Got Scraps? CHALLENGE ACCEPTED

Y'all know my love of scraps.  They're so much fun!  So when Mom handed me a binder full of scraps waiting to be used...I said, "what the hell is this?"

So as I'm sure most of you know, Blank Textiles got bought out last year by Jaftex.  So what that meant is that most of our color cards were useless, because many of the lines were being reduced or discontinued.  On those color cards, they had a bunch of tabs of fabric, up to 3"x 5" and as small as 1"x 2".  When you think about a 3" binder full of those pieces, that's a lot of waste if you're just going to toss those cards!  So I was tasked with doing something with those itty bitty pieces.  So out came my iron (to melt the adhesive) and off I went.

I decided to go with a row quilt.  And polka dots.

Problem solved.  I haven't quilted it yet though...that's down the list a ways.  But it just goes to show you really can make something from little bits of nothin'!

Barbecue Quilt, and Pork Butts.

I'll start this post by saying this is a low brow post with butt jokes, so if you're not down with immature humor...whelp, this post isn't for you even with the quilt at the end.  Just saying....



When Myke and I were kids, and I mean like...10 or 11ish for me, 7 or 8ish for him... one of our favorite shows to watch together was Cow and Chicken on Cartoon Network.  I pity those of you without a cool little brother to laugh at low brow, stupid stuff with. Apparently, we were weird kids, because in retrospect, that was one weird cartoon.

Can we just address the red guy?  The butt walk?  His aliases...Captain Butts Pirate?  Lance Sackless?

But one of the things we thought was funny, was that one of their favorite foods was pork butts.  That is exactly what it sounds like.

Still funny....WHY

So what am I getting at...Other than having fun looking up old Cow and Chicken pictures...

Awhile back we got a fabric from Blend Fabrics that was barbecue themed.

The first thing I thought of, was Cow and Chicken's pork butts.  I asked  Myke what he thought of when he saw the fabric and he said THE SAME THING.  We joked about what if I made a quilt that had a pork butt on it, and of course Mom was like, "No that that's weird, you guys are weird. You can't make a pork butt quilt."  CHALLENGE ACCEPTED.

Immature victory is ours. This quilt is a tabletopper from the pattern Picnic at the Farmers Market by Whistlepig Creek Productions.  It has the pattern for the tabletopper and the placemats, and I think there's a tablerunner in there too that isn't shown on the cover.

I showed Myke the quilt, and he laughed. You'll see why...

...and yes...the placement of the pig butt and the word butt was intentional.  And, yes, Mom shook her head. And yes, I am immature sometimes.  Pork Butt. Heh.

Spring Chicken

Here is another shop sample that I whipped up.  It is from the book My Spring by Disa Designs.  I really love the work that Disa Designs does - her patterns are really cute across the board.

The quilt I did is the one hanging in the background.  It's cute but Mom and I agreed that it would look neat in brighter colors.  Much against her style, she asked that I do it in Jason Yenter's Bloom Modern II.

The focus print

A "closer"-up of the sample quilt

So here is what we ended up with.  Seeing the original, and then the sample...I think it looks great either way.  That, I feel, is a testament to a successful pattern design - that it will look good in different color styles. 

Sweet Pea Manor

Well here's a throwback Thursday for you...

This is an oldie.  I got the pattern back when Judith owned the shop, and started it a few years ago.

 Let me start by saying, it's a (really) cute pattern.  It's got good bones!  But, and this may be shocking to hear out of me, that cover sample is just too much.  There is so much stuff going on, and it's all bright and while the colors are all very different...the tones are not.  Excluding the yellow (light) and the blue (dark), everything else is tonally similar and I think some neat details get lost in all that.

So, I changed it up.  I kept the bright colors, but added some more mid tones and black and white. I omitted the stars in the sky, And no, the sky isn't freakin' pink.

Almost there...

The center is complete!

The baskets kicked my ass for some reason.  I guess subconsciously I wanted them to be bear paws.

Well executed, but wrong. 

All that's left now is to get the borders on, which, I haven't decided what those are yet, and to quilt it up. 

Dino Dig!

Every now and then a pattern finds its way to me more than once, and more than twice.  It's not necessarily a bad thing!  That just means that A.) I know what I like, and B.) my family and friends know what I like.

This pattern found its way to me three times. 

It's a cute pattern!  The dino on the middle right has something strange going on (a long-necked herbivore with carnivore teeth? Exsqueese me?), but overall, it's cute.  So I made it and we kitted it up.

Nevermind my face...I was vexed at shorting myself just shy of 3" of border on that one side.  Damn it. And yes, the dinos all got button eyes after it was quilted.  No eyeless dinos here!

But, I do have to brag for a minute...

THAT CORNER, Y'ALL.  It is so sharp and so clean!  So much so I had to take a picture of it, because otherwise it may not have actually happened.  (Pics, or it didn't happen!)

Science Rules.

This fabric reminds me of one thing:

In particular, the part where the woman is like, "Science Ruuuuuules."

I love this fabric.  It reminds me a lot of our science books when I was in grade school...the cheesy pictures, the limited color scheme...watching Bill Nye...

I made a sample for this from the book Quilt Lab by Alexandra Winston.

My only gripe about this book was that in her effort to be heavy on the math and science theme, it eliminated my ability to use any of the triangle templates I had because the angle on the triangles in the quilt I chose were EXTRA SPECIFIC....there was a decimal in the angle.  It was really more of an annoyance than anything. But because of the amount of cutting I had to do, my accuracy would have been helped a lot by not having to be so cautious with a template plastic template with a proper ruler on top.

Boo.  

But it was my first time doing anything significant with non-half square triangles, and I am fairly pleased with the outcome. Were I to do this over again, I would probably toss in a few other go-withs that weren't in the line instead of sticking only to the pieces in the line.  I feel its awfully white-heavy, but oh well, I like it nonetheless!

The Garbage Quilt

I am posting this just to show that I don't cherrypick which quilts I post.  Not every quilt is a success story...we all have some quilt fails, and I'll be the first to point out that this is one of mine.

I call this one The Garbage Quilt.  Why?  I was going for a scrappy Thin Mint look, but it got way out of hand and very quickly started looking like literal garbage.

Guess who endorses this quilt?

So it started out just fine with the pattern.  I chose Farfalle by Villa Rosa Designs.  And, I decided to go with dark brown scraps with bright/light green scraps.  Thin Minty.  Or so I thought.  The first block wasn't too bad. 

Things escalated quickly from there,  But for whatever god awful reason I persevered against my better judgment.

And then it was done.  And it was this.

Too much pattern, too much variety in tone, too much going on and the pattern got swallowed up and sort of lost in places.

If I were to do this again?  I would probably only use scraps for one of the two colors, and use a solid for the other.  Or, if my heart was set on scraps, I would be a little pickier about pattern and I would try to keep the tones of all the fabrics for each color more consistent. Coulda, woulda, shoulda.

Like my Dad says, "If 'Ifs' and 'Buts' were candies and nuts, we'd all have a merry [flippin] Christmas."  Too late now!  This quilt just stands as one of my quilt fails...ya can't win 'em all!

Stained Glass

This is a store sample I did recently where I was unenthused about the focus fabric, but I ended up being really happy with the quilt as a whole because of the go-withs.  

This is the pattern I used...simple but great for large prints! 

The focus fabrics are the yellow and black graphic prints in the squares.  I mean, they're okay, but I'm not a huge fan of yellow most of the time, so it didn't really ring my bell.  That, and the go-withs for the line were limited - just a black and white dot and a yellow solid.

I found a batik that had the bright yellow, some turquoise and pink in it and ran from there.

I think it turned out looking kind of like a bright piece of stained glass.  Not too shabby for not liking it very well at the start...now it's one of my favorites.  I guess maybe I shouldn't judge a quilt by it's focus fabric until it's all done.  

Bucky McFinn

It's pretty rare where I find a book and I like every single quilt in it.  I think you probably can relate there, I can't be the only one!  Usually I will like a couple of things in it, but I also usually see a few stinkers.

Well, I have found one of those rare books in which I like every single quilt in the book.  But...it just so happens to be a kid's quilt book.

Animal Parade By Cheri Leffler is full of really cute quilts targeted to kids, but I fell in love with the sea life quilt in there.  I made it for no other reason than I liked the quilt and that we had the perfect, silly sea fabric to go with.

Most of you have seen this hanging in the shop already over the past few months, but I'm just now getting around to posting it on here...

I call the quilt Bucky McFinn because if you look at the shark in the border, he has a CRAZY overbite.  Mom and I named him Bucky McFinn - no one's afraid of him because he can only bite himself!

Memory Pillows for a Friend

One of the awesome things about sewing and quilting, versus other mediums of art, is that it helps make memories tangible.  You buy a fabric while on vacation, and it will always hold that memory for you.  If you inherit fabrics from a friend or from family, no matter what that piece ends up in, it will always remind you of that person.

In this case, the fabric was a shirt from my friend Kim's late father.  While her dad has been gone for a few years, it's still been a struggle dealing with his absence for her and her kids, particularly for her daughter.

So with her daughter's birthday rolling around, she asked me back in January if I could make a pillow for her daughter out of a shirt she had saved, an a matching one for her son.  Of course I could!  All she asked is that somewhere I could put a patch that said...

So I did. 

She said I made her daughter cry!  I'm glad to know that they were happy tears.  

Finally! A Dino Fabric a Girl Can be Proud of!

While I did love the Disney princesses when I was little, I have always loved dinosaurs.  Real ones, not the cutesy little stupid ones.  I remember I used to ask my mom as a kid if T-Rex was real, if he could look in our windows.  He probably could have! 

So I have grown into an adult who loves dinosaurs.  Too bad paleontology doesn't pay, because that is a field I'd love to be in.  I watch as many documentaries as I can, and I read as many articles and studies as possible.  One of the things I have always whined about as a quilter is that all the dinosaur fabric on the market is not only targeted to kids only, pretty much to boys exclusively, but they're always cartoony.  I mean, I get it, some kids are scared of dinos, but many aren't.  But they get cartoony, dummy dinos. Ick.

Until Michael Searle designed this.  

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I AM IN LOVE.  Toothy, bitey, realistic dinosaurs! I already have something in the works.  It's going to be badass.

April Showers

I'm on a roll with samples lately.  This is one of a bunch I've just whipped out. It's a little hanging quilt by Pieced Tree Patterns, called April Showers

I changed up the colors a little (of course) to showcase some of the American Made Brand solids we have in stock.  I also changed how I assembled the bottom umbrella portion, because I didn't want to assemble it separately from the rest of the quilt. Since it was going to require bias binding anyway, I just appliqued the umbrella shape on, then made the quilt sandwich as usual.

A word about the pattern, however.  If you look at my sample, and at the cover quilt, the stems are not centered.  This drove me nuts!  In the pattern instructions, everything is shown centered, so I thought it was a mistake on my part that they weren't lining up with the flowers correctly.  Until I looked closely at the cover of the pattern....they aren't centered there either!  Thank God for those appliqued leaves, because they help to fool they eye a lot.  This was otherwise a great little pattern though.