It's Thanksgiving weekend, I must be quilting

Well, the quilting bug is here again. So is another bug--I think I'm getting a cold, so no staying up till 3am working on this project.

I am making a variation on the Crazy Nine Patch on the blog Oh, Fransson! A few weekends ago I decided to try out this really fun piecing method, which gives you nine unique nine-patches using nine fabrics. I made 36 total, each in a different color scheme. Now I'm going to put them all together with sashing into a semi-traditional quilt for my favorite 12-year-old girl, Madison, who loves blue. let's see if I can finish it in time for Christmas.

Dad's surprise quilt

For years, my dad has hinted that he wants his own quilt, each time I present a quilt to one of my nieces and nephews. So I decided to make him one! It's a scrap quilt based on tons of past projects, using a simple pattern from a book called Slash Your Stash Quilts. It was so fun to make. I used up tons of scraps, including a lot of strips from my long-abandoned log cabin project. Maisie loved the scrap box, which is from Nikes I wore in college!

Pirate, as usual, is like a paperclip to a magnet when I start pinning. He just adores fabric:

Glowy goodness in mom and dad's back yard:

I so totally dig the back. It's hard to see, but the backing fabric is all chinese characters. My dad loves books and bookmaking, so I put as many book-related fabrics in as possible:

Pretty soon, Miss Ruby, my youngest niece, will be ready for her own bed-sized quilt! Here we are with Dad's:

This is what it's all about:

Doll Quilts!

The doll quilts are both done! Each is sized for one IKEA doll bed, and each bed holds several dolls. Niece Ella's grandma is making luxurious sheets to accompany. Ella, her mom, and I chose the color schemes and fabrics together from my enormous stash.

Ella's favorite fabric is the plums. Me too. Here's the back:

This coin quilt was so fast, I made the entire quilt in a day, including hand-stitching the binding. I love the color combination:

Here's another fun back--extra coins and odds and ends. I am so glad I found a use for the background fabric--I don't usually buy fabrics with a white backround like this and it had been sitting in my stash a while. It works great in this project.



I washed and dried these for a very fluffy, puckery look.

Quilting on the bias

The trail mix quilting is in progress after about three weeks of procrastination! I got pretty burned out with the piecing process--this quilt has too many pieces.

The entire quilt is quilted on the bias, which is a nightmare! I have, for the first time I can recall, reached a point where I'm going to have to undo and requilt a line of stitching because it's cocked--I'm getting some puckering between parallel lines, probably because I was not allowing one of the lines to go through the machine at the same rate as the other. Frustrating. I'm enjoying the walking foot quilting look though, emphasizing the straight lines in the quilt with straight quilting before adding some awesome free motion stuff at the end. Can't wait for that to be done.

A Quilt for Quinn: Trail Mix

Quinn's getting a big-boy quilt! The pattern is Trail Mix, something I ripped out of a magazine years ago and pulled out of the files last weekend. Quinn's favorite color is green, so the quilt is mostly green with lots of acid tones in green and other colors, with some cools mixed in. The key color turns out to be pink--a fabulous pinwheel patterned pink fabric I added at the very last minute. It makes the pattern without making the quilt girly.


I love cutting fabric. Check out these stacks! Yipes.