PhxMQG Mug Rug Swap

Saturday was the Phoenix Modern Quilt Guild’s February meeting, and we held a little mug rug swap. I love doing these little swaps, because I use it as an opportunity to learn and stretch my creativity and skill.
Of course, creativity didn’t strike until about 8pm the night before…and my idea was a little crazy and time consuming…
You that lovely lone starburst block that is so popular right now? I had the bright idea to scale it down to mug rug size! (I have a few in progress photos on instagram, but I have no idea how to get them to my blog. Help?!?)
Here’s my result:

I love it sooo much!!! The inner white pieces finish at a mere 1/8” wide!!! The whole thing is 6 1/2” square

Here’s a shot with a nickel for an idea of scale. Seriously tiny piecing going on. Now the problem is I will never be able to throw away even the tiniest scrap of fabric, because what if I NEED it some day??

I backed it in this fun colorful Kumari Garden print. And I got to use one of my brand new tags!!! I found the awesomest Etsy shop ever. Cassie at GutenTags is seriously awesome, and I will definitely be back for more from her.

And the back side of my new tags :)

Ok, here’s where my story gets silly. We did a random swap for the guild mug rug swap, and I was the last to get one. And guess which mug rug was last to be distributed….Mine!! To save confusion, and because I really do love it, I kept my own mug rug…I felt so dumb taking my own back….but then again, I am really excited that it gets to live with me after the hours of teeny tiny piecing I put into it :)

And here are some shots of all the lovely mug rug that got swapped on Saturday:

(Mom’s is that cute itty bitty dresden plate next to mine :) ) We have some awesome talent in our guild!

PS- QUILT CON IS THIS WEEK!!! Getting super excited! If it is quiet around here, it is because I am frantically trying to get my house in order and ready for me to be gone for a few days! And packing...

How often does this happen??

I figured out what to do with my small scraps before I even started cutting out the quilt the scraps would come from! Hurray for no teeny scraps languishing in my scrap drawer!

Oh, and the quilt I was really cutting out is up there in the corner :)

Another completed quilt!!

I finished this custom pink and zebra quilt yesterday and snapped a few pictures. My customer saw this quilt of mine on flickr and asked if I could duplicate it for them.

I had some adventures trying to find the fabrics for the quilt. I was out of the zebra print, but I knew I had seen it recently at my LQS, so I figured, no problem! Yeaaaahhhh…I got there, and it was GONE! Drat! Now, there are a lot of zebra prints out there, but I really like the one from Summer Soiree by Paula Prass. Unfortunately, it’s old. After scouring the interwebs, I found ONE seller that happened to have just the amount I needed! Hurray!

Then, I was looking around for a suitable binding, because I had used a Park Slope print on the original quilt(now long out of print), and while it looked fabulous, I doubted I would be able to find any, at least in quantities I would need…Well, I couldn’t find anything else, and decided to search etsy for some lovely Park Slope(which I still LOVE), and found a seller with NINE yards of this hot pink print. Well, I immediately called my mom to see if she wanted any, and we took a good chunk of that yardage off her hands :)

Ok, now here’s the problem. I ordered the fabric TWO WEEKS ago Monday, and I still haven’t received it. Yesterday I finally realized I had just enough left to bind this quilt and went ahead and finished it with what I had on hand, but I haven’t received my order!

And now I need some opinions. I didn’t receive any notification of shipping or anything (and boo they didn’t combine shipping so I paid WAY MORE than needed to ship 5 yards of fabric), so after a WEEK, I messaged the seller and asked if they had shipped. They replied “shipping tomorrow”(that was the entirety of the reply message). Now it has been another week, so I messaged again asking if they had a tracking number or anything. She said she shipped several days ago and the package should be here. What do I do? I really want to give this shop a negative review, because seriously, I have ordered fabric 4 times either the same day or AFTER, and I have received ALL of it. But, I have a really hard time, as another etsy seller, giving a bad review. Help!!

ANYWAYS, that was my fabric saga. Now this quilt is finished and winging its way to the new owner! It was pretty cool, I got all of the front pink squares out of my scrap drawer, woo woo! The backing is a Michael Miller Quarter Dot in Fuchsia(ordered from Cotton Blossom Farm, AWESOME shop. That one, I would totally recommend, Cathy has fantastic customer service!)

My custom herringbone from my last post is coming along as well, just a slight glitch in my math skills = needed another row pieced in, whoops.

The Lone Starburst

My first paper piecing venture, besides a string quilt. Success! (Mostly. My center isn’t quite as perfect as I would like, but, it WAS my first try…)

I am having a lot of fun digging though my scraps to put these together (I have started an orange one now!). And while I have a gazillion green scraps, apparently a lot of them are multicolor or very different from each other…

I got the template here at Six White Horses. I found her blog through the link on Fresh Lemons, and let me say, she has some awesome stuff! I am dying to try her wonky chevron tutorial, too.

I have wanted to try out some paper piecing for a while, and I’ve seen some cool stuff, but as soon as I saw this star, I HAD to try it. Like, immediately printed out the template and sat at my sewing machine the first chance my children gave me. So much work, but so much fun! And it’s nice to be doing something a little more creative than the constant chain piecing that I’ve been doing lately.

This will definitely be an ongoing project, since it takes so dang long, but I am slowly going to whittle away at my scraps (probably add more to them than take away in the process, but, whatcha gonna do!) I will try to post my progress :)

Scrap War Zone

What I should be working on:

What I dove into instead:

No regrets!

More on my paper piecing adventures soon!

Scrappy Rainbow Quilt- a Finish!

I finally have a finished quilt to show off! I started this thing way back here, and I actually finished this quilt the week I found out I was pregnant (in May), and before I could get pictures, I was laid up on the couch. Anyway, I present to you my scrappy rainbow quilt!

I started making some random 5 1/2” blocks when my string scrap bin (a big red vines container. I’m cool like that!) was stuffed so full I couldn’t get anything else into it. I sorted out all the strings by color and went to town with no plan at all! Well, when I hit purple, my last color and least amount of scraps(had to borrow some from my mom!), I decided I needed SOME sort of a plan…so I started playing. I love the gradient look, so I went with it, and found that I only needed a couple more purple blocks and then I would be done!

Thanks to my awesome husband who let me drag him all around my grandparent’s and take pictures of quilts, he’s awesome :)

Now I have a slight rant about the back…I decided that this gray and white Ta Dot (I believe the color is Stone) would be a PERFECT back, and I had a good size piece of it, but not quite enough. So, off I ran to my LQS where I remembered seeing a bolt, got the bit I needed, and ran back home. To my horror, they were DIFFERENT DYE LOTS! Now, I know this is bound to happen, but I was so annoyed…and I couldn’t get any from the original bolt I purchased from, because I bought the end of bolt! Anyways, I worked it out so that all the dots from one piece were on one side of my scrappy back strip and all the dots from the other piece were on the other side, so it’s not very noticeable (except to me!!).

I quilted a continuous swirl that started a little off-center, (not that you can tell from the above picture, it’s just a cool pic), and started the swirl off with a cute daisy. It was fairly easy since this was a small quilt, but I don’t know that I would do it on anything bigger!

And I finished it off with a black and white pinstripe. I love how it sets off the rest of the colors and frames the rainbow! By the way, I thought it was pretty funny that I blogstalked across my quilt’s close twin while I was laying on the couch sick back in May. Rainbow, striped binding, even the quilting! I guess quilters think alike!!

I have listed this quilt up in the shop. Hurray for something new in there! It was starting to get just a little sparse, what with not sewing for 4 months…but I am definitely back in the groove(mostly), and I am still trying to keep up on my blogging! Yay!

Have a fantabulous day!

WIP Wednesday- a new quilt

The lighting is terrible, as is my carpet, but I had to snap a picture when I laid out these blocks yesterday.

I actually got this top mostly put together after this photo was taken, too, so there will be a cute new baby quilt showing up around here soon!

I am having issues deciding other things for this one, like backing…binding…should there be borders…any input would be greatly appreciated!

Oh, and my purple scraps were so abysmal I had to borrow some from my mom. Yay she had lots of purple scraps!

More on this one soon!

Mug Rugs

I finally got to attend my first Phoenix Modern Quilt Guild meeting on Saturday, and I had so much fun! How awesome is it to be surrounded by people who not only understand your quilty obsession, but share it? Fantastic!

Anyways, we had a mug rug swap while there, and here is my contribution

Front:

Back:

I had some questions as to how I pieced my front, and I had to admit, I didn’t really know! I set out my scraps sort of how I wanted them to go together and started sewing bits together! It was fun, though I did end up with one Y seam; poor planning! The solid is Kona Coal, and the rest of the fabrics were all scraps, hurray!

And here is the amazing mug rug that I received!

It is already pinned to my wall above my machine :) But ew bad lighting in my room, sorry!

Here’s all of the lovely mug rugs hanging out together.

Fronts:

Backs:

By the way, the cute one with the little 1” squares on the front was the one my mom made :)

I can’t wait until the next meeting, so fun!

Twinkly Stars Quilt Finish!

It is finished! I finished up the binding on this cute thing on Sunday night, and now I want all my quilts to be this small, because it seemed like the binding took no time at all!

So, all the star fabrics are SCRAPS, how cool is that? I feel so accomplished, I busted some scraps! Though, like I said in this post, I got bored of making stars after making these 9, so I decided that a small quilt was in order!

I used this awesome Jennifer Pagenelli stripe I had sitting in my stash begging to be used. It frames all that white on the front great!

When I asked my quilting consultant (aka the hubs!) what I should use for the back, he said it needed some BAM! Off to the stash I went again, and I found this print that was also begging to be used! I bought it thinking I would use it in Zoey's string quilt, but decided it would look better in something with bigger pieces. Well, BAM! It works perfectly as backing; then you do't lose the awesome print!

This is my favorite star. The center block on it is only 1 1/2". It's so tiny!

I quilted with an all over loopy (still one of my favorites!), but I made smaller loops than I usually do, since this quilt is so tiny.

Oh and I tell ya, when you start quilting something, check the back for tension problems RIGHT AWAY! I got almost 1/4 of the way done with this one and THEN remembered to look...Yeah, the seam ripper and I spent some quality time together...But now it looks fabulous, so that seam ripping was worth it :)



I have listed this pretty little quilt in the shop, so it can find someone to love it as much as I do!

My table right now

So, remember how I was going to try to slow down a little? Yeah, didn't really happen. Since that post, I have pieced two quilt tops, basted and quilted one of them, and this one is sitting on my table ready for pins. Oh yeah, and I got two more quilt tops planned and cut out this weekend. Slow down, bah! Maybe when I'm dead :)

Anyways, this one started out as a scrap buster project. I've wanted to try out some wonky stars for a while, and my pink and green scraps happily agreed! But...I made 9 and got a little bored... 28" square is a good carseat/stroller/playmat quilt size! Tee hee.
Still have no idea how I am going to quilt this, so it might be a little while until I actually have it finished, but it's been sitting on my kitchen table, and decided it was time to baste and get it off of there!
That's all for now; have a fun Monday!