The Hildy

She’s finished! One down, two to go! I was able to send this quilt off to her new home this week, well almost home, she is a Christmas gift. She needs to make a stop for wrapping and inspection first. I hope she passes! This quilt was featured on Richard and Tanya's Link a Friday Finish!!

I did free motion quilting throughout using three different patterns, one for each section of the quilt. Tiny loopy loos for the white background, Moda Bella White.

Meandering in the sky because it sometimes reminds me of poufy clouds! Meandering is not my favorite fmq pattern, but it works here.

And swirls with great big flowers for the grass. Love!

The plaid binding fabric is by Denyse Schmidt, it was so perfect for this quilt. The oat colored backing is from Marmalade by Bonnie and Camille and was just the thing to pull it all together and was selected by her new owners along. Wouldn't you know I ended up with an adjoining piece of binding right at the corner, agh! At least it was only one corner on this quilt. I've had quilts where every corner was tricky because of the extra fabric. Maybe I should roughly lay out the binding before I start attaching to prevent that problem in the future?! I say with a chuckle, I’ll never learn!

A final head shot! The eyes are always tricky on this quilt but I think I've gotten it down. Basically 2 white jelly beans layered with 2 smaller brown jelly beans. Instead of free motion quilting them in place this time like with the Jake quilt I slowly did a straight stitch around the outside of the white and black in coordinating thread.

Link Parti's 

Take a look at the link parti's I get down with here or by clicking on the Linki Parti's link above. Linking up to Richard and Tanya Quilt Show off Saturday Quilt Story i have to say Sew Fresh Quilts and Whoop Whoop Friday 

It's A-Bark Time

I managed to finish my latest dog quilt this weekend! I pondered and pondered over the fabric choices for the bases. And then pondered some more for the borders and binding fabrics, good grief. Working in the dark hasn’t been helpful. I initially thought I was going to use the coral solid I auditioned in my last post about this quilt. After I cut the coral strips it wasn’t right so I plunged ahead with the teal solid. I blame the short days. By the time I get home from work it is already dark, stuff just looks better in the dark!

Once all of the bases were attached I reviewed about a thousand – ok a dozen (felt like a thousand though) – different combinations for the inner and outer borders and couldn't get that to come together either, ugh. Ever have ‘one of those’ quilts, jee whiz?! I finally decided to nix the inner border altogether and increase the size of the outer border so that the quilt ended up the same size but only has one border. Since this quilt is destined to hang in a dog rescue I went with this Moda Summersville print by Lucie Summers that features different animals included dogs for the border. The larger sized border allowed for plenty of space to show off those animals too!

I had not forgotten about that solid coral! I did a peek out binding using the solid coral and teal. I'm wondering if there is a name for this type of binding? I recently discovered a two color binding strip in a $5 scrap bag I purchased from my LQS, Patches and Petals. Serious, make your own scrap bag for $5! After deconstructing the scrap binding I figured that I could probably manage making one! To create the two color binding I just cut a 1.5in strip of teal aka the outer binding color and a 1.75in strip of the peek out color which was coral on this quilt, sewed the two pieces together and pressed in half. Done! It’s a little fussy because the binding does need to be pressed exactly in half or the peeking color ends up wavy but this is going to look super cute hanging up so totally worth it! It is just the right amount of that amazing coral which is by Art Gallery Pure Elements. The teal solid is Kona Azul. 

I attach my bindings front and back by machine. I use a 2 3/4in binding folded in half, the extra ¼ inch gives me just a little breathing room... I attach the binding to the back of the quilt first. This time I sewed the back binding a little narrower than usual by moving the needle to the right a couple of hairs (1.0 on my machine – it was either 3 or 4 hairs). Making the back binding a little smaller allowed me to stitch along the front directly on the crease where the teal and coral meet without sewing over the back binding accidentally.

Side track: Did you notice the dog butt with chicken head, yikes!

Oh the quilting! This time around I top stitched each dog in coordinating thread. The simple quilting should allow the dogs to shine without distraction at the rescue.

And

Too rainy for a good outside photo but here are all the dogs! I did add in the coral with flowers in the upper right and solid mustard dogs... because they were too awesome not to.  Both are Art Gallery fabrics, but don't they look great with the Simply Style line!

Link Parti's 

Take a look at the linki parti's I get down with here or by clicking on the Linki Parti's link above. Linking up to Stitch by Stitch Sew Fresh Quilts Richard and Tanya Quilts Persimon Dreams crazy mom quilts and Quilt Story 

Orange You Glad It's Finished?

Well I sure am!  The Vertical Chevron Quilt is finally finished. This quilt will be a crib quilt for a special addition coming later this fall/early winter. It measures right around 32x48.

The last time I mentioned this quilt it had been quilted and I was awaiting a binding selection. We decided on the Stitched Road Granite by Art Gallery - what a great binding this made!

This quilt is made up of fabrics from my stash. Since teal is one of my favorite colors and I am always drawn to teals when just browsing I had ample teals. I did have to purchase most of the bright orange fabrics as I didn't have many of my own although I knew I wanted to take a look at a few fabrics by Lily Ashbury, she has amazing selections when looking for fabrics saturated in colors especially pinks, orange and greens. The white paisley on orange is one of her fabrics from the Folklore line which I adore! I headed down to my lqs and found some great Botanics in tangerine that went great with this quilt as well.

This particular crib quilt was straight line quilted and lined with a super soft minky dot backing in Charcoal. Thankfully I did not experience the minky pulling through to the white front fabrics this time around! Remember the dog quilt with they navy minky - I'd be lying if I said I wasn't nervous. Thankfully everything worked out just as it is supposed to.

Perfect for a winter baby! Since I enjoyed working with these fabrics so much and had a few scraps leftover, I went ahead and made a coordinating pillow using the fabrics from the quilt top. This pillow was featured at Quilt Story: Fabric Tuesday!!!

If you guessed this pillow had an invisible zipper you would be right on. Honestly I will use every opportunity to practice the invisible zipper! The backing of this pillow is coordinating charcoal minky dot. The pillow is a bit of a surprise so I hope it will go over well.

This was the first 60 degree triangle quilt I've done. This pillow was small - only 16 inch square. The triangles were '3 inch finished' - I'm still not really sure what that refers to but I saw it on the ruler I was using. I'm thinking it must be the horizontal top (or bottom) of the triangle as my math was way off and I ended up needing way more rows both horizontally and vertically to make up a usable pillow sham. I did straight line quilting across all the seams, which is a look I really like on this type of quilt.

Don't mind the lumps - I don't have a 16 inch pillow insert so its just some folded up towels in there!

Link Parti's 

Take a look at the linki parti's I get down with here or by clicking on the Linki Parti's link above. Linking up to Stitch by Stitch, Quilt Story My Quilt Infatuation, Richard and Tanya Quilts, Whoop Whoop Friday, Quokka Quilts and crazy mom quilts 

Best,
Heather

Three Times the Charm Indeed

This weeks finish is from the book 3 Times the Charm, Book 2 by Me and My Sister Designs. Super fun book, lots of small projects with easy to follow instructions all made with charm packs. I've made the dog quilt found in the book three times. I think I'm going to need an intervention from the dog quilt, I may be a little obsessed. Needless to say I really like the pattern. The quilt features 25 pieced dog blocks. There are lots of little pieces for each dog. I focused on two or three dogs at a time so that I could keep them straight and not end up with funny looking dogs... because then I have to get my seam ripper... followed by grumble, grumble, grumble. Focusing on two or three dogs at a time prevents grumbling.

Here's my latest dog quilt all finished and just in time! This particular quilt is being donated to a silent auction fundraiser next weekend. This quilt was featured at Stitch by Stitch: Anything Goes Monday!!

The first two times I made this quilt I quilted the sashing and background in a tight meandering pattern. I liked the look but I wanted to do something a little different for this quilt so I chose an allover loopy loo design which I think is a design that can be used on pretty much any project!

I've done this quilt with a navy background in the same pastel colored dogs which give the quilt a whole different look, you can see bits of in in my Just Another Dog Quilt post. The pastel fabrics in all three dog quilts are from Chez Moi's Coquette line from Moda. It's possible I like that line a little too much! The white and green solids are from Kona. Snow and Celery I believe. You may remember in my last post I was deciding on which binding to use. I did end up going with the yellow, which is called Maize by Robert Kaufman Pure Organics. And I got to use a pretty new notion! Have you seen the new wonder clips by Clover that come in PINK for breast cancer awareness? Seriously. Pink. I can not resist pink. I've been getting by with 20 red clips for awhile, but it's never enough. I only use the clips for binding but with only 20 I would have to stop and rearrange the clips quite a few times depending on the size of the quilt. When I saw a box of 50 pink clips I knew they were meant for me!! More on these gems and their pink friends later.

I really love how the butter colored binding looks against the pink backing.

Perfect fit!  I'm so excited for this latest dog quilt to go to its new home :)  Here's a sneak peek of my new project

Linking up with 

Finish it up Friday at Crazy Mom Quilts 

Confessions of a Fabric Addict
Quokka Quilt - TGIFF
Val's Quilting Studio - FMQ
Anything Goes Monday - Stitch by Stitch
Richard and Tanya Quilts

Blossom Heart Quilts