blogger's quilt festival: Penny's quilt

As I was looking through my quilty posts, I couldn't believe I hadn't posted about this quilt, finished, yet, so I saved it for the Blogger's Quilt Festival to really show it off.

A few years back, Judy Laquidara offered a quilt along, block of the month pattern that I honestly can't remember what it was called.  (Sorry Judy!)  There were a number of star blocks, all a little different, and a bunch of borders.  (But what quilt of Judy's would be complete without oodles of borders?)

Anyways, I really wanted to do it, but couldn't think of a good reason.  I knew if I started it without a reason to finish it, I'd never finish it.  And then it hit me: a good friend of the family, Penny, would be turning 40 in about a year and a half.  Since the timing on the quilt was a year, I'd have a top finished in plenty of time to get it longarmed and give it for her birthday.

To the store for fabrics!

(For those of you who are familiar with her quilt you'll see I used the same colors as her first one - I liked it so much, I decided not to change it!)

Each month I awaited the new block instructions.  Judy writes impeccable instructions and I was thrilled to work them.  I even learned how to cut a 1/16" increment for some pieces!

I can't even find photos of all the blocks...but here are a few...

I struggled more with some blocks than others, but in the end, they all look great.

And then came borders.  Judy had lots of borders, but by the time I'd made 12 blocks and sashings, I was wearing down.  So I went with simple borders.

I think the solid borders frame it nicely.

I used a very pink pink on the back.  Penny is a girly girl and LOVES pink (even at 40!), and I toyed with the idea of making the top itself quite girly, but it's king-size and I wanted it to be used on the bed she and her hubby share.  Though he's a pretty laid-back guy, I figured a pinky-pink quilt might not make him terribly happy.  (Especially if Penny decided she needed to redecorate the room to match!)

The quilting is just an overall pattern of viney leaves.  I wanted to have a more custom job done, but money was tight and I don't think hurts the quilt at all.

I took it to her 40th birthday party, where we'd been instructed to NOT bring presents.  Well...  She pulled it out of the bag, did a happy dance, hugged it and ran OUTSIDE (her birthday is in November and we live where there's usually snow on the ground by then) to show everyone out there "helping" deep fry chicken wings!  I think she liked it...

So this is my entry for the Blogger's Quilt Festival.  Go check out the rest of the beautiful quilts!

 

Katie

Happy quilting,

blogger's quilt festival: krystal's quilt

Some of you have seen this quilt before (back in the APQ days), but I still love it and it's such a great story, I'm going to share it today for the Blogger's Quilt Festival.

I have a good friend, Krystal.  We met probably 12 years ago when she started working part-time with me.  We had a great time working together and got along well and became friends.  I've been gone from that job 10 years now and we're still friends.

As good friends do, we shared good and bad, laughed and cried together.  She's a great gal, but seemed to have trouble finding a worthy guy.  She'd been dating a guy who seemed perfect and I was waiting for the engagement so I could get busy on a wedding quilt, but instead she got the unpleasant surprise of a breakup.

I decided she needed a quilt anyways, boy or no.  So I started looking for ideas...

In the Spring 2007 issue of Quilts and More, this quilt was featured.

Called "Climb on In" by, um, well it doesn't say!  If it's yours, please let me know and I'll change this to give you proper credit!

So off I went looking for fabric for those plain stripes.  I knew that was going to be the hardest for me - a large-scale print...  I came up with this poppy print:

My mom was with me.  She told me how U-G-L-Y this print is.  We often have different opinions.  I ignored hers.  I often do.  (She ignores mine too.  It's all good.)

Of course, the original quilt wasn't large enough, and those tulip-like flowers don't go so well, so I had to make a few modifications...  I also had to find some crazy long tables to get those 100" strips of applique pinned properly!

But I had no real deadline and those of you who follow me know that I work S-L-O-W without one.  And in the meantime, she started dating again and found a wonderful guy online.  He moved here from England and they were married in a gorgeous outdoor ceremony a bit north of home two days before my own anniversary with my hubby.  (What a nice anniversary trip for us!)

So the quilt turned into a wedding quilt!

Here it is before it was quilted.  Queen size!

I love it.  Every time I see the pictures I love it more.  My mom was SO wrong about the poppy print...but she still stands by it's ugliness, even if she does like the quilt overall.

But the BEST part was giving it at the wedding.  I had to make a fuss because they were going to open gifts later, privately, but I wanted this to be seen.  Krystal liked it, but her new hubby...he hugged it to himself and went around the room showing it to everyone like a little boy who'd just found his long-lost blankie.  Absolutely priceless reaction.  The best I've ever gotten.  Likely the best I'll ever get.

How about this awesome quilting?  Done by Bonnie Rhoby, my favorite longarmer (who also sold me her extra longarm last fall).  She made the quilt even better, if that was possible.

And yup, that's all needle-turn applique!

And now for the sad part.  The part that those of you who have seen this quilt before don't know yet.  My friend and her hubby, married not yet 3 years, are separated.  I don't know the whole story (she's a busy gal and we don't see each other as often as we'd like), but I'm sad for her.  Yet I hope that she still has this quilt and can curl up under it every night and have it comfort her because that's where this quilt started and that's where my heart will always be for her.  A great big sisterly hug.

Happy quilting and blogger's quilt festivalling (yep, that's a word now),

Katie

blogger's quilt festival: erik and jennifer's quilt

I've been wanting to show this quilt for about ever now and when I realized Amy of Amy's Creative Side was hosting her Blogger's Quilt Festival again, I decided to hold off a little bit longer.  It's finally time!  Yay!

Last summer, 2009, the hubby and I travelled to the Kansas City area for a family reunion.  On the way, we stopped to visit with one of the hubby's high school buddies.  They'd lost touch after graduation, but managed to reconnect because they both work for the same company, though doing quite different jobs in very distant locations. 

I was nervous to visit.  Though I'd met his friend quite a few years back and liked him, I'm not always well liked by wives of the hubby's friends.  (I grew up with two brothers and hung out with mostly guys growing up, so the finer points of being a girl are still a mystery to me!)  But I went because that's what you do when you're married.

I shouldn't have worried.  This guy's wife is great.  We hit it off and chatted like old friends for hours while the guys drove in to the friend's workplace to give the hubby a tour.

They had been married just a year before, but we didn't know at the time.  As we were driving home after the reunion, the hubby and I decided they needed a quilt.  Both for a belated wedding gift and a token of our friendship.  That was the easiest part!

Since this was for the hubby's friend, I wanted his input on the design and colors.  And since the hubby thinks that quilting is poisonous (well, not really, but he teases that way), and his ability to imagine a pattern in different colors is severly limited, I had to look through dozens of magazines to find something that came in the right colors, size, etc.

I ended up choosing a pattern called Autumn Crown, found in the October 2003 issue of McCalls Quilting.  And I planned to do it in similar colors.

That was easier said than done.  I had a pile of fabrics and then went looking for a border print to tie them all together.  I found the swirly print above and had to put everything back and start over.  But at least I had the fabrics, right?

Many calculations and lots of cutting and lots of sewing, I had a top...

Holy cow that was a lot of points to carefully match and not sew into the seams!  And then I had to put borders on.  I don't like borders.  I don't like long seams.  I think I'd be happy if I could just make blocks and let someone else worry about making a top, but I couldn't really call myself a quilter if I just made blocks, right?  So I sucked it up and put those borders on and sent it off to my favorite quilter.

Probably about a year had passed since our initial visit to this point...

It came back from the quilter and I was in love.  She did an AMAZING job.  I just told her to do whatever she thought would fit best (wondering if quilters hate people like me or love them?) and it's wonderful.

It took me a while to finally get the binding sewn on, but I did.  But while all this procrastinating was going on, we managed to lose the mailing address of the friends.  So the hubby had to be urged to contact his friend to get it and the friend had to be reminded a few times (boys...) and we finally got it.

I was so excited to send it out, I forgot to take a photo until the middle of the night, the night before I finally had a chance to ship it.  I planned to ship UPS (you can insure things for what they're actually worth, not just the cost of materials (requiring a reciept if you make a claim) like at USPS) and have them box it up at the store.  So I packed up the quilt, my camera and the lint roller along with my lunch when I headed to work the next day.  A couple of friends helped me on our lunch hour and I got a picture.  Not the best, but hey, it's a photo, right?!

And without further ado, Erik and Jennifer's quilt:

I really like the quilt, though I went through a phase during construction that I really didn't like it at all.  (I do that a lot.)  I think it's about 80 inches square...I can't find those notes...but I wanted it to be a good-sized throw quilt for them to use on their couch.

The quilt arrived, but it took more than a week for the hubby to get confirmation from his buddy that they'd actually gotten it.  (All of this communication goes through work e-mails because both the guys work wierd shifts and it's just easier that way.)

So there you have it.  Finally finished and shipped.  And thank you to those of you who made it all the way through the post.  The quilt had a story and I wanted it told.  Sometimes I get a little wordy...  :)

Happy quilting,

Katie

Blogger's Quilt Festival

I couldn't resist - all those fantastic prizes and new bloggers/quilters to discover...

Some of you know already, but there's an online quilt show going on, and Amy, the coordinator has asked quilters to post a quilt and it's story. 

So here goes:

(I wish I had a picture of this quilt after it was quilted, but it seems I can't locate that one.  It WAS quilted and bound before given away!)

The story:

This quilt was made as a raffle prize for a fund raiser for my hubby's family's Relay for Life team in 2007.  The team was created after his maternal grandfather passed away from cancer.  The family felt they needed to do something to help others from facing the same sadness, so they joined and walked.

Being a quilter (and slightly crazy), I offered to make a quilt, assuming it would attract attention and earn more money through the raffle they were holding.  I decided a queen-size would be nice because it could be used on a bed or wherever.

The pattern was in McCall's Quilting magazine, February 2007, called "Star Crossing" by Sandee Wachal.  It was done in red and green, but I felt that looked too Christmassey, so I changed it to red and blue.  It seemed fitting, too, because Grandpa was always running around in an American flag baseball hat, carrying his American flag folding chair to get-togethers.  He was also a war veteran.

Sadly, the raffle didn't do as well as I had hoped, but that's a whole 'nother story and nothing I want to drag around here.

What I learned:

1. Raffle quilts are a LOT of work for little satisfaction.  Smaller is better.

2.  There are a LOT of pieces in this pattern.  Look before you leap!

3.  Setting triangles that are too big are confusing...  Thanks mom.  :)

4.  Queen size quilts are really, really big.

I didn't like all those little pieces, but I love the quilt and had a little bit of a hard time parting with it when the time came.  I still have a few scraps from the quilt that I use in special projects.  They will always remind me of this quilt and Grandpa.  He was a fiesty old man up until the very end of his life.  He lived at the local Hospsice house for the last 7 months of his life - a month longer than the doctors told him he would likely live when he was initially diagnosed.  I honestly believe he lived that long just to prove them wrong!  And I am so glad that I got to know him a little.  Just thinking of some of the things he did make me smile (like the day he showed up to "supervise" our new roof being put on at 5am - before daylight - and wondered where the roofers were?).

I know some of you have seen this before, but I wanted to share a quilt that had special meaning and I think this one qualifies.

Now it's time to go check out some more of the other quilts and blogs!

Happy quilting,

Katie