8 Projects for April and May!

Posted on May 31, 2015 by zippyquilts

In keeping with the plan to finish a UFO a month during 2015, here is the April finish. Since this fabric has been waiting for about 5 years, I’m calling this a significant finish!

Flower Fairies, A Donation Quilt

The second April finish is not only finished but delivered to the Quilt Alliance for their 2015 challenge. This one is called Cat Circus. The Laurel Burch fabrics reminded me of how just one cat can be a complete circus (polite word for disaster) in just a matter of minutes in any room in the house. I love cats, so that’s OK by me.

Cat Circus, my 2015 Quilt Alliance challenge quilt

And here is the May finish, along with two other donation quilts I made in April and May. This means 6 so far this year–I’m caught up through June! I’ll have more information on some of these in a later post. They are an improvisational quilt, an orphan block quilt, and a quilt using Cuddle charms and cat fabric.

Donation quilt made from orphan star blocks

I made two more blocks for My Modern Sampler this month. You can read about the improvisational one here, and I will blog about the Humbug Star at a later date. For now, here’s a preview:

The finished block, which will be 12-1/2 inches square

Finally, I bound the Charley Harper quilt that came back from the quilter a while ago. These organic cottons from Birch are stiffer and less silky than my usual quilting cottons, so I washed the quilt when it was finished. That helped some with the stiffness and also made the quilting stand out more.

Turning Twenty Again pattern in Charley Harper fabrics

On to the June projects–I’ll have much more news coming up!

My Modern Sampler: Improv Block I

Posted on May 24, 2015 by zippyquilts

Sherri Lynn Wood’s book finally arrived, and I’ve been enjoying it. I have NO intention of making a full-size quilt for every exercise in the book! However, an improv block for my sampler quilt seemed just right.

The first exercise in the book involves cutting fabric into squares, then using background fabric as needed to join them improvisationally. I’ll mostly let the pictures speak for themselves here.

I chose 2 fabrics and a background to start–my notes are lying on the background fabric

Then I cut a bunch of squares

About half way through, the design looked too static to me, so I cut a triangle of background fabric to set in the middle and throw the whole thing onto diagonal lines.

I joined some of the pieces, but then…I decided to add a triangle!

The finished block:

The finished block, which will be 12-1/2 inches square

This ended up resembling my previous work much more than it resembles Sherri Lynn’s quilts. I think that may be sort of the point 🙂 Here are some of my previous improv blocks:

Confetti Block, 2014

My entry for the Quilt Alliance Challenge 2014

I’ll probably go on to Improv Block II, etc, as I go through the book. Stay tuned!

The other posts in my modern sampler series can be found here:

My Own Modern Sampler–It May Take A Year!

The Modern Sampler Continues

2 Quilts, 1 Set of Instructions

Posted on May 3, 2015 by zippyquilts

It’s here! The latest issue of Modern Quilts Unlimited, containing a quilt designed and made by me!
The editors did a great job of providing clear diagrams for my instructions, and of photographing the quilt. It is made from Michael Miller batiks, supplied by the company for this project. I love MM fabrics, and was happy to use batiks for a little change from the “oh-so-solid” solids that are currently popular.And here’s a second quilt made with the same feature blocks, arranged differently. (The solids are Michael Miller Cotton Couture left over from another project.) You can get the templates from the magazine and make your own blocks, arranging them to suit yourself.

Alternate colorway and block arrangement from the same pattern

Look at this fun quilting done by Joyce Miller!

So go make it your own way!

One Quilt, Two Lessons

Posted on April 26, 2015 by zippyquilts

Check out these fabrics!

Alison Glass Handprint fabric and neutral linen

A friend gave me the FQ (fat quarter) bundle of lovely Alison Glass handprint fabric and I combined it with a neutral linen fabric I’d been saving for something special. I started with Karla Alexander’s instructions for a quilt, but (as my friends all know) I never really follow instructions so it diverged…

The blocks were lots of fun to make. I followed the instructions for a while, then started cutting the blocks up and inserting strips. Then decided NOT to trim all the blocks to one size. I adjusted the sizes of the linen sashing so that all the rows came out the same length, and made the rows of different heights to allow for the different block sizes.

And I slashed the sashing and inserted some strips in that, too.

When I had the top all made, I basted it with spray basting as usual. BUT I didn’t have enough of the first can. Then the SECOND can was a different brand and almost empty as well!

Determined to get the doggone thing basted, I resorted to some spray-on stuff that was supposed to bond the fabric to the batting when I ironed it. This last stuff left SPOTS on the handprint fabric, which is light weight (almost like voile). YIKES!

Lesson 1: Be patient until you can get to the store for a can of basting spray.

Finally (after buying basting spray) it was basted and I started quilting. Enter Lesson 2: this linen is a loose weave of large fibers and doesn’t play well with a tight weave of small fibers. YIKES AGAIN! No matter how I changed the pressure on the quilting foot or otherwise fiddled with it, the quilting distorted the top and the backing.

The finished quilt

Now it’s finished and I like it. I appreciate the texture of the linen, but I’m not sure I’ll use it again. I took this to my last modern guild meeting and people were positive about it, but one of the more experience sewists told me linen is usually stretchy, so at least it’s not just me!

Here’s the quilt back–that column was straight when I started!

Well, I try to learn something new every day, so I’m calling this a SUCCESS! 😉

The Modern Sampler Continues

Posted on March 22, 2015 by zippyquilts

These next two blocks were made from inspirations I found on Pinterest (yes, I love Pinterest!) The first I simply copied because I loved the colors and their arrangement in the original artwork by Richard Paul Lohse.

Quilt block based on the work of artist Richard Paul Lohse

Here’s a drawing of how I constructed this block, with measurements, if you want to copy him, too. There are 4 units, each 4″ finished (4-1/2 inches for each unit before joining) so that the entire block is 8″ finished. I’ve marked the size to cut each piece on one of the 4 units, assuming you can take it from there 🙂

Layout for block based on art of Richard Paul Lohse

If you look up the artist Richard Paul Lohse, you’ll see that a lot of his designs would make terrific blocks or whole quilts. Great sense of color!

The second block was made from a tutorial I found at a website called Piece By Number and you can find the free pattern on her site here.

Circle of Geese block made from a pattern at PieceByNumber

This block was easier than it looks thanks to paper piecing. I enjoyed making it, though I feel no need to make another right away!

I think these two blocks have a lot of ZIP for the relatively little amount of effort they required. The Lohse block depends very much on choice of color, so be sure to lay out the fabrics and look at them a while before cutting. Have fun!

2015 Donation Quilt #1

Posted on February 22, 2015 by zippyquilts

A couple of my quilty friends try to make a quilt a month for various charities, so I thought I’d try that this year. The group with which I make donation quilts sends them to a Ronald McDonald House to be given to sick children. The House wants all quilts to be 40″ x 40″, which doesn’t seem too big to do one a month. Here goes….

For January I took some of my orphan blocks and related fabrics and made this quilt. The blocks also happen to be on my UFO list for 2015, so there’s TWO projects accomplished at once 🙂

February finish and January donation quilt

The blocks finish 12″ square, which means that with a 2″ border the quilt comes out 40″ x 40″ as planned. The 9-patch blocks were made using the stack and shuffle method I learned years ago from Karla Alexander’s books. It’s easy and fun. To end up with blocks this size, I started with 15″ x 15″ squares of fabric (since they’re cut wonky on purpose it takes a bigger starting square than you might think).

The center block has little inset strips using a technique I modified from one of Judy Niemeyer’s ideas. To make a quarter inch inset that doesn’t “wobble”, do this:

Block pieces, including yellow insert

Cut a 1″ strip of fabric and lay one edge along the raw edge of the piece where you want a narrow inset. Stitch through both the strip and the quilt piece 1/2″ away from the edge, either by using the 1/2″ mark on your machine’s throat plate or by marking the center of the strip.

The center pieces of the block have been jointed and the insert laid along the side

Fold and press along the seam-line so that you now have 3 raw edges, all lined up.

Strips have been added to all sides of the center pieces and pressed along the seam

I don’t usually trim away the extra fabric because I like the stability, but it DOES make for some weighty intersections if you choose not to trim away the bottom 1 or 2 layers. Then assemble the block as you normally would, using 1/4″ seams. The strip you added will show up as a 1/4″ inset.

Let me know if you try either of these blocks. I thought they were fun!

Tessellations! By Jean Larson

Posted on February 15, 2015 by zippyquilts

As promised, my friend Jean Larson has written a tutorial on tessellation quilts. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did! –MJP

Tessellating designs make me happy. Tweaking those designs is even more fun. I want to share the joy of starting with a very, very simple design and watching it blossom. My inspiration comes from this web site: http://gwydir.demon.co.uk/jo/tess/

Start with a simple gridded block and create a light/dark design. Here, I’ve started with a 3 x 3 grid. Then re-color the same block with the lights and darks reversed

.The grid lines are only for design purposes, and each block can be constructed with a single square block with 2 corner triangles attached using any method you prefer.

Here are some design possibilities…A simple “cat head” quilt using only 2 colors.

Different looks can be achieved with variations in the color placement.

Blocks can be inverted and turned for even more quilt designs.

Just imagine all the possibilities with color in these!!!!!

It’s even more complex when you design with a 6×6 grid. Here are the positive and negative versions of another block.

These blocks can be constructed using half-square triangles integrated with larger fabric pieces. If these blocks were to finish at 6 inches by 6 inches. The center column on each block would be a single 3.5 inch wide by 6.5 in long piece of fabric. The side strips would include some half-square triangles.

A couple of the quilts that can be made:

Looks like spools, some gray, some white, all standing up. Same quilt with alternate blocks turned a quarter turn yields a different clearly recognizable tessellation. Reminds me of tessellating doggie rawhide chews 😉

Now back to the spool quilt from above. The “thread” areas have been colored in. No blocks have been turned.

This shows the power of color and value (lightness and darkness). The colored part, being next to the gray and being closer in value to the gray, unites those parts of the block, and gives the illusion that we have all gray spools on a white background, some standing up, some lying down.

I hope these examples can be the seeds to sprout some design experimentation with tessellating shapes.

Start with 2 square grids
Create a positive design, and its negative design
Alternate them in a quilt layout
PLAY!
And play more with color!

Happy Quilting (and Designing)!! –Jean Larson

Meet Lee Monroe of May Chappell Patterns

Posted on January 25, 2015 by zippyquilts

Images for this post are the property of Lee Chappell Monroe, May Chappell and used with permission.

Lee Chappell Monroe

Lee is a North Carolina quilter, designer, and teacher who came to my attention through her blog, which is titled May Chappell. Like a lot of other people, I initially thought May Chappell must be her name. Here’s her explanation of where the name of the blog actually came from:

Why May Chappell? There are always loads of questions about why the company is May Chappell and not Lee Chappell Monroe. You can read all about it here. The short version is that it is named for an awesome lady, my great grandmother.

Lee designs quilt patterns and sells them through quilt shops. She went to quilt market for the first time last year, hoping to give her patterns a wider audience. In addition to quilts, she designs pouches and “loves all things fabric”. Like many modern quilt designers, she is trained as a graphic artist. Here’s one of her quilt patterns:

All Strung Up, a May Chappell design

And here are a few questions Lee was kind enough to answer for me, as well as pictures of more of her patterns:

Here’s a tote bag Lee designed to use mini-charm squares

Q: Where do you think the quilting field is going?

A: This is a toughie. I usually see trends in the questions that I get from my students. I’ve had a lot of students lately that are self taught and they’re interested in learning more about precision. I’m a big believer that there is more than one right way to do things in quilting, but there sure are some wrong ways!

Q: What about your personal quilting future?

A: I have new patterns coming for Spring Market that I’m really excited about. I’m a terrible secret keeper so I usually want to put out the design right as I draw it!

Q: I know you took your patterns to quilt market, but where could I buy them? I don’t see them on your website [Note: They ARE on her website, at least now. Silly me 😉 ]

Eye Candy, one of Lee’s quilt patterns

Lee’s Designer Star Quilt. If you go to her website/shop you can see a picture of the whole thing.

A: I love designing patterns and the printed patterns are available through local quilt shops. Because I also teach quilting at local shops, I’m a huge advocate for supporting local! Quilt shops are a huge resource for the sewing and quilting community. If your shop doesn’t have my patterns, they’re available through the distributors. You can also purchase PDF patterns through my website here. I teach all over North Carolina and I’m starting to expand out across the country. Teaching is my favorite part of my job; I’m passionate about quilting and I love sharing that. You can see my teaching schedule on my website, too.

Q: Show us something pretty you’ve made lately!

A: This is a table runner I made for my brother using my Blue Ridge pattern.

Table runner by Lee Monroe

This post ran longer than usual, but that’s because I just HAD to explain a little about why Lee Monroe has a blog named May Chappell 🙂

First Finish

Posted on January 4, 2015 by zippyquilts

Metro Hoops quilt made by Allison at Cluck, Cluck, Sew

Inspired by the beautiful Metro Hoops quilt Allison showed over at Cluck, Cluck, Sew, I mentioned the Quick Curve Ruler as something I wanted to try in a recent post. Here’s a picture of her quilt so you can see what inspired me.

My clever son-in-law gave me the ruler for Christmas, and as soon as we got home I tried it out. As always, I learned a lot. Certainly the Metro Hoops pattern is a nice modern alternative to the traditional wedding ring quilt. What I wasn’t prepared for was the fudge factor required to make it work.

My first Metro Hoops block

It made a really cute block, but then my inner perfectionist kicked in 😦 The block required a lot of “easing in” along the seams to make the points match up. *(You can skip to the reason why at the end of this post, if you like.)

Luckily, I almost never cut out a new quilt completely before making a test block. After making one block for this quilt, I decided 5 hoop blocks was my limit. The blocks really are quicker and easier to make than they look, so I got the 5 done in a few hours. They are nice big blocks (finish 15″) so I had a good start on a baby quilt.

I drew an approximation of the block with my EQ7 program and came up with this layout:

My EQ7 layout for the Metro Hoops blocks

Another half day to make the alternate blocks, then a day to put it together, make a back, and quilt it–and voila! The first finish of 2015!

About the Quick Curve ruler: the women who designed it have lots of cute quilt patterns on their site, so it’s worth checking out.

*BUT, if I make metro hoops again, I’ll modify the directions to make it more to my liking. I think the basic issue here is that the single curve provided by this ruler is used for both the concave and convex curves in the quilt. That means there is no seam allowance to make the curves match nicely. The project is “saved” by the fact that the curve is less than a quarter circle, so it’s possible to fudge the sewing to make it go together without adding seam allowances. It does work, but don’t think it’s going to fit the way pieces cut from most curved templates do. If you decide to do it, be forewarned to relax and get rid of the inner perfectionist!

Happy new year!

Year End Review

Posted on December 28, 2014 by zippyquilts

For better or worse, I published goals at the beginning of the year, so here’s the review of my progress:
I met all the goals! (Does that mean I didn’t set them high enough?) I retreated with my buddies THREE times instead of just two! I attended 3 big national shows as well as 2 local ones (all were excellent). I took a couple of fun and useful classes, one of which I still need to write up here so you’ll know about it. I submitted several quilts to shows/contests and 3 were accepted. The one I donated to the Quilt Alliance even won something, and sold for $300 to benefit the Quilt Alliance! And I had lots of fun, which was really the point of it all.

Here are pictures of a few of my projects from the second half of the year. The pix of projects from the first half of the year are in this post.

Spring Sun, a design by me, using blocks paper pieced from a totally different Judy Niemeyer pattern! It took about 2 years, but it’s now DONE.

Zippy Star Quilt and Pillow as shown in Modern Quilts Unlimited, Summer 2014

Packet of Posy Seeds, done for the Michael Miller spring challenge

Zippy Star I, which sold at the Asheville Quilt Show in September. This was my “practice piece” for the MQU quilt shown above.

Donation quilt for Ronald McDonald House. I’m going to work more on using up orphan blocks next year.

And, despite the risk, here’s what I plan for the coming year:

1. I’ll retreat with my buddies at least twice, probably 3 times again!

2. I’ll attend one big national quilt show, maybe two. I’ll attend at least one local show.

3. I will limit much more strictly the shows and challenges I enter. It takes too much time and effort that could be spent on making what I want to make 🙂

4. I’ll continue to make donation quilts, including one for the Quilt Alliance. Please consider making one for the Quilt Alliance yourself. You can read about their mission here. Click on “2015 Quilt Contest” to learn about this year’s challenge.

5. I’ll continue my blog, and I think I’ll put up instructions for a few easy donation quilts just in case somebody is looking for ideas.

What’s coming up for you?

Zippy Quilts

Modern Quilts With A Twist

Tag Archives: modern quilts

8 Projects for April and May!

My Modern Sampler: Improv Block I

2 Quilts, 1 Set of Instructions

One Quilt, Two Lessons

The Modern Sampler Continues

2015 Donation Quilt #1

Tessellations! By Jean Larson

Meet Lee Monroe of May Chappell Patterns

First Finish

Year End Review

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