Mixed Bag

Hi All,
it's been awhile but I have been so busy with other things that I don't have much of an update on the secret project. Here's the most recent pic. Hopefully there will be some time to work on it more over the holidays so I can get you a better update. I'm actually really impressed at how great it's looking (if I do say so myself). Please excuse the surroundings as the spare bed often acts as storage for Dartmouth Clothing stuff as well.

I have been doing a bit of shopping on the fabric sites over the past month or so. Here are some of the items I've been looking at:

Henna Garden. One of my fave fabric lines. This stuff is out of print so when I saw this bundle on Etsy, I had to get it.

This next line is called Winterkist by Monica Soloria-Snow. Perfect non-christmas Christmas fabric. I haven't bought it yet but it's on the list for sure! I just can't decide which colors. If she keeps going with fabrics like this, she might be on my list for favorite designer.

Roughing it by Laurie Wisbrun. She is one of my favorite designers and this one is super cute. I'm picturing it on a quilt for a little boy or even just one to keep at the cottage.

Wisbrun's sequel to the Llamas in sweaters I blogged about awhile back. This is the Christmas edition.

Halloween Wrapup

Hi folks. Since I'm still waiting on Amazon to send me some items I need to continue my work on the Secret Quilt (What the hell does "shipping soon" mean??), I thought I would give you a wrap up of our halloween costumes.

First up is Eric's costume. He went as an alien from the movie "Attack the Block". Apparently it's a good movie although I haven't seen it. The alien is described as "all teeth and fur" so I understand if you can't tell what it is.

Eric's Costume

Screenshot from the movie

Next up is my costume. I'm a fan of retro pop culture for costumes so I went as My Pet Monster. If you're in the 30 year old area, you probably know what I'm talking about. If not, the show is on Teletoon Retro.

Finally, is my nephew's costume. He wanted to be Sonic the Hedgehog - a video game character that is both classic and contemporary. A good choice and he was quite the star at his school!

Sorry for the terrible quality of pics. Hope you enjoyed Halloween as much as we did!

Sneak Peek

Alright ladies and gentlemen (who am I kidding, it's just ladies!). I know you've all been chomping at the bit to get a glimpse of the secret project. Well, here it is. I'd say it's about 1/3 done as I have roughly 2500 squares pieced. My original estimate was 10,000 pixels but I cut off a substantial amount of the original picture to make it more manageable. Final will be closer to 7,000 pixels but it will still be plenty large. Note that the finished size of each pixel is about 1" square and you can understand what a big project this is. Would love to hear your guesses as to what you think it is!

Busiest time of the year

So I know that in many houses, Christmas is the busiest time of the year. Or maybe it's back to school. In my house, it's halloween. Eric LOVES Halloween. We've (mostly him) have done some amazing costumes over the years. Depending on what's going on, we usually do something for my niece and nephew as well as for ourselves.

Here are a few of the things we've made:

This was Liv's costume last year - was supposed to be a cupcake but really didn't turn out as we'd hoped.

Payt's angry bird last year. This one was cool and easier than I'd expected.

Costumes 2010. Payt is Toad from Mario and Liv is Princess Peach (aka misc princess). We didn't build anything for her costume.

Me as Hulk Hogan a few years ago.

The final one I have a picture of is the best one. Eric and his brother made this Iron Man costume in 2010. They took it to a bunch of costume contests and of course won everything. It's amazing (it's missing a couple of pieces in this pic).

You will have to wait a few weeks before I tell you what I'm doing for this year's costumes. I will, however, tell you that I wanted to do a monster like this but my niece would rather be a vampire (weirdo).

Back from vacation!

Just thought my 3 readers would like an update on what's been happening over at CCQ headquarters. I was on vacation for 2 weeks. The first week, Eric and I went to Boston for some shopping and baseball watching (Jays won!). The second week Eric had to go back to work so the dogs and I did some cleaning but also got some sewing done. The quilt I am working on is taking longer than I expected as usual. I may even take a break to work on a quick satisfaction quilt. Here's a photo of all the blocks I need to piece so you can understand the magnitude. Each pile is roughly 4 inches tall. It will make a picture when it's complete.

To tide you over until I have something more interesting to show, here's a pic of Jack and Darwin in the bathtub playing. They went in all on their own for no reason.

Stash Update

So there were a couple of things I "had" to buy online for my latest project. In order to make the shipping cost efficient, I added a couple of fabrics to the orders. Here's what I got:

 This first item is a must have for quilters who buy fabric online. The complete Kona Color Card by Robert Kaufman fabrics allows you to better choose your colors so that you aren't constantly looking at them onscreen trying to figure out what works together. Very happy to finally have one.

These next two fabrics were just really cute and I couldn't not get them:

Rally by Dan Stiles

Bespoken Fancy Buttons

Finally, I'm going to have to find something awesome to do with this fabric by Tula Pink. There are a bunch of co-ordinating fabrics (and 3 colorways) but I knew E was already going to give me that "don't you have enough fabrics" face so I only bought this main one.

Nightshade by Tula Pink

Hoping to have a sneak peak at the new quilt for you soon. TV fans should be getting very excited about this one.

One finished and one started

Damn, it's been a month since I posted! How'd that happen? I'll have to blame this lovely weather but really I'm just lazy. I wanted to show you how the City Green revisted quilt turned out. I still seem to be having issues cutting the blocks all the same size but this one is much better than the first. In the end, I still did the rows offset because although most of them lined up, they didn't all.

Here's the final product. I'm happy with it but it's a bit too small for use as a sleeping quilt so the damn cats have claimed it for now. I think it'll be fine for a couch quilt in the winter. I'm thinking that I would like to buy a fabric cutter such as the Go!baby sometime soon so that I can avoid my current issues of terrible cutting.

Here's a look at how the quilting is done. Kind of an echo just inside the sashing. It makes it look like the sashing is actually over the squares which I like.

Now for a sneak of my next quilt. This one is going to take awhile but I'm very excited about it. It's a pixel quilt!! YAY! The content is kind of a secret but I can assure you that it's going to be awesome. I have already cut about a million squares and have a million more to go.


Two of my ten colors. The squares are 1.5"x1.5" which means they'll be 1" square when sewn.




This is a trial to see how the process would go. I found a tutorial by Oh! Fransson (link to left) that should make it easier. I'm thinking that it will also make my cutting issues less noticeable.

 That's all for now. I will try to document the process while I'm going.

Pixel Quilts 2

I had too many of these to share last time so here are some more. It seems like a large portion of the quilts out there are mario focused but there are lots of others too. Enjoy! 




Another pattern from Carolina Patchworks

I loved Dr Mario when I was a kid.

Done by Oh Fransson which is linked on the right

Ok, so I've been thinking too much about this for the last few days and I think I'm going to try to do one. So here's the question, do you think I should do Frog Mario or Tanooki? They will be similar ideas to the ones below. Let me know what you think.



Pixel Quilts

For a while now I've been eying quilts that I will call Pixel Quilts. Most of them take old nintendo game characters and transform them into quilt form. This is done fairly easily with the 8-bit characters from our childhood since they are already pixel-y. Essentially what you do is cut out a bunch of colored squares and sew them together to make something cool. Each square is a pixel. It will probably be some time before I try one of these since I'm still not good at the exact patterns (see last post). Update on that one: not going as planned.

I just wanted to share a few of my favs. Apologies that I haven't figured out how to give credit for everyone's pics - I am not claiming these to be my own, don't worry (we all know I can't quilt like that).

















This last one is a pattern by Carolina Patchworks (link to the right) who has all kinds of pixel quilt patterns including Donkey Kong and Mario. She also has a book coming out in September called "Pixel Play" which is entirely pixel quilts!! Can't wait!

City Green Revisited

When I first started quilting about a year ago, I bought a book called City Quilts by Cherri House. What drew me to it is that it was a whole book using geometric patterns with solid fabrics. I find a lot of quilters use patterned fabric which can look awesome but can also look way too busy in some cases. I generally stick with solids but sometimes add patterns to the back.

The first quilt top that I started was Cherri House's City Green. It didn't turn out well but since then I have learned the importance of making sure that your measurements and cutting are exact so that things line up. Here's the first one I did. Instead of it looking like mosaic tile, I had to offset the pattern so that it wasn't as obvious that things didn't line up. It is on my bed and I use it every night but I'd still prefer if it looked nicer.

My First City Green with Jack

 
Now, here's what I'm hoping my next one will look like. Cross your fingers but this is the general color scheme. PS this one is made by Red Pepper Quilts who makes awesome stuff. If you search flickr, you can find a million variations of this quilt but I love the beach glass look of this one.

Here are all of my fabrics starting to come together. Since this pic, I have cut them all up and am ready to do the strips. I will know soon how well I did. Wish me luck!

Finally Done!

It's taken me awhile but this is finally finished (no thanks to annoying things like exams and cleaning). This quilt is another collaboration with Jayme of RAWR creatures. She did a cute little owl to go with it but I don't have a pic yet. This project is for a preggo co-worker of Eric's and Jayme's. I hope she likes it but it's going to be really hard to let it go. Might have to make one of these for myself.

This picture of the back gives you a good look at the diagonal quilting I did. I'm pretty happy with how that looks - especially in the morning sun.

New Fabric (so excited)

I should be doing school work right now but I had to share my newest fabric find. The Berenstain Bears was my favorite book series when I was a kid. I stumbled across the newly released fabric by Moda completely by accident this morning and had to add it to my stash. I have no idea what I'll use it for but I'm sure I'll find something (and it probably won't be given away). These are the two that I got: