Finished! In 2016

Posted on January 1, 2017 by zippyquilts

First, the Christmas tree picture with fireplace was at the Grove Park Inn, in Asheville, N.C. That fireplace is big enough for a man to stand up in. Hopefully when there’s no fire.

And now, the 2016 finishes.

Scan Me, a quilt made to promote safer sex.

Cherrywood Toss won a blue ribbon.

Refrigerator quilt inspired by Gwen Marston. Bev Manus came up with the idea for refrigerator quilts.

My Modern Sampler Quilt

“Gwen Visits the Farm” is the quilt I made for the Quilt Alliance contest this year

Roxie bag made as part of Quilted Adventure online retreat

Blouse from a Loes Hinse pattern, in Cherrywood fabrics

Tumbling Blocks placemats, made in class with Karen Combs

These Sweetpea Pod bags were so fun that I made a LOT of them!

And, of course, the quilts for Ronald McDonald House:

Improv orphan blocks

Happy new year, and may you have a great year of quilts in 2017!

Slabs, Round 2

Posted on December 18, 2016 by zippyquilts

Cheryl Arkison is one of several people to suggest putting together scraps of the same color to make a quilt block (or fabric from which to cut quilt pieces). Cheryl calls hers “slabs” and makes them big–15 inches square finished.

Above is the quilt I made from a slab swap with one of my quilt groups a couple of years ago. I had asked for slabs made from the yellow/orange family, and I loved what I got. But I’m not one to leave well enough alone, so I cut them up and made the quilt shown above.

A relative-who-will-remain-nameless looked through my quilts online and asked for something similar, but in a larger size.

I’ve had fun collecting orange and yellow fabrics. My friend Linda donated a large bag of orange “scraps”; I felt free to ask her since she claims to hate orange 😀 Then she brought me a big cut of solid orange to go with the scraps!

Linda even found an orange patterned bag to put her scraps in!

The rest came from my stash and from a few things I bought while travelling. I improvised the squares, featuring a few funky fabrics in each one from the fabrics I bought especially for this quilt.

Then I used Moda Bella Amelia Blue to sash each square and cut the sashing so they are all wonky. Each will finish 18″ square with sashing.

This one will be big enough that it will need to go to the long-arm quilter. I’ll have more pictures when it’s finished.

Meanwhile, how are those holiday projects coming along?

Next Scrap Project

Posted on December 4, 2016 by zippyquilts

I mentioned I’m doing a Lego Quilt, based on instructions from Tonya Ricucci. I am lucky to have changed to a 4-day-a-week job, so I spent my first Friday off getting all the strips done. I put them up on the design wall as I pieced them to be sure I was getting a good balance of colors and values.

Strips on my design wall

Tonya’s instructions say to cut 1-1/2″ strips and join them to make the rows in each block. I have a lot of strips, sorted by width, so I tried the 1-1/2″ strips first, joining them end-to-end and cutting into the lengths I needed.

That was tedious, to say the least. I switched to using wider strips, joining them lengthwise, and cutting 1-1/2″ strips from the sets.

Now I have 420 strips, enough to make my 42 blocks (finishing 10″ each) for a 60″ x 70″ quilt. This will be my next leaders-and-enders project. Here are all the strips laid out ready to go! Stay tuned! I think it will be fun to see it come together!

A Nice Surprise and a New Scrap Project

Posted on November 6, 2016 by zippyquilts

First, the surprise: One of my quilts, Cherrywood Toss, won first place in the Modern category at my local show! Needless to say, I was thrilled!

Cherrywood Toss. Read about it here.

And then it was on to a new scrap project! I’ve been wanting to make a scrap quilt with a zillion pieces ever since my friend Jerri made her postage stamp quilt.

I came across the “lego quilt” on Pinterest and followed the links to this post by Tonya Ricucci of Lazy Gal Quilting, which gives specific directions. Go visit her post–there’s a cool picture of an antique quilt that gave her the idea.

Strips on my design wall

Tonya made her 10″ (finished size) blocks using 1-1/2″ strips composed of scraps of various sizes. She mentioned that there was some difficulty getting them to come out the right size. Because of that, I am making my strips 11″ long unfinished so I can trim the blocks to 10-1/2″ wide after they are assembled. Also, I’m making the first strip in each block 2″ wide unfinished so I can trim in that direction as well.

So far I’m just making strips and putting them on the design wall to be sure I have a balance of values throughout the quilt. I’ll let you know how it goes. This takes a LOT of time! And like most scrap quilts, it doesn’t seem to use up even 10% of the available scraps! So far I’ve used only one drawer of the scrap cabinet!!!!

This might be a good leaders-and-enders project, since it seems like it could take forever. I’ll let you know how it turns out 🙂

Smoky Mountain Quilt Guild Show, Part 2

Posted on October 30, 2016 by zippyquilts

There has been so much going on (that’s good!) I haven’t had a chance to post the rest of my favorites from my local guild show. Here are a few more of them.

Please note that this is a local show, so most of the quilts were made from patterns or workshops. I’ll list the source where I have it.

Jen Kingwell design beautifully done by Susan Roper

Traditional design made “to use up scraps”

Our guild has a very active group making Quilts of Valor for men and women who have served in the military. The next two were made for that program.

Inspired by a design on the Alycia Quilts blog

Design by Jenny Doan for Missouri Star Quilt Company

Design from the book Modern Paper Piecing was both pieced and quilted by Linda

Debby designed and made this quilt after a study of Amish quilts

Quilt is based on a Mind the Gap design by Moda. Karen cleverly named it after her “mistake” in placing the green strips!

Christeen designed this quilt herself, and I think the name should get a humor award!

Betty designed and made this quilt for a log cabin challenge

From a pattern by Kathy Wells

I’m lucky to live near so many talented quilters!

Cherrywood Toss

Posted on July 31, 2016 by zippyquilts

This quilt was started about 2 years ago when I bought a scrap pack of Cherrywood hand dyed fabrics. The blocks are entirely from Cherrywood scrap packs plus that cute print with the words on it, which is a Robert Kaufman fabric.

The dark sashing is made from black plus little pieces of the darkest almost-black solids I could find. All are Cotton Couture from Michael Miller.

I quilted this on my home machine, using randomly-spaced, gently curving, lines from edge to edge. I used Superior Bottom Line in the bobbin, which I always do. Top thread is a medium grey light weight polyester, Mettler Metrosene.

This is going to the Smoky Mountain Quilters show in September. This year the show is scheduled in conjunction with Western Carolina University’s Mountain Heritage Day, which I think is a great idea. Of course I’ll have pictures from that show when it happens.

Linking to Aunt Marti’s UFO Challenge. I did get one finished this month!

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Projects from 2014

Posted on June 19, 2016 by zippyquilts

As part of my effort to develop galleries for this site, here is a review of my projects from the first half of 2014.

The design and tutorial for this zippered pouch came from Noodlehead.

I made a series of these little zippered pouches, and they have been useful.

These next two bags were made from a book entitled Ruby Star Wrapping. You can read my review of the book here, if you want.

I continued my interest in improvisational piecing in 2014, making this confetti block…

Confetti Block, 2014

…and this entry for the Quilt Alliance annual contest:

Whirlwind, my 2014 Quilt Alliance challenge quilt

I made this quilt for the Pantone Challenge. It looks better in person than in this picture, and now is used to decorate one of the rooms at our local free clinic:

Radiating Orchid, my mini-quilt for the Radiant Orchid Challenge

As always, I made a number of donation quilts for Ronald McDonald House. I used them to try out a variety of techniques and other experiments:

Nine Patch Quilt

Donation quilt top is the finish for June!

One of my quilts for Ronald McDonald House

I made this baby quilt because I loved the fabrics:

Baby Dots–Front

Baby Dots–back. I may like it even more than the front!

And I participated in several swaps, including one involving these blocks. Don’t even think about the 88 little pieces in the block on the left!!!

Swap Block–88 little squares!!!

Swap Block

I’ve reached my (self-imposed) length limit for a post, so the rest of the 2014 review will be coming up next week! Please come back 😉

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The Rest of the Story

Posted on June 5, 2016 by zippyquilts

Here are the other two quilts I made while doing the Gwen Marston class on iQuilt.

This first one is my version of one of her quilts, and again I made it 12″ x 12″. I faced it, which I don’t usually do, so that was a learning experience. I like the way it turned out.

This second one was made of scraps from the other quilts in the series, which makes me happy.

This started as a liberated Roman Stripe design, with a center of 4 larger blocks and a “border” of smaller blocks. The size of the blocks worked out fine, but the pieces got more and more “liberated” so that I’m not sure it looks much like a Roman Stripe any more. Which is fine, actually.

I quilted it using a pattern of wandering lines, all in one direction, and I like the result. After considering several threads, I used a thin medium grey polyester. I think it blended well so that the quilting didn’t obscure the design. Here’s my “trial” of several threads.

How do you choose your quilting thread for a project?

Refrigerator Quilt

Posted on May 15, 2016 by zippyquilts

A very artistic quilter in one of my guilds is making a series of “refrigerator quilts” as a challenge to herself. They are 12” x 12” and intended to be displayed on her refrigerator for one week, until she finishes the next one!
The guild took her idea as the challenge for May, so I’ve been making a little refrigerator quilt myself. I took my inspiration from Gwen Marston (again) and made a bunch of little freeform stars.

Refrigerator quilt inspired by Gwen Marston. Bev Manus came up with the idea for refrigerator quilts.

The best part is that, because it is small, it was made almost entirely from scraps. I had enough scraps to make all the stars different yellows and all the backgrounds different blues.
The back is a piece of fabric I dyed in a class many years ago.