Tilting at Hawaiian Windmills

Look what my quilting sister made. I guess she liked the windmills I made from her donation fabrics because she's making one from her leftover Hawaiian fabrics. (That smartie buys these gorgeous prints whenever she vacations there.)

Hawaiian windmills with matching blades

And her second layout.

Hawaiian windmills with random blades

Here' how she finally pieced it.

Hawaiian Windmills with sashing

Enjoy the day,
Ann

Don't Leave a Puppy Home Alone All Day

You know what happens when you do, right? That puppy gets into everything, making a big mess... and is usually so proud to show you her results. In this case I was the puppy. Yep.

While visiting my quilting sister (QS) in Colorado this summer she foolishly left me home alone with the lame excuse of work. So I cleaned a bit, read a bit, then noticed the stack of fabrics she'd set aside to donate. According to QS, they didn't go together. Hah, says I.

I'd previously sent her a copy of Sujata's Cultural Fusion Quilts but... she hadn't started on any. Of course! She needed an example. I started cutting. By the end of the day there were 120 squares and some blocks were sewn. Over the week I finished sewing all the squares and suggested she sew it into a philanthropy top. QS gave me the snake eye. Where's the gratitude? Into my luggage they went. Last week I sewed them up. It's major clean up/clear out mode at my house.

Rocky Mountain November quilt

They look well together, IMHO. The fabrics remind me of late fall in the Rockies: the bright foliage is gone, some snow, blue skies and lakes, brown and evergreen hillsides. This has been my recurrent point -  your fabrics will go together. You already curated them when you bought them.

Rocky Mountain November detail

Because of the size, it's now a Veteran's quilt. Thanks, QS.

Quilt Details

Size: 90"(H) x 75"(W)

Pattern: Windmills from Cultural Fusion Quilts

Enjoy the day,
Ann

Windmill in the Mail

Windmill is quilted, bound, washed and in the mail. What a fun and easy process from Sujata Shah's book. She's started a blog for Cultural Fusion Quilts where you'll find many more made by herself and others.

This quilt began with leftover fabric I used to make some centers on Propellers and Planes. I'd set them to the side while deciding whether or not to keep them. But as I was sorting my stash, more fabrics appeared that just went with these wild things.

Windmill quilt

I don't know what came over me: the fabric seemed to magically fall into place and the top was done in a day.

I wrote about the quilting at the bottom of this post. Several quilters posted photos with something similar. They were so lovely but didn't include instructions so I made up my own method. Here's a close up of the tightest section of the curve quilting.

Top left corner of Windmill shows
the curve quilting with the smallest radius.

In the opposite corner, the radii are the largest.

Bottom right corner of Windmill
where the curve has the largest radius.

Another idea that struck me from other quilters is using leftovers for binding. Here's mine. I really like the black/white/red diamond print both as binding and in the blocks (see the second photo.)

The double fold binding is made from any
fabric in the quilt that was leftover again.
Cut 2.25" wide by whatever length was available.

Enjoy the day, Ann

Pi Day 3.14.15 @ 9.26.53

It's Pi(e) Day. Another crazy reason to celebrate.

Pi is the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter. It's an irrational number (which just means it can't be written as a fraction because the digits don't end or repeat) whose first few digits are 3.141592653... March 14 is extra special this year because we can correlate those digits to a specific time down to seconds. Nerds are thrilled.

It seems like a good day to celebrate circles in quilting. My favorite circles are my quilt guilds: currently SCVQA and QGGH. I've joined a guild everywhere I lived. They are always a source of friendship, inspiration and education. I hope you have a group of friends as inclusive and supportive.

On to circular quilts.

Although New York Beauty isn't finished, there is some progress. Only sixteen more. Even though these blocks are a decade old, I still like the colors and the pattern. {Why, oh why, didn't I finish it with the millenium?}

New York Beauty in progress

All my quilts in the show this weekend have circles or curves. There have been many photos, but here's a new one. I used this fabric (a decade ago) to applique on t-shirt quilts for my daughter and her friends who all had dogs. This is the last of it. Does that make Propellers and Planes a scrap quilt?

Steam Punk quilt block
from Propellers and Planes
with dog face conversation prints

Windmills is my current project. The block has slight curves. I'm echo quilting a quarter circle over the top.

Quarter circle curves echo quilted across Windmills

The quilting shows up better from the back.

Windmills back with leftover blocks. 

I drew one line on the quilt using my cutting ruler. I placed it in one corner, rotated the ruler and marked with chalk at intervals. Then I connected those dots. That was my first quilting line. Subsequent lines are a walking foot away. This seemed like a better idea than starting in the corner.

Example of marking the first line of quilting on Windmills

And we're having lemon meringue pie for dinner. Yum.

Enjoy the (pi) day, Ann

Windmills

Oops. What happened to the New York Beauties? They're still on the design wall because...

While reorganizing my sewing room some fabrics kept insisting they would look well together. So I pulled Sujata Shah's wonderful book, Cultural Fusion Quilts, and read the instructions for Windmills again.

Although she suggests WOF cuts, several of my fabrics only made one or two squares. It just adds to the diversity.

 Improvisational Windmills 60"x60".

Here are a few blocks in progress. Don't they remind you of dad's old ties?

Improvisational Windmill quilt blocks before trimming

I plan to make the back from leftover fabrics and blocks.

Linking up with Scraptastic Tuesday which always has wonderful ideas linked.

Enjoy the day,