Three Reasons to Love Pinterest

Posted on June 22, 2014 by zippyquilts

Delightful quilt from CutToPieces.blogspot.com

I started using Pinterest a while back at the urging of my daughter, and have found it invaluable. It replaces at least 3 scrapbooks/notebooks that have been floating around my house for years.

First, of course, Pinterest is great for quilting ideas! When I find something I love, I don’t have to bookmark it or add it to favorites to be able to find it again. I just pin it to one of my Pinterest boards–maybe Quilt Ideas, or Good Quilt Photos, or Design. Then when I wonder, “Now where did I see that great quilt?” I can flip through my Pinterest boards and find the picture, which in turn has the link to where it was found. This saves a LOT of fooling around looking for things on the internet and replaces the lists I had to keep previously. It’s even partially replaced the notebooks full of clippings I’ve kept for years.

T-Perspective by Linda Rotz Miller

Second, Pinterest is great for finding other quilters, their blogs, etc. For example, I found the Cut To Pieces blog shown above because I admired one of the quilts from the blog I found on Pinterest. But there’s more! When you find someone whose taste is similar to yours (based on the pins you find from him/her), you can “follow” that person or just some of that person’s boards on Pinterest and get lots of great new pictures that he/she found. For example, I found the picture here on the Pinterest page of Tricia Royal, a quilt artist from Chicago, so now I follow several of her boards. You can also follow your friends’ boards to see what they’re pinning. In fact, if you see something they’re pinning it may give you an idea of what they’d like to have for the next birthday!

Terrific design from Melody Johnson Quilts

Finally, you can simply search Pinterest when you need inspiration. By putting “modern quilts”, “colors”, “art quilts”, or whatever into Pinterest’s search box, I’ve found many, many fun ideas. It’s a great amusement in waiting rooms, while enjoying a second cup of coffee, or when in need of new ideas. As a commercial for a product I’ve long forgotten used to say: “Try it–you’ll like it!”

What to do with Beautiful Fabric?

Posted on June 15, 2014 by zippyquilts

I’ve been a fan of Moda’s Wildflowers collections of fabric for quite a while, not only because they are beautiful florals, but because they look just like spring in central Texas, where I used to live.

Although this picture was taken to show the quilting done by my long-arm friend, you can see several of the beautiful flowers and get the idea.

But as always when I buy a piece of fabric I really love, the question is what to do with it that does it justice. I finally had a brainstorm when working on a border designed by Karla Alexander for one of her stack-and-shuffle quilts. It involved cutting gentle curves through several layers of fabric and then shuffling the layers before assembling the pieces.

I chose some gold to go with my floral and cut large squares. Then I cut curves in them freehand, shuffled, and sewed them together.

This quilt is called “Drunk in the Garden” and is intended to give the impression of a moonlit walk through the Texas hill country in spring. Nature walks don’t go in a straight line, so the golden paths through the quilt don’t go in a straight line. I threw in “drunk” because that comes to mind before “nature walk” when you see this wiggly path!

Best of all, I was able to use large sections of the floral fabric to show it off.

What have you done with favorite fabrics?

10 Donation Quilts!

Posted on June 8, 2014 by zippyquilts

Ronald McDonald Quilts

I have a little group of quilty friends that I retreat with at least twice a year. We all make quilts for Ronald McDonald House of Cincinnati. This last time, just 3 of us finished a total of 10 quilts! Here are some of them.

R McD House of Cincinnati wants all quilts 40″ x 40″ so, as I’ve mentioned before, these are a good opportunity for a lot of experimentation:

Try new designs to see if you like them
Make orphan blocks into quilts
Try new color schemes
Donation Quilt, 40″ x 40″
Use up fabric left from other projects
Use your scraps to make an improvised quilt top
Use up charm packs (yes, we’ve all bought a few extra!)
Make a simple quilt as a rest from challenging projects
Quilt the tops yourself for practice
Try out binding entirely by machine–makes the quilt more durable
Anyway, enjoy this little quilt show! And check with your local Ronald McDonald House if you’re interested in donating quilts to them.
Quilt with teddy bears

Pieced back

Charm Squares

Leftovers

Girlie Colors

More Charm Squares–this one more of an I Spy design

More leftovers–can you tell some group members have grandsons?

Boy Scout theme–there were 2 of these–and look at the quilting, 1/2″ apart!

My improv 9 patch

Orphan blocks with improv sashing

Your Inner Designer 3: New Blocks From Old

Posted on June 1, 2014 by zippyquilts

There is almost never anything new in design; indeed, the best designs probably are made with a sense of history. So far we’ve modified overall quilt designs to make new ones; this time we’re going to modify blocks. So here we go: 1. Stretch it:

: Block 1

: Block 2

: Block 3

: Block 4

Quilt made with Block 3

Quilt made with Block 4

2. Tilt it, or stretch and tilt it:

: Block 5

: Block 6

This quilt is made from Block 1, tilted, with half the blocks tilted the other way

3. Cut it and shuffle the pieces; rotate them if you like:

: Cut

: Shuffle

: Shuffle & Rotate–Block 7

This quilt is made from block 7, with the blocks rotated various ways to make the pattern

4. Cut it and insert something. This will distort the block and you’ll have to trim to make it even:

: Block 8

: Block 9

: Block 10

Quilt made from Block 10 and a plain block with strips inserted the same way

All of this fooling around might be a good use for some of those orphan blocks–what have you got to lose? And If you find some modifications you really like, try them out in a quilt: Please make some designs and send them to me–I’d love to see what you come up with!

52 weeks and a May finish

Posted on May 25, 2014 by zippyquilts

Here’s the UFO finish for May, which barely got done among all the other projects in May! It is a donation quilt made out of orphan blocks; I’ve made a couple of similar ones in the past year because there were a LOT of these blocks! I actually made the quilt top in September of last year to demonstrate use of improvised sashing, and then the top kind of languished. When it came up as the finish for May I had already chosen the binding, so it was actually pretty quick to finish.

I love the striped fabric for binding, an idea I got from Rita over at RedPepperQuilts.com. She makes beautiful quilts!

And WordPress tells me I have now done 52 posts, which would be about right for the 1 year since I started this blog! Thanks to everyone who is following. I also appreciate your comments–it’s nice to know somebody is looking!

Two Favorite Quilt Patterns

Posted on May 18, 2014 by zippyquilts

I love designing quilts and making my own designs, but I also enjoy making quilts from outstanding designs by other people. I thought I’d list a couple of my favorites, and I hope you’ll let me know (in the comments) what some of your favorites are, too.

A floral quilt made from Lucky Stars by Atkinson Designs

A favorite quilt pattern for me should be striking in appearance, should have foolproof instructions [because I certainly could be a fool on any given day ;-)], and should be something that makes me say, “I wish I’d thought of that!”

Lucky Stars by Atkinson Designs. This is the first quilt pattern I ever bought, though far from the first quilt I made. When I started quilting, I just decided what I wanted, drafted the pattern,and then made it. Buying this pattern was a revelation! Such great instructions! Such great results! And so little effort compared to what I’d been doing! I’ve made this pattern several times, and the recipients have loved every one of these quilts. I’ve also used this to teach “Make Your Second Quilt” for advanced beginners, and the students loved it, too.

: Lucky Stars in Batiks

: A baby quilt from leftover blocks

I LOVE any quilt with concentric boxes, and having them in multiple sizes and bright colors is just the BEST! This quilt pattern is Outside the Box, by Rose Mason. I put 4 of these together to make a queen quilt for a friend’s daughter when she got married, and it worked out really well.

Outside the Box, pattern by Rose Mason

And even that didn’t wear me out on concentric boxes! I’ve made many more, both from patterns and my own designs.

Please leave a comment telling me what your favorite patterns are, and I’ll pass along the love in a later post.

Happy Plaids is my own design, but there are MANY similar quilts out there

Personal labels 3 ways

Posted on May 11, 2014 by zippyquilts

The first quilt to have my new label on the back!

I’ve been thinking for some time that I’d like a “standard” Zippy Quilts label to sew into the binding of my quilts in addition to the usual label I put on with the name of the quilt and the date. I’ve seen several such labels and think they look cool. They make me think the creator takes herself and her work seriously enough to have a professional label.

I collected a bunch of ideas for making labels on my Pinterest page, here, if you want to look. Pinterest is great for gathering idea from around the web and organizing them all in one place. I also got some of those ideas by doing a search within Pinterest for “fabric labels”, which lead me to things other people had discovered.

It boiled down to just a few good options in 3 categories:

1. Print your own labels, sort of like I do my labels with the quilt name/date/etc. This would be fairly economical despite the cost of printable fabric, because the labels are small. However, the washability of some of the printable fabrics was in question, and there would be the need to finish the edges in some way to avoid fraying. Nevertheless, there’s a very nice tutorial on how to do it here, on the Emmaline blog.

2. Get commercially-made labels, either woven or printed, from specialty companies that make them. There are lots of companies that offer lots of different labels, from laundry tags like you sew into your kids’ clothes before they go to camp to really professional woven labels. The cost varies a lot, too. The main drawback was that, for the better looking ones, you have to order an awful lot. What if I had 1000 labels I didn’t much care for?

3. Design your own at Spoonflower and have them printed up on fabric for you to cut apart into labels. There’s a tutorial on how to do it here, on a nice blog called “While They Snooze”. This is what I ultimately decided to do. They’ll print either a sample or a fat quarter (FQ) for you, so I ordered FQs of 2 different layouts to see if I liked them.

Spoonflower labels–first layout

I cut them apart with pinking shears to avoid a hard edge and sewed a little hem around each one to prevent fraying. I think another time I’d make them a little smaller, but this is a good start. The Spoonflower site is easy enough to use that I never even had to contact them for help.

The second layout

My second layout left space below my name on each label so that I could cut out the label, hem the sides only, and then fold it in half, inserting the remaining raw edges in the binding. This avoids the need to sew it down separately on 4 sides. I may like this better, but I haven’t had time to try them much yet. The first one is going on my Quilt Alliance donation quilt, which I’m still binding. I think I’ll go back and put them on all this year’s projects.

If you get some labels made for your projects, write and let me know what you did and how it worked out.

Label on Quilt Alliance quilt back

Your Inner Designer, Part 2: Many block arrangements

Posted on May 4, 2014 by zippyquilts

In our last exciting episode (as they used to say on the radio), we took a traditional-type quilt pattern and tweaked it 3 (or more) ways to make different quilt designs.

Large blocks, with the intersections lined up

Now we’ll take some combinations of blocks and arrange them to make new designs. As before, your new designs can be drawn on graph paper (or with a computer program like Electric Quilt). It’s your choice whether to make them in cloth or not.

1. Combine two easy, familiar blocks.The usual advice is to combine blocks such that their seams will line up,like that first one on the left. This has the advantage of making more secondary patterns when you look at the combination overall, and the disadvantage of making the construction more tedious. Try it both ways. My personal preference is for the second design on the left. The different sizes of the pieces in the blocks make the quilt more interesting; I really don’t notice that the seams haven’t lined up.

2. Take a quilt made of just one block, or even just one patch, and color it different ways. Here’s one of my favorites. It starts as the traditional tumbling blocks pattern, but can also be stars, chevrons, or many, many other things. There is LOTS of room for experimentation here.

Tumbling Blocks

Zig-zags

Stars

Chevrons

Some folks make an outline drawing then copy it several times so they can color it different ways. I can see this going on for weeks if you attend lots of boring meetings where you can take your sketchbook 😉

3. Pick an asymmetric block, make lots of them (on paper or in fabric) and rotate them into different combinations. There are almost endless variations with HST (half-square triangle) blocks, for example.

These options should keep you busy for a LONG time. I suggest you buy a graph paper notebook and some colored pencils so you can keep your designs all together. Next thing you know, you’ll have more quilt designs than you could make up in a lifetime! You can just pick your current favorite next time you want to make an original quilt.

The next blog on designing your own quilts will be the first Sunday in June. Meanwhile, remember that it can be fun to try out a design by making just a small quilt. You could make a lot of HSTs and combine them in 4 different ways for a set of 4 placemats, for example. Have fun!

This is made from HSTs that finish 3″ square, set 4 x 6 so that the mat is 12″ x 18″

The same HSTs have been rearranged here

Using the same fabric in different arrangements is a fun way to make a unique set of placemats

I recently saw this arrangement touted as an “easy herringbone quilt”

Gallery Show!

Posted on April 27, 2014 by zippyquilts

Leaf, made in class with Laura Wasilowski

The Asheville Modern Quilt Guild is lucky enough to meet in a nice conference room in the building occupied by both the Quilt Alliance and the Handmade in America organization. Because of those connections (and the quality of our work) we will be having a show of our members’ work at the gallery maintained by Handmade in America. This is an organization representing craft artists from Western North Carolina (that would be us!) The work they represent is very high quality, so we are thrilled to be invited to display our work in their gallery, located at 125 S. Lexington Avenue in Asheville. (The entrance is on Hilliard Avenue between Church and S. Lexington.)

I’m including pictures in this post of the works I’m submitting, but I hope any of you who are in the area will come see the show. It will run April 29 – August 19, with an opening reception 2-4 p.m. on Sunday, May 4. We have several fine quilters in our group, and they really do make “all kinds of quilts”, as the title of the exhibit suggests. Please come!

Improv I, my original design

Bubble Up, my oritinal design

Quilt Alliance Challenge

Posted on April 20, 2014 by zippyquilts

After thinking I would use Sunbonnet Sue as my inspiration,

Scraps!

I did a total about-face and chose a scrap quilt instead. I LOVE scrap quilts, and since I certainly HAVE a lot of scraps, it all works out 🙂

Here’s the process for this year’s Quilt Alliance donation quilt. I wanted to use tiny scraps and have one tiny star. I used Electric Quilt (EQ7) to print a foundation pattern for a star that finishes about 3″ square. The first one I made, using the brand of fabric we’ve all

Paper foundation for star

Foundation pieced star, finishing 3″

depended on for solids, was just a little off. Turns out the “beefy” thick texture of that fabric doesn’t lend itself well to tiny, tiny points (the center square here is 1/2″ x 1/2″). So I re-generated the foundation pattern and, as often happens, decided on a little design change at the same time. Then I made the star using Moda Bella black, which is a lighter weight cloth that folded more crisply in such a small space.

Joining scraps

Scraps

Improvisational piecing

For the rest of the quilt I pulled out my zippy-colored Michael Miller cotton couture scraps and just sewed them together as I took them out of the box. Eventually I had to cut a few more “scraps” to finish the top. There were so very MANY seams that I was glad of the lighter weight of this cloth, almost like voile. It took many days to do this, quite a bit longer than I had expected for a 16″ x 16″ quilt! The smallest pieces finish about 1/4″ squares or triangles!

Quilt Alliance Challenge 2014

So here it is! I would love to count the pieces, but I don’t think I have the energy left to do it! Besides, who wants to know a thing like that? 😉

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this: