I’ve started a new blog titled Betty West about my life as a photographer, artist, snowboarder, housewife, student, etc… and I’m moving all my best quilting posts over there as well as making that my new base for future quilt blogging. Run on over and read about some other fun stuff as well. Thanks for taking time to read about me, I appreciate having your interest and support.
Halloween is admittedly my favorite holiday. I love dressing up, I love decorating the house, all of it. I combined light quilting with embroidery and got this:
I finished the tops to 2 more quilts. They weren’t super complicated and both went fast, but now I’m stuck at the pre-pinning stage. My mom has the huge table we use for clamping the layers and pinning a quilt. It’s just impossible to get everything straight and tigkt and even without it. Hopefully I’ll be up that way soon.
This is a pretty simple top made from a Lake House fabric. It’s 10” squares of daisies. I’m using pink minky for the back, so I wanted to stay simple because I’ve been told you can only do minimal quilting with minky.
These are the tops to the reversible quilt. It’ll be interesting to see if they line up during pinning. It just needs to be fairly close for what I have planned. I wish the camera had picked up the colors better, especially the pinks.
Also, here’s a project that I did forever ago, but I don’t know why it’s never been posted. It’s a pillow quilt. This one is small and only lightly quilted with freehand squiggles. I love these because they’re fast, warm and compact. They fold into a pillow, which is perfect for throwing in the car. You can make them just about any size as long as the pillow pocket is 1/3rd the width of the quilt by 1/4 the length so it folds up nicely.
The pocket is a quilted rectangle/square topstitched to the bottom center of one side. The quilt is folded in thirds lengthwise (toward the camo side) to line up with the pocket edges, then it’s folded over 3 times and stuffed into the pocket as it’s turned inside out.
Finally, I’ve been working to reorganize my office, so I went through all my fabric and organized it into scrap drawer, yardage drawer, fat 1/4-charms-jelly roll drawer. It’s beautiful.
I have 2 quilts planned out. Blooms for Annabelle by Bloom Creek with all those pretty pastel florals on the left there, and an idea for a blocky quilt from the pinks and browns (I just have to figure out the math and get going).
I finished the top to the pink and brown quilt. Perfect corners, mom’s appliqué and everything. Now time to acquire batting and backing.
I also got around to quilting the care bear quilt with glow in the dark thread. I started out with some freehand stars that didn’t go too well and ripped them out. Then I switched top and bobbin threads and decided to shadow quilt some of the figures on the backing, so there are clouds, stars and moons on the top. I really love it.
I also put some sleepy phrases in the borders.
Kind of showing the glow.
Now I’m going to tackle my reversible quilt. I should have been working on it a long time ago, I even got the batting last year as a Christmas present!
It’s been a long time… however, I haven’t actually sewn/quilted anything in the gap because I was planning and surviving my own wedding – eek! So, I’ve been back in the sewing room and have some updates of nearly completed projects…
Expect this to be a long post.
I’ve been working on the Raspberry Truffle quilt from Bloom Creek. (This picture is from their site). This has been a mother/daughter project that’s been months in the making. I really loved this quilt when I saw it in the LQS, and a year later when the store unfortunately went out of business, they had leftover kits for 60% off.
My mom bought it for me as a gift and we made a pact to divide the blocks and collaborate. 
This worked nicely for both of us, because I can’t appliqué (not because I don’t want to try, my machine’s zigzag function is broken, lol), and my mom doesn’t really love machine quilting. So we divided up the blocks, and now I’m down to finishing the borders.
I admittedly threw down the quilt for the day when I realized I was missing 2 of the foursquare cornerstones for the border. I normally am lazy about quilting and only about 20% of my corners ever match, so with this I went out of my way to line up corners, ripping seams and redoing seams… I feel a little insane. I’ve watched the sixth season of Lost and Twilight (4 times) while making this quilt.
Also, I’ve managed to injure myself multiple times. I think quilting could be considered a dangerous activity. Besides pin pokes, iron burns, sewing yourself to your work and the mental injury when you realize you’re cutting up perfectly good fabric into tiny squares and sewing it back together… I’ve managed to sprain my ankle sewing this quilt. We have hardwood and my clear ruler ended up on the floor, so I slipped on it going between the ironing board and the sewing machine. I am still foggy on how I twisted my ankle, but I think it was from crashing into a dresser and spinning around mid-air because I really didn’t want to hit the ironing board with hot iron on the way down. I got a slew of other bruises from the fall, including my hip from hitting the dresser. Don’t fall in a house with hardwood floors. Just don’t. On the upside, when I burned my finger on the iron later I already had a bag of ice handy…
However, all frustrations aside, I really am loving this quilt and I only have the 2 sides of the outer border left to sew in the pattern.
Things I’m considering and could use feedback on:
This quilt is currently 60”x80”, and twin batting is 72”x90”. I have managed to finish the kit with a TON of extra 5” charms, so I’m seriously thinking I’ll add a charm border varying pink and brown charms.
How to machine quilt this… the sampler in the store has some amazing swirly floral stuff that I can’t remember. So I really need some suggestions! Thanks.
Other Things…
I have a whole stack of projects and fabric in my queue.
Among the fabric I have some coordinating pastel florals, some pink and brown prints and veggie print fabrics I want to make potholders out of. The stack on the right is projects in progress…
My first quilt, with the care bears. All of the nighttime fabric happens to glow in the dark, so I bought some glow in the dark thread and I’m planning on quilting stars with it. This quilt was only loosely ditched, so it’s been needing additional quilting for a long time.
Halfway there… I’m working on a reversible pink and black quilt in Asian inspired prints. Instead of having a top and backing, one side is black with pink sashing while the other is pink with black sashing. I’m looking forward to assembling and quilting this one. I have one side fully assembled and the other is cut and ready to be pieced.
Not even remotely started, but this should be an easy/fun one. I have a bunch of this panel-ish fabric with large gerberas in various colors on white, or white on various colors. I don’t think I’ll get too fancy with the top for this. The backing is pink minky, which is why this will be so fun. Minky is brand new to me… and super soft. This was another amazing clearance kit.
Well, that was a lot to read through so thanks for sticking with me. I should have some finished project updates soon. In the meantime, I have that whole fabric stash and I could really use ideas for what to do with it! If anyone knows of a great pattern or small project (I love small projects), please post in the comments. Thanks!
I’m really into quilting everyday objects now. Something about putting batting into random stuff is really appealing to me. I made 2 of these, one for a swap and one for myself because I loved it so much!
I recently entered into a Princess Bride swap, and I just wanted to share some of the stuff I sent, including some quilting PB awesomeness.
This is just paper and backwards, but I ironed it onto a shirt (unfortunately I couldn’t get a shirt until the last minute and did this as a flew out the door to the post office… so no pics of that)
Quilted PB clutch/makeup bag
That was some movie nerd super fun. I rarely do craft swaps, but I find them super inspiring when I do.
Some in-action shots now that the house is all set up…
The table runner on our coffee table with all the winter candles
The tree skirt under the tree… I don’t know why it’s rumpled in these pictures, it lays flat up until a cat gets to it. The second shot is for fun, neat light streaking effect.
And here’s an extra just because it snowed today. We ended up with 2 trees this year, so we put the taller one outside and decorated in blue and white (like the lights on our house). As soon as we finished, it started snowing… loves it.
Sometimes a girl reaches a point where you can only own so many blankets, but there is still a strong desire to quilt. That’s when I turn to quilting bags. The first is actually only mildly quilted… I wedged batting between two pieces of fabric… a silver sparkly fabric which I ironed a fairy cutout to, and a white fabric with silver dragonflies. I did shadow quilting around the cutout and freehanded a butterfly, then added a zipper, formed a tube and seamed the ends in opposite directions, sewing in a ribbon handle as well. I think the final project is kind of interesting.
The second I made to hold my Nintendo DS and all it’s accessories. I used batting to pad all the walls and added zippers, diamond quilting and ribbon handles. For this one I also put ribbons on the inside so I could clip the activity meters for a walking game, as well as Velcro strips and pouches for the charger, earphones, etc… so they can be Velcroed in place instead of shifting all over the bag. The outside pocket holds all the games in their plastic travel cases. This has already gotten so much use, the ribbon handle I sewed to the top corner is already starting to come out of the seam.
Inside of pockets before filling it up…
Full of stuff, the pick is the velcro pocket and the second shot shoes the ribbon for clipping the meters.
This quilt was actually sewn by my mom. I just wanted to share because I hand dyed all the fabric for it. This was a fun adventure and was really cost effective, so feel free to give it a try. For the quilt she needed tonal fabrics (light, mid, dark) all of the same shade for each color. I used a kona cotton, cut to size, and Dylon powder fabric dyes. Then I experimented and came up with a formula for diluting the dye that gave me the 3 tones. I also found that squishing the dye into the bucket gave it a nice moddled effect. Key for making the dyes stay on the fabric: a chemical for treating pools called PH+, added halfway through the dye process to make the mixture more basic. This is a fun (and messy, wear gloves and crappy clothes and don’t do it near white tile) project for making tonal fabrics. The end result quilt:
I’m contemplating selling fat quarter bundles of this through etsy. Please comment on what you think of this idea, I’d love to guage interest before I start dying fabric like crazy.
