of course there were many other arts and crafts, not just quilts. If you’re travelling through West Virginia on the toll portion of I-64, in the southern part of the state, the Tamarack center is worth a stop. Here’s the website so you can see for yourself.

 

More Quilts!

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I just finished a quilt but then I cleaned up around the studio and found another stack of quilts I don’t think I have blogged about!

The good news is that three of these were for the magazine article, so I showed them last week! And the one on top I wrote about a few weeks ago. Here are the rest. First, the new quilt:

This little owl was made from a kit I found at Studio Stitch. I’m not saying for whom, because the holiday season approaches!

Quilt Stats

Name: Little Owl

Finished size: 39″ x 45″

Pieced and quilted by me

Pattern by: Bound Co.

Kit from: Studio Stitch

Then there’s this New York Beauty quilt I made in 2022 so I could try out various alternatives to piecing with paper that has to be torn out. I don’t think I ever presented the entire quilt. It started when my friend Elizabeth provided free patterns for NYB blocks, then I designed some with EQ, and so forth. Somewhere along the way I forgot to show the finished quilt.

Quilt Stats

Name: NYB

Finished size: 52″ x 52″

Blocks designed by Elizabeth Eastmond and currently available free in her PayHip shop

Setting designed by: me

Quilted by: Linda Nichols

And finally, here’s a quilt I’m calling Valley of the Kings because of the Ancient-Egyptian themed metallic fabric that inspired it. I bought that fabric perhaps 10 years ago, so it was time!

Quilt Stats

Name: Valley of the Kings

Finished size: 60″ x 71″

Designed and made by: me

Quilted by: Linda Nichols

Whew! Now I’ll try to keep up 😀

 

Electric Quilt, and Why I Use It

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I’ve been using the quilt design software Electric Quilt (EQ) since the EQ5 version. I’m now using EQ8, so it’s been a few years. OK, quite a few.

All the drawings in this post were done with various versions of EQ.

I love EQ for several reasons:

  • I like to design my own quilts. At first I didn’t have many ideas, so I just combined the blocks provided by EQ in various ways. There are almost endless possibilities. Here’s where I re-drew Arkansas Crossroads to see how it would look with a scrap slab center.
  • Once a quilt is designed, it can be exported as a JPEG to share with friends! That’s how I got the pictures in this post from EQ to the blog 😀 Here’s one from 2007:
  • I can fiddle endlessly with various layouts, block sizes, colors, etc, etc. before deciding how I want to do a quilt. Here are a few options I considered for a doll quilt for a friend.
  • When the instructions in a pattern don’t work out, or the size of the quilt doesn’t suit me, I can draw the quilt in EQ and try out various solutions. Here’s a block I re-drafted after the instructions in the pattern didn’t really work. And by the way, I was able to print templates straight from EQ in the desired size once I got it re-drafted.
  • AND on top of all that: the block above was colored with my actual fabric because I was able to scan the fabric into EQ, scale it, and then fussy cut the block center from it!
  • It’s possible to make everything from simple to elaborate designs.
  • EQ gives me an estimate of the yardage needed for a quilt. It does over-estimate a bit, but of course that’s waaaay better than underestimating! So, for example, I drew this quilt and then decided what size I could make it based on how much fabric I have. I can change the size of the blocks until the quilt fits my yardage!
  • I just like to draw things in EQ for fun. Here’s a tile floor I photographed in a restaurant and then drew in EQ. No way would I make this, but it was fun to draw. The asymmetry shown was indeed in the floor from which I copied the design.

There are sooo many other things I love about EQ! I’ve just taken the on-line classes to learn to use it better and they were very helpful.

And finally, the folks at EQ provide wonderful customer service. A friend and I both failed to figure out how to draw the quilt below in EQ. I emailed tech support about it and Heidi drew it for me! She also sent a link to a lesson on how it was done 😀 That’s great customer service!

I get so much use out of this program! Have you tried it?

PS: No, this is NOT a sponsored post! But here’s the link if you want to learn more about EQ8: ElectricQuilt.com  

The EQ folks have a video program for guilds, too. Don’t know about you, but we’re always looking for program ideas.