I decided my couch looked kind of funny with one fall pillow (my Autumn Star Pillow) and one regular pillow. So I made a friend for Autumn Star.

I wanted to use the same general fabrics but not the same design, so I made a couple columns of flying geese. I chose to paper piece them because I’m just so much more exact when I use that technique. I didn’t make a tutorial but I did make a PDF of the templates I whipped up to use. You can download it here.

I was able to fit 10 on one sheet of paper but you’ll need to print 2 sheets if you want to make a pillow like mine. You’ll have a few leftover. If you’ve never paper pieced before – these are easy! I have a tutorial on the technique here.

I think they look happy together!

This post feels so good to write! Last winter I hosted a quilt along on my blog called the Solstice Stars Series (see tab at the top of my blog). I wanted to make a quilt that focused on traditional stars, but arrange them in a non-traditional way. I purposely only made 5 stars so we would all be a bit forced to think outside of the box regarding the quilt layout.

My quilt top has been sitting finished for months. I wasn’t sure how I wanted to quilt it…I had some dreams of hand quilting. But last week I decided to face reality, it was not going to happen. I feel like every second of my day is filled up and I really wanted to finish this quilt. So I decided to try one of the free motion quilting techniques in Angela’s new book, a double loop.

I’m really pleased with how the quilt turned out. I love the colors (the fabric is Secret Garden by Sandi Henderson). The scrappy part of the quilt is similar to my Good Folks Scrappy quilt. You basically just cut strips of varying widths and sew them in columns. Then you sew the columns together until you have your desired width of quilt top.

The back is a mixture of a solid I had around the house and left over fat quarters from the Secret Garden line. The binding is Free Spirit Designer Solid Flamingo.

The final quilt measures 54″ x 60″. You can find links to all the star tutorials as well as more layout ideas on the Solstice Stars Series tab at the top of my blog.

I picked up a couple of books last week. One of them was Free-Motion Quilting with Angela Walters. I had been thinking about getting this book ever since it came out (Angela is widely known in the quilting community as being an AMAZING quilter), but I wasn’t quite sure what it was all about and if I needed it. I noticed a few other bloggers were being inspired to try new free motion quilting designs after getting the book and decided to see what it was all about.

I have many quilt books I like, many I love. I mostly use them for inspiration. This is one of the few books I can honestly say needs to be in your quilt book library. (And no, I wasn’t paid or asked to say that. )

Angela provides detailed, step by step instruction on how to make a huge variety of free motion quilting designs. She breaks them down so well that even a novice can figure out what to do.

As soon as I opened the book and started to absorb how much awesome information was in there, I dropped all my current projects, ran to my sewing room, and made some quilt sandwiches. I needed to try everything immediately!

Obviously I have more work to do, but this is my first try and it’s not horrible. I am particularly desperate to perfect some of the swirl designs.

Now Angela is a long arm quilter, but these designs can be done on a home sewing machine as long as you are set up for free motion quilting.

I had made a few quilting sample sandwiches several months ago to practice different types of quilting…

And now I plan to make a sandwich for my favorite designs from Angela’s book as well.

Last week when I posted my Cutting Edge quilt, I mentioned that it was the first of two quilts I made for Quilt Market. Today I’m happy to share the second. This quilt was made for Ty Pennington’s booth at market using his latest fabric line from Ty Pennington Impressions.

I am having trouble finding any 2012 swatches on the Impressions website or Free Spirit/Westminster Fibers website, but you can see some the fabrics up close on the quilt photos. I chose to work with a lot of the bright colors in the line…no big surprise! This quilt was exciting to make because even non-quilty people know who Ty Pennington is, right?

Once again, Lee was nice enough to take a picture of the quilt in the booth for me at Quilt Market – thanks Lee!

This quilt is made from square blocks, but I set the inner squares and crosses on point. The blocks are 14″ squares and the full quilt measures 56″ x 56″. I quilted it with free motion meandering.

I made this quilt and my Cutting Edge quilt over a period of less than two weeks. It was exciting and stressful to be a little part of the Quilt Market rush. I also wrote a pattern for this quilt that was handed out at market and if I see it online, I will update this post with a link.