Category — Modern Quilts

Low volume sewing is pretty hot right now. For me, one of the biggest challenges is finding low volume prints in my stash. It’s probably pretty obvious that I tend to be attracted to color saturated prints. Amanda from Westwood Acres sells a low volume bundle in her shop on Etsy. She cleverly named it “Inside Voices”, I love that! Amanda asked if I wanted to play around with one of the bundles, and I thought it would be a great way to jump right into the low volume trend.

I was throwing around a few options for this bundle. I was this close to pairing it with some other prints and making a zigzag quilt using this technique by AmandaJean of Crazy Mom Quilts. In the end, I started thinking about my Stepping Stones quilt. I decided to make something using the same basic construction. Columns of fabric that are equal in width, but various lengths. These pieces are from 3″ to 4.5″ long and 3.5″ wide.

I laid it all out Saturday morning. Went to lunch with the family. Came home to this.

“Who me??” Does anyone else have a dog that likes to roll all over your projects. It’s a good thing he’s so cute.

I’m hoping to have this little baby quilt finished up by Valentine’s Day. Can wait to share it with you!

Last week I finished my latest round of The Traveling Quilts Bee. This iteration, I had Elizabeth of Oh, Fransson’s quilt. No pressure, right?

Elizabeth’s quilt is 80′s themed. She found some really, really bright fabrics to send along with the quilt. I’m talking neon! This is how the quilt looked when I received it.

So many people had already added amazing things to the quilt. Check out the Pac Man by Monica! Genius.

I was going back and forth on a few ideas. MTV logo, Cindy Lauper silhouette. In the end, I’m not that good of a sewist for those. But I knew I could do a Rubik cube! I did a little searching on Google Images and found a nice Rubik graphic. I opened it up in Photoshop and traced the lines to come up with a bit of a paper piecing template.

I printed the image out and cut it into sections based on each side of the Rubik Cube. Then I cut those sides into strips and paper pieced each strip.

Once I had the strips sewn together to form each side, I pieced them together as I would any Y-Seam. That was a little trickier than anything I’ve done, as I not only had to line up the y-seam, but also the seams of the color squares on the Rubik Cube.

Elizabeth’s quilt also uses some black and white prints. I dug around in my stash and found this older Seagull print (Alexander Henry I think?). Since this is an 80′s themed quilt, I thought it was a bit clever and reminded me of the band Flock of Seagulls. Hopefully you don’t hate the band Elizabeth!

I’ve mailed the quilt on to Ashley and am excited to see what she adds!

Many of you probably remember the Summer Sampler Series quilt along I hosted along with Lee of Freshly Pieced and Katie of Swim, Bike, Quilt in the summer of 2011. Was it really that long ago? We created the series because all three of us love Modern Traditionalism and we really felt it was just such a great skill builder. I have read many success stories from quilters that learned various new techniques while making the quilt: half-square triangles, flying geese, bias piecing, paper-piecing, piecing equilateral triangles and diamonds, hourglass units, and string piecing.

Lee, Katie and I often get emails and comments about the availability of a printable PDF version of the tutorials for this series. Today I’m excited to announce that we now that have available! Lee has put together a fantastic anthology of the blocks, patterns, tips, templates and almost 150 pictures. They are all in one convenient 86 page PDF document.

You can buy the entire thing for $9.99 in our pattern shops:

Teachers, shop owners, and guilds: Would you like to teach the Summer Sampler Series as a class, or run it as a block-of-the-month series? Purchasing copies of the Summer Sampler Series Anthology for all of your participants gives you full permission to teach the series publicly, and we offer discount pricing on the purchase of four or more copies. Email Lee, Katie, or myself for more information.

And no worries, these tutorials will continue to be available on our websites. The Summer Sampler Series Anthology is simply for those that appreciate the convenience of the entire pattern in one printable document.

I finished my Glimma quilt just a couple of hours ago and I am pretty proud of myself for braving the frigid cold outside to get pictures! It helped that my car has heated seats. And I think it’s actually 20 degrees which feels like a heatwave after the sub-zeros from the last two days!

I’ve decided to call this quilt “This Way, That Way”. I love the effect of the flying geese going in all the different directions.

As I mentioned here and here, Windham Fabrics sent me a little pack of charms from Lotta Jansdotter’s upcoming line Glimma, due out in April. I decided to mix it with two shades of Essex Linen – yarn dyed in black and flax. Paper piecing the flying geese made working with the linen quite easy. When it came to removing the paper and sewing everything together however, I really relied on starch. It stiffened up the fabric enough to make it easy to work with, not stretching all over the place.

I quilted this with diagonal lines, randomly spaced. They are each between 1/4″ and 1/2″ apart. I bound it with the Yarn Dyed Black Essex Linen. The back is a Moda Crossweave in a coral color (not sure the exact name). It measures 30″ x 40″.

Have I mentioned that I’m actually going to get to meet Lotta at QuiltCon? I signed up for her Textile Printing class and I can’t wait! Is anyone else taking it? And speaking of QuiltCon, I am honored to have two quilts selected to be displayed, my Off Centered Improv and my Belle Wave quilts. I’ll be spending the next week getting them ready, sewing hanging sleeves, labels, and packing them up to ship. Fun, fun!