Another small finish- improv scrappy quilted pillow

I decided to try my hand at another popular non-quilt project in the quilting world - pillow covers. And since I had an awesome baby sister with a birthday coming up AND some darling scraps from my current big quilt project, I figured that the stars were aligned.

Here is the sister:

She's the second from the left and the youngest.

And here is the pillow:

The fabric line is Bluebird Park by Moda.  It has the cutest little hedgehogs (which is the sole reason I bought it.) Look closely - see them in that orange piece in the bottom left quadrant? There were hedgehogs in Turkey that lived near the base housing and once you've seen those little spiny potatoes, you just can't NOT love them. We used to go looking for them at night. You can see a picture of my mom holding one in this post.

For my big quilt I'm using a jelly roll and layer cake of this line for a fun envelope block quilt using a Missouri Star tutorial. I'll post it when it's finished.  I did a piano key border for the quilt and the leftovers made a great backing. I was even brave enough to put a zipper in. (Yay me!)

I used straight lines and a large spiral swirl for the main block and then did some fun mini swirls and pearls for the negative space. I was pretty pleased with the way the quilting turned out. It's nice to see improvement! (See the hedgehogs?)

This sister has never received a full size quilt from me although I did make her a fun wall quilt when she moved to Texas. (Hey, I guess this one was actually my first mini. Hm... Didn't realize that.)

So although this isn't a full quilt either, (someday Wendy, I promise) it was fun to give her something quilty for her birthday. My mom was visiting us and then visiting her, so she was my delivery girl. So via two airports and a plane ride, it got safely to its new home.

Quilted name tag

Have I mentioned that I'm serving as the Vice President for my local modern quilt guild?  No? Well, it wasn't exactly intentional but after I got roped in committed to it, I've found it very rewarding. I started attending this guild in January of 2014 when it was held in Henderson at Quiltique. It was a fairly robust group then. But through the months and a location change to the Christmas Goose on the west side of town, the attendance dwindled until at last December's meeting there were only 5 of us. Thus the 'nomination' to the 2015 board.

But I'm happy to report that things have really turned around for the guild. Our membership has exploded and we're almost standing room only in our meetings. I love all the ladies on the board and am really enjoying being a part of leading this vibrant group of quilters. I'm in charge of membership as well as swaps and challenges for the group. Our first challenge was to make a name tag. Here's what I did:

I started with a small quilt sandwich of white fabric, batting and black fabric.  I didn't want to piece or applique the letters and had some metal letters left from my paper scrapbooking days so I tacked those on. Then I raw edge appliqued some small square scraps from Geoffrey's black and white quilt along with a fussy cut from my favorite Turkish fabric. Don't you just love those tulips in the bicycle basket? This effectively quilted the layers together.  I added a thin binding of red polka dot. Thin binding is harder to work with my usual 2.5 inch binding. A couple of my mitered corners are less than perfect (by a lot).  But it is good to try new things right?

I thought the letters needed something to finish them so I added a small knot of ribbon to each one. Then I made a double fold strap out of scraps and attached it to the back. I am glad that I attached the straps to each corner rather than the center like a lanyard because it lays flat and straight when I wear it.

I presented the challenge in our February meeting and showed mine as an example. The members who wanted to participate brought theirs to show in the March meeting. We even had a special raffle drawing for those who made a name tag. Here is all our tags up on the design wall together:

I loved seeing all the different ideas and creative techniques.

P.S. I started chatting with a couple of ladies in the check out line at Kohls the other day. The subject of names came up and one of them was bemoaning how she didn't like her name - Ann, because it was so old-fashioned. I shared that my name, Ida LaVern, was even more so.  She agreed and commented that my parents had really screwed me up!  Ha ha!  I forgave her because she let me use her menswear coupon which got me two ties for free. :)   And I've never hated my names or thought that my parents were unkind in giving them to me. And with my new nametag, I think my name looks pretty darn modern!

Quilting again - Thank Heaven!

One thing I have learned from this whole long drawn out moving and re-settling process is how much joy I get from quilting.  I could go into the why and hows of that but I know that for those of you who understand no explanation is needed and for those of who don't no explanation would suffice.

But while I was without my own Helga for four months (and missed her very much) I did get a chance to sew on my mother's Viking while I was staying with her. Her machine is about the same age I am. She bought it while my dad was finishing his PhD at Purdue and she paid for it mostly by teaching machine embroidery classes. This was back when machine embroidery did not involve software and was much more like free motion quilting or thread painting. Anyway, the machine is a rock. 40ish years later and it's still going strong.

My mom is an accomplished seamstress but hasn't done much quilting. Inspired by a certain daughter she decided she wanted to make a quilt for her first grandchild's wedding.  We chose something simple since we didn't have a lot of time. I had been wanting to try the giant star quilt tutorial at In Color Order and I loved this variation with the great borders at Diary of a Quilter. We also thought it would be fun to use Jake and Laura's wedding colors, which were midnight blue and sage green.

I have to say that this pattern is awesome for putting together a quick but impressive quilt and with Jeni Baker's great diagrams showing layouts for 8, 4 or 2 colors it's so versatile. We had a great time choosing fabrics and the quilt top went together quickly and fabulously.

I love the polish that the scrappy border adds to it. We took turns free-motion quilting the different sections. Each section has a different pattern with the whites all being a large stipple. My mom's machine embroidery skills served her well and she's on her way to becoming a great free motion quilter.

 The back is black and white sheet music. Particularly appropriate since both Jake and Laura are in vocal performance choirs at their college. The binding is an awesome, funky geometric fabric that has both the green and blue in it.  My mom wasn't sure about this one but I knew it would make a great binding. It keeps the quilt fresh and modern. And just makes me happy.

We split the backing up with a thick strip of bricks and a tone on tone black. The quilting shows up well on the black and you can see the various stitch patterns we used.

I didn't get exact measurements of the finished quilt but it turned out about queen size which is equivalent to a snuggle couch quilt for my 6'8" nephew. 

My sister wanted them to open the quilt before the reception so we could hang it behind the gift table. It looked pretty amazing since it matched all the wedding decor. My mom has decided to make this a tradition for all her grandkids.  She has quite a few of those so it's a good thing her machine is so immortal!

As for me, I've finally gotten Helga unpacked and settled in a corner of my bedroom. I'm making progress on my two matching quilts-in-progress.  And just to cheer myself up during a dismal week, I've started a new quilt. 

Fabric hoarding, I mean shopping, in Old Adana and two quilts in the wings

Helga, my sewing machine (she's a Viking) is all packed and on her way to Nevada with all our other household goods. We are neck-deep in that lovely paperwork/busywork quagmire they call out-processing. And I am really missing the stress relief and therapy of sewing.

So what does a girl do when she can't sew? She goes fabric shopping of course!! It was actually on my list of things-to-do-before-leaving-the-country to go buy more Turkish fabric. If you remember from this post and this post, Turkish cottons are 96 inches wide and make really fabulous quilt backs and binding fabrics. I compared wide quilt back fabric prices online the other day and the cheapest I found for 106 in wide fabric was $20.00 per yard. And I can get 96 in wide fabric for 10 Lira per meter which works out to $5 per meter (yard) and sometimes even less. Gotta love that!!

So my daughter and my friend Linne and I headed to Old Adana's fabric district on a sweltering hot day to see what pretties we could find.

Here we are contemplating yet another purchase.

See that pile on the counter?  You can't look at the fabric yourself here. You have to point to the one you like and they will unroll it on the counter for you to examine. Then they just pick up a meterstick, do a rough measure in the air and then cut or sometimes tear the fabric. No exact measurements and no 'cutting table' here.

Here is what we ended up with:

I already have the top one in black and red but had to go back for the brown and red. Love the vintage look of both of these. I bought 2 meters each which is plenty big to back any size quilt. Kinda crazy that these fabrics are made in Turkey but have English text on them. I never saw that when we got here a year ago but now there are in almost every shop.

Delaney, my pianist, picked the music one. The ships are on a map background. I love finding nice masculine fabrics that aren't cheesy. Two meter pieces again.

Some awesome solids and tone on tone plaids for bindings. I bought half meter pieces of each color. Making binding is a breeze when each of your 2.5 inch strips is 96 inches long!

So all these will go in a box and be mailed to Nevada to await the arrival of Helga. And someday they will be used in a quilt and remind me of my year in Turkey.

I did keep one quilt out. Well, two as I am working on two quilts at once from the same pattern. I'm hoping to borrow a friend's machine and get the rows assembled into complete tops before I leave here. Here's a sneak peek:

 These HSTs are really really small. They finish at about an inch. That's the smallest I've ever worked with. I've always thought pieces that small were just too fussy to be worth it but these are a bonus block from the main charm square blocks and I just couldn't throw them away. The pieces strips will become a top and bottom border on the finished quilt.

Here is one of the ten rows, finished, pinned and labeled in duplicate. The fabric line is Juggling Summer by Zen Chic. Great colors! I can't show you more than that because the future owners of these two quilts read my blog. But as I have missed being able to have a finish for Amanda Jean's Finish It Up Friday, I will content myself with linking to Freshly Pieced's Work in Progress Wednesday. Cuz just knowing that I have two lovely quilts patiently waiting for me to finish them helps me keep a little happy space in all the craziness of a trans-oceanic move.

A Big Bear Hug!!

 My poor long-suffering middle child finally has a quilt to call his own. This quilt has been in the works since before Christmas but has been put off for baby quilts and a teacher quilt. And if I'm honest, because I just didn't enjoy working on it. Carson picked some wildlife panels that were so not my style and that I had no idea what to do with. And it didn't help that several of them were printed off square. So it was slow going.

 I finally decided to cut some of the panels apart and made some stars with fussy cut centers. These are my two favorite. The other two were a rock and a tree. Not as exciting.

 This is the center panel.  Now that it's done I'm not loving the grid quilting. Like his older brother, Carson requested minimal quilting but I felt like I couldn't leave that big space entirely unquilted. Oh well. It's fine.

 

The only sort of pattern I used for this whole quilt was Scout by Cluck Cluck Sew for the borders.  And even that I changed to make the feather portions thicker.  I did some bricks around the center panel. And because I am not a quilting math genius none of the corners pieces, neither the stars nor the wolf/elk panels, match up exactly with their respective borders. You can see that pretty well in the above picture. It frustrated me to no end while I was working on it but now that it's done it doesn't bother me as much.

The back was a lovely soft flannel plaid that Carson had picked. This is the first time I have backed a quilt with flannel. I had a few small problems with puckering but I love how soft and cuddly it is. I wish it had turned out a bit longer. Its plenty wide enough for his bed but he is a tall boy and going to get taller so it should have been longer.  Eventually I'll make him another one. But this time I think I will avoid panels and follow a pattern!

I named it Bear Hug. Carson is the middle child but he is the biggest. He outweighed all his siblings by 2 pounds at birth. And he has passed everyone but his dad in height at age 13.  He has a great smile and sense of humor and reminds me of a big teddy bear. And he does give pretty great hugs.

I finished this quilt while he was away at scout camp. And Geoff and I left for our Switzerland trip the day before he got home. So I laid it out on his bed for him to find. He was pretty excited.

Teacher gift quilt - "Gateway to Imagination"

 Ta-da!! Here it is - the coolest teacher gift I have ever pulled off! When I saw this Moda Bakeshop Tutorial I knew I wanted to make this quilt.  The recipe calls for a jelly roll but I thought it was a great way to use my 2.5 inch scraps instead. And since my youngest son Rory (the only one in public school full-time this year) had an amazing teacher, it was easy to decide who to make the quilt for. I enlisted the help of my friend and fellow quilter Lisa whose daughter Astrid has the same teacher.  So after a giant joint fabric pull and a division of blocks, we created this in a relatively short amount of time.

 Lisa also does beautiful cross-stitch so she created this for our label. I left the naming up to her and she came up with "Gateway to Imagination." I love it. The backing fabric you see there is Turkish fabric. I love it for quilt backs because it comes double wide - no seam backs are awesome! We used a few solid Turkish fabrics on the fronts but as they tend to curl weird when pressed I tend to avoid them in piecing when I can.

We split the blocks up. I think we each did 8 blocks. Lisa sewed them into rows. I did the applique word strips and sewed it all together into a quilt top. Then Lisa enlisted a friend of ours to machine embroider the titles of Rory and Astrid's favorite books on several of the book spines. (By several I mean like 35 or so).

 These pics were taken before we washed it so some of the marking lines are still visible.

 Knuffle Bunny trilogy, Mo Willem's Pigeon books, The Stinky Cheese Man - this is some great literature here!

 She also stitched Rory and Astrid's names into the top left hand block.

I was in charge of the machine quilting.  I loosely followed Melissa's quilting ideas in the original tutorial with a few additions.  My castle is a bit shorter and has a yellow brick road and a bridge.

 I stitched an ocean with a little boat along the bottom border.

And the right border was a magical bean stalk ending in the clouds.

I was worried that I wasn't going to be able to pull off all this fancy FMQing. But the quilting gods smiled on me. I didn't have any trouble with timing and only the green thread broke on me a few times. Speaking of thread - I am generally a white or black thread quilter. Lucky for us, Lisa had an amazing collection of variegated Sulky threads in lots of colors. Lisa also attached the binding, using this great fancy scallop stitch, and she made a hanging sleeve for it so Ms. Harvey can hang it in her classroom next year.

We were even done a day early - how amazing is that? Rory and Astrid did a great job keeping the secret from their teacher. All she knew is that we were taking her to lunch on the last day of school (which was a half-day).

Here we are presenting it to her. The kids are so excited. And so are the adults!

They had a great time showing her where all their favorite book titles were. (Incidentally, Astrid is the friend I made the frilly skirt for in this post.)

Here is one last shot of Ms. Harvey with her students and her new quilt. If you are only here for quilt eye candy, you can stop reading now. If you want to know why Lisa and I went to so much effort for a teacher appreciation gift, hang in there for one more paragraph.

Ms. Harvey is one of those teachers you pray for.  She had infinite patience, creative ways to manage the chaos of a room full of little people, and a particular love for squirrely little boys. She was fabulous.  And talking to her at lunch just increased my admiration for this woman. She has been teaching for DoDs schools for 36 years. She started in Berlin when it was still a divided city and her phone lines were bugged. She then taught in Italy for a number of years. She has lived and taught here in Turkey for over ten years.  Have you been reading the news about the protesting and rioting in Turkey recently? Here on base we are pretty isolated from it. But Ms. Harvey lives downtown. Her 9th apartment floor apartment balcony overlooks the park where the protestors are camping out. She told us stories of watching the police fire water cannons and rubber bullets. Of listening to the Turkish people bang on their tea kettles and flick their lights on and off to show support to the protestors as they marched down her street. She could see them calling to the young people, telling them which way to run to avoid the police. One night the tear gas was so bad that even nine floors up it hurt her eyes.  She has a front row seat to the history that being made right now.  Makes for a fascinating lunch conversation.  And one awesome teacher! Now I'm just praying that the principal decides that she needs to teach 2nd grade next year!

Henry's quilt

Remember when Delaney and I went up to Germany to visit my friend Jayne who was stork-nested up there to have her baby? (Read about that here.) Well, Jayne is back in Turkey with her two cute kids and a darling little baby boy named Henry.

We threw a small shower for her in our church women's group.  From the seven women there she received a star shaped crocheted blanket, a knitted stuffed rabbit, a crochet teddy bear, an embroidered receiving blanket and two handsewn hooded towels. We are a talented bunch!

Anyway, here is my contribution.  A few months ago I showed Jayne three different fabric options for baby boy quilts. She picked Ten Little Things. So using Amy Smart's Off-Set Square Tutorial, I made this quilt:

 All of the prints are from the Ten Little Things line. The solids are Turkish cottons purchased in Adana. They seem to be good quality but I still worry that they won't hold up as well as the prints.

 I love those owls. They are so cute!

For the backing I used everything I had left of the asterisk prints in brown and blue. The middle bit is a Turkish cotton. It seemed to fray easily so I serged it to the other pieces and then put a straight seam just inside the serging.  When my mom came to visit I asked her to bring me some Heat N Bond. She did, but when I went to use it I realized she had brought me the no sew kind. And they aren't kidding. You really can't sew through it very well. So I used a blanket stitch to sew down the applique and then echo stitched around each letter so I could see from the front where to avoid when I was quilting it together.

That wasn't the only bump in the road either. My machine went all wonky on me when I tried to free motion stipple this quilt. After a two days of frustration I finally got it to behave again and was able to finish the quilt without the thread shredding every two inches. Yay!

Jayne loved it and hopefully, as it turned out to be fairly large for a baby quilt, Henry will love it for several more years to come. 

Freedom Star Quilt

 I'm so excited to have this one finished!! My parents are coming this week and I wanted to have it done and hung up before they got here. A friend of mine also had a project she really wanted to get done so last Saturday we set up our machines and paraphernalia in the base chapel annex and sewed most of the day. By 4 pm we had two finished quilts!

A patriotic quilt has been on my quilt wish list for a while.   For the reason why see below. When it came to pick a pattern I was inspired by all the great HST star quilts I had seen in the last year. Some time ago I had purchased 6 Town Square Quilts charm packs and with a sheet (okay several sheets) of graph paper and colored pencils, I came up with a design I liked. 

 I intended it to be a wall hanging. Our base house has tile floors and concrete walls so it gets loud! Curtains and carpets in the living areas help absorb noise but there was nothing in the stairwell and it functioned as a huge echo chamber.

The backing is a Tradewinds fabric I purchased on sale. Its a lattice of bamboo and I have it in light green as well. A yummy fabric!

 This is my favorite block. That little dove with the olive branch in its mouth. You can see the quilting was just a simple straight line echo quilting along the lines of the star.

 I still wish the red in the binding were a bit brighter to match the red in the quilt, but I like the stars and think the navy background frames it well.

 The reason I wanted a patriotic quilt was I wanted to make a compliment quilt to this one. This quilt means a great deal to me. As you can see by the label below, it's a valor quilt. My husband was given this quilt at the end of his second Iraqi deployment. No, he was not wounded and I hope that it doesn't offend anyone that he owns a valor quilt without having been wounded.  He was and is a physician and he served in Iraq in that capacity.  The last week of his second tour he had to vacate his hooch (the term for the little trailer things they slept in) to make way for the next wave of medical staff. He ended up sleeping for a few days in the hospital where he had treated patients. The nurses gave him this quilt to use during that time and to take home with him. 

The quilt. is. beautiful. The backing is a text print of the Declaration of Independence and its quilted in a varigated red, white and blue thread. The front has these vintage looking boys and girls dressed in red, white and blue and holding flags. It's gorgeous.

That second Iraqi deployment above all his other deployments and TDYs and even his year in Korea was particularly hard on me, so this quilt symbolized to me a thank you for the sacrifices of military wives and families. I looked up the women who made this quilt and learned that Ruth Stonesifer was the president of the Gold Star Mothers. I am deeply grateful for both her and Nellie Conrad for making this and other quilts like it. I love this quilt. It is something I would grab if my house were on fire. And this is the quilt that inspired me to learn to quilt.

So now they both hang in my stairwell, my own little quiet(er) corner of patriotism.