Happy Summer Solstice!

Ok, so here in Houston, it has "seemed" as tho it has been summer for a while now. In fact, I was told that the heat index yesterday was 106! It will be a very long time before we get relief...usually around late october.

I wanted to post some pics of a quilt that I have been fiddlin with for a few months now. It is "Deep Blue Sea". The fabric was really inexpensive...in fact its a jelly roll from Wal-mart. But I wanted to try a pattern that I have loved for a very long time. Its a "Friendship Braid". Actually the piecing went VERY fast. I had the braids pieced in an afternoon, and sashed/basted the next afternoon. However, I couldn't figure out how to quilt it tho. I knew I wanted to stay out of the ditch, but didn't want to do just a meander either.

Then my roommate came and saw the top. He said, "its like your swimming in the ocean." So this gave me an idea. I went to my "go-to" site for quilting designs and decided upon Leah Day's Swirling Waters design.

I did a small practice sandwich, and I think it came out decent.


So here is the quilt. I do hope that you can see the filler design in the quilt. Its not perfect, but I think that it came out really well.







And btw, I really am lovin the way the back turned out! I think its really pretty cool :-)



I hope that everyone has a fun Summer...and find some swirling waters of your own!

Thanks!

My attempt at a WholeCloth quilt

Well, I thought that I would give a small *PRACTICE* wholecloth quilt a try. I had gotten a wedding ring stencil from Leah Day's site. So I marked, and basted some fabric that I had from a previous project.



I used water soluble thread to attach the trapunto batting to the quilt top. So far so good. Even the cutting away of the extra batting went pretty well. I think I only cut into the top twice!



After this stage, I went ahead and sandwiched more batting and the back. I didn't really know how I was going to stitch the quilt, so I decided that I would just do maybe a different filler stitch inside of each ring.



After I was finished stitching....I soaked it in water, and Karen McTavish is totally correct in here dvd when she lifts it out of the water...and you hear angels singing! It was really just for practice, but I still really liked the way it turned out. Can't wait to do a "real" one!



Hope everyone's Father's Day was a good one for ya!

Its Been A While.....

Well, yes, it's been quite a while since I have posted anything here. But in my defense, I have been really busy this past month with just working on myself. Its still a work in progress, but i am slowly starting to really like the results.

This doesn't mean my machine has had a chance to gather any dust...so I thought that I would put up some pics of some things that I have been working on this past month.

This is a small baby quilt that I am actually pretty proud of. Not so much the layout or fabric choice, but of the actual FMQ I did. It came out really nice I think.








This is a quilt that I did for my roommate. It really was just some scrap fabric that I had and wanted to play around with half-square triangles. I didn't trapunto the motifs, however I did do some micro-stippling in the sashing that made the triangle squares "poof" alittle.





Im going to try and post some pics of a whole cloth quilt that I did tomorrow. Im new at this, but im trying! Thanks for taking a look.