agilejack

I have put off finishing this quilt back for several months because I was dreading matching all those paisleys. Then a friend suggested that I add strips of a different fabric for contrast and to avoid having to match prints.

So we dug through my stash and found this red Kaffe Fassett guinea flower. And I love it!!!

With this backing, the quilt will effectively be reversible.

I can’t tell you how much I love this paisley fabric. I’ve loved paisleys since I was a kid. I remember vividly a little paisley dress my mom made for me when I was in kindergarten. It had a little Peter Pan collar and cuffs.  But this is the most amazing paisley fabric ever!

This back is for my KFC hexagon quilt. Three quilts will go off to the long armer this week.

I got a lot done this last weekend. I told myself that I wanted to get three quilt backs done so that I could get them all off to the long arm quilter. And I did it!

The bottom blue and green quilt is made from batiks and is a disappearing nine patch pattern. I made this a couple of years ago anticipating that my nephew would be getting married and I wanted to give them this as a gift. Well, they’ve finally announced a date. I’ve got plenty of time to get it done, but I want to check it off my list.

The middle quilt is the scrappy batik wonky log cabin quilt that I talked about in this post. It’s also the cover photo on this blog. I bought the backing for $4 a yard last summer in Salt Lake City. It’s sort of a small cow print in black and white. It’s really bold and fun and it will make this a wild quilt! It makes me very happy!

The top quilt is my Kaffe Fassett Collective hexagon quilt that I made this spring. You can see it in this blog post. I used my favorite tangerine paisley jungle for the back, and added some red Guinea Flower. I was originally thinking I wanted to use all the paisley, but the thought of matching the pattern on two long seams made me want to cry.

I’ll share photos of these quilts when they’re done. I hope my long armer hasn’t retired!

I also cut out the batiks for 12 three-pouch sets — that’s 36 pouches! Now that they’re cut I can easily sew a set in an hour or two. I plan to take the finished sets on vacation with me as I’ve had people request some to buy for gifts.

I’ve already completed two sets and have two more partially done. I had to stop because I didn’t have the right zippers. 100 new zippers on the way!

I just love these batiks! they are so bright and colorful!

On Sunday my friend Helen came over to spend a few hours and get some lunch. Helen is a maker who deals with knitting, felting, and dyeing and occasional sewing. She brought some lovely cotton fabric with her and we twisted, knotted, rolled and banded it all in preparation of indigo dye. I told her a few months ago that I wanted to cut some of her indigo dyed pieces and make something fun. So she did the right thing and got me involved in the process. She will do the actual dyeing when she has enough pieces to fill the vat. It will be a couple of months before I see the results of my work.

On my trip to Canon Beach last week my friend Linda and I stopped at Center Diamond quilt store on the way into town, like we always do. I bought  a few nice batiks and a couple pieces of Kaffe fabric, and then as I was checking out I saw these adorable Mia Charro panels of dogs and wild animals.

I couldn’t wait to make them into pouches!

These are made with blue chambray and linen as the main body of the pouch, with a batik frame around the panel and batik linings.

I just LOVE working with the linen and chambray! I love the way it looks and I also LOVE the structure and the way it turns out so tailored. I can’t get enough of it.

The panels are adorable! Really not like anything I’ve ever seen. I bought a third yard of each and will be able to get a LOT of pouches out of them.

the facial expression of these dogs just kills me!

The colors in the wild animals are so vibrant. I’ll have fun putting together fabric combos. Lots of colorful options!

I couldn’t wait to dig in and make a pouch from the hippo! She is so adorable. So I started looking through my stash and landed on this muted brassica color way from Philip Jacobs. This pouch is lined with Kaffe’s mille fiore. The frame around the hippo is blue chambray. I love how this turned out!

It’s got a zipper pocket on the back. I made it big enough to hold my iPhone.

Here’s a larger view of the two dog pouches. I love these with the batiks. I’ve got a lot of batik scraps left over from my three-pouch sets that are big enough to do the lining and frames on these. I love the batiks with these panels! And I just love the linen. It’s so nice in person… such a lovely texture. I’m going to be sad when I run out of it.

And of course, I have a real soft spot for terriers and LOVE this one with the blue chambray. I just love that fabric!

I have a friend coming over today to talk about quilting and felting, and then we’re going to go to lunch. I hope to finish the quilt back for my Kaffe hexagon quilt this afternoon. Then I’ll have three quilts ready for the long arm quilter. I’m also cutting the pieces for 12 batik pouch sets

Picked up some blank journals at the craft store a few weeks ago, and had a gorgeous day this weekend so sat outside and did some painting in the shade.

I painted some journals for gifts last Christmas and everyone really loved them. A bunch of women at work take them with them everywhere. So I picked up a stack of them thinking I’d paint a few now and then and have some ready for gifts.

It’s hard to find these blank journals that aren’t really pricey. So when I saw these at Michael’s for a decent price, I picked up a stack.

Got three done. Planning on doing a few more this week.

 

A friend of mine is hosting a friendly dog agility competition later this summer and has asked me to make zipper pouches for the main prizes for winners. It was a great chance to go through all my dog fabrics and put together some fun combos.

I’ll be making 15 pouches overall — 5 each of large, medium and small. I finished the five large over the weekend.

I have way too much dog themed fabric! i have larger pieces of the black and white paw prints and bone prints. I have smaller amounts of the other dog prints. So this is a good opportunity to clean out some of those fabrics.

The small and medium pouches will have some brighter colors in them. I’ll put some work into them this weekend. I want to make sure I have them done and don’t have to scramble at the last minute to get them done.

There are some really fun dog themed fabrics out there. I’m guessing I’ll buy more in the future!

We’ve got building renovations going on at work and we’ve been in a construction zone for many months. My office has been pretty much unscathed with the exception of new carpet, new lights and paint.

Each office got an accent wall… bright blue, darker blue, green, yellow or gray. Guess which color I got. Of course, I got gray. Me who loves vibrant color more than anyone I know.

So I pulled out this unfinished paper pieced wall hanging that I had planned on making for my sewing room, which will now adorn my gray walls at work. I started it nearly two years ago. It’s been sitting unfinished because I needed to make seven more blocks to get it to the size I wanted. It’s made from Kaffe Fassett Collective fabrics and some batiks.

This was my first ever paper piecing project. My very generous friend Karin had me up to her place a couple of years ago to give me a lesson on how to paper piece. I learned a lot in that day that will serve me very well in my future paper piecing endeavors. She taught me how to do the actual piecing, how to use the “add a quarter” ruler, and how to manage my fabrics to be as efficient as possible.

I don’t know why, but I always dread sewing circles. But once I sit down and do it, it always works out well and the blocks go together so nicely. I have ambitions to do more circles in the future.

I played with A LOT of different layouts for this wall hanging. The small size really limited what I could do. I typically prefer a less symmetrical arrangement of New York Beauty type blocks, but there weren’t enough blocks in this wall hanging to make a nice random arrangement. It just felt too chaotic.

Here’s some of the many variations I tried. This is a good representation of my obsession with this process!

 

It’s really overkill. But it took a good deal of time to come up with the right arrangement. And when I would move one block to make an area feel right, it would create four other issues I’d have to deal with.

My friend Karin helped me with this process too. I’d make changes, message her a photo, she’d respond, I’d rearrange and take another photo, send her that photo, and on and on.

I got distracted and was snapped back to reality when my smoke alarm went off! I was boiling sugar water for my humming bird feeder and it boiled dry and smoked up the entire house! It’s going to take me a year to clean that pan!

I’ve been playing with some ideas for the border for this wall hanging, but haven’t yet landed on what I’m going to do. So it hangs on my design wall and I’ve been working on some smaller projects as I mull this over.  I’m thinking I’ll go simple with the border to let the blocks shine.

As I was pressing this piece, I held it up to the light and the effect of stained glass was so amazing!

I’ve had this flying geese circle template set for awhile now and wanted to put it in a pouch. The original pattern finished up at 12 inches, which is way too big for a pouch. So I shrunk the templates down to make an 8×8 block.

And it’s still to big for the pouch! I have a smaller version that will finish up as a 6 inch block, which will have much better proportions in a pouch. I’ll work on that some time later this week.

I wasn’t as careful with the quilting as I wish I’d been. Amazing how you can put a lot of work into something and decrease it’s beauty because of a little impatience toward the end. Most people probably wouldn’t see it, but it stands out like a sore thumb to me!

I used Kaffe Fassett Collective fabrics for the goose points, and a white on white that I’ve had for a couple years for the background. I like the texture the white on white gives this. And of course, I just LOVE the blue chambray that I used for the body of the bag.

Rather than doing a pieced panel for both sides of the bag, I put a zipper pocket on the back. it should be a really functional little pouch.

I just love how the details on the pouches come out in the chambray. It feels so tailored and structured. I just love it!

 

Finally finished up this paper piecing project that I started back in April, and I’m really happy with how it turned out.

After I made and posted the first panel, a friend of mine told me that she wanted the pouch I was making for her mother… who in her 80s continues to buy season ski passes each winter and dearly loves the mountains.

I let my friend pick out the fabric for the body of the pouch. I really wasn’t sure I liked the light blue, but now that it’s done I’m really happy with it. It feels like a really cold winter afternoon. . . almost dark. It feels crisp and clean to me, and I can almost smell the mountains that I miss so much.

The mountains are based of off the Scrappy Mountains paper piecing templates that I purchased a few months ago. They include a lot of variations of mountain designs, with several different sizes. I’ve seen some really fun fabric combos used on these by different people.

I made each pouch panel from two different templates. I put them together with more of the darker blue sky fabric, and did some improv piecing at the bottom with a dark green batik to give the effect of foot hills.

One of the things I love about this pouch is that all four mountains are different. There are a lot of options with these templates.

I debated about how to quilt this pouch. I wanted to quilt it because I feared that once washed, the paper piecing would be a mess. I wanted quilting to keep it all in place and manage all those seam allowances. I finally landed on straight line quilting, and I’m really glad I decided to go that way.

Someone recently was surprised that one of my pouches had a pieced panel on both sides of the pouch. I was so surprised by this! I just assumed that everyone did the same thing. I love having both sides complete with the design. It just makes it a nicer product.

I’m having so much fun with the little paper piecing I’ve done. There are some really amazing things out there that far exceed my skill level. But I’m getting better. I have plans to incorporate more paper pieced panels in future pouches.

I’ve been making this pouch in my head for a couple of weeks now… wondering how to go about making the star block. I’ve been looking at lots of pictures of star blocks, but didn’t actually look at any patterns or tutorials. I love looking at things and figuring out how to make them — that’s the really fun part for me.

I’ve wanted to make some wonky star blocks for a long time. I just like the crooked, freelance look to them.  So I dug into my batik scraps and selected some fabrics. I just LOVE that yellow fabric in the center. I chose the aqua and purple to go with the color of the leaves in the yellow batik.

I free motion quilted a simple stipple design across the star panel. I used a light gray thread to blend in a little.

I just bought a selection of 25 different colors of micro fiber lacing for my zipper pulls. I auditioned several different colors with this pouch, but the purple was the obvious choice. I bought 300 wooden beads for the pulls. I’m wondering how long they’ll last.

I totally made up the measurements for the block elements. I drew it all out on paper before I started cutting fabric. here’s how it all went together.

I started by determining the approximate size I wanted the block to be — about 8 inches square finished. So taking seam allowances into account, I started with a 4 inch block in the center. The aqua star point rectangles were cut to 4 x 2.5 inches and the light colored corners were cut 2.5 inches square.

I want to make more of these. I’m looking forward to playing with different combinations and arrangements for color!

 

 

I’m chunking along getting all my unfinished pouches done. One more set to go. And now I want to cut some more — I want to take some on vacation with me later in the summer.

Here are the latest few to be completed.

I’m itching to do something different for awhile. I might do some paper piecing to put in pouches. Or I’m thinking of some wonky stars.

I have more ideas than I have time!