The Hipster Wedding Quilt

My friend Veronica is the proud owner of three of my quilts, most recently her wedding quilt which I blogged about here.  When she asked me what it would cost to make a wedding quilt for friends of hers I told her to keep her money and give me the details, because that's the kind of friend she is.

The young married couple are described as like all things "hipster".  I decided on Cotton and Steel fabrics in an oversized flying geese design.  Ironically the quilt wound up the same size (80" sq) and with the same basic blocks (8" HSTs) as V's wedding quilt.

I really wanted to quilt this with vertical lines, but its so time consuming and difficult and you end up with so much fabric shifting.  Instead I did sort of vertical zig zags in each block, to get the same basic effect while being able to work on only one small piece of quilt at a time.

I'm not sure how I wound up with all the background puff balls going in so many different directions. I did try.  Anyway, not stressing about it.

I had saved all the selvedges off the fabric and attached them on the backing under the binding.  It seemed like a hipster-y sort of thing to do and I think it does look cool.  Happily this quilt has now been passed on to its new owners now after a stop at V's house so she could write the label.

Linking to Crazy Mom Quilts Finish it Friday.

A Sewing Retreat at Home

Last Wednesday as I sipped my morning coffee I noticed there was a Cutthroat Kitchen marathon on Food Network leading up to the premier of the new season.  Cutthroat Kitchen is my latest TV obsession and I couldn't resist the draw of 9 straight hours of episodes.  Now I was supposed to spend that day on school stuff, so I decided that if I was going to spend an entire day not doing school it needed to be an exceptionally productive day!

Machine turned sideways to make room for cutting

I set myself up a sewing station downstairs right in front of the TV and prepped sewing and cutting projects to keep me busy.  There's something neat about this picture that I didn't realize until afterward:  that table.  That table is old. It used to sit in the corner of the kitchen in the house where my mom grew up.  It wasn't their eating table, it was for butchering chickens and that sort of thing, and has the cut marks to prove it.  Mom's parents both died when she was a child and this table was forgotten for years. Turns out some cousins had rescued it. They refinished it and a few years ago they gave it to us and it now sits in the corner of our living room.

My mom's mom is my only family connection to quilting, although obviously I never met her.  We have several of her quilts.  It's neat to think that decades later I can sit at the table of another quilter and work :)

Here's my tally from my personal sewing-retreat day:

sewed together the rows on a May block drive top

quilted and bound the blue and orange baby quilt

cut and sewed (112) 8.5" HSTs for an upcoming wedding quilt 

sewed up another May block drive top

 began sewing together the April block drive bonus blocks

Over the weekend I pressed and trimmed the HSTs and sewed them into flying geese units.  Here is my initial design wall layout.

These are Cotton and Steel fabrics (my first time working with those, in general I'm not a big fan of their designs).  This will become a wedding quilt for friends of a friend. I don't know the newly weds or what their tastes are but I was told they like "everything hipster" and the store Anthropologie.  I sent my friend a few snapshots of fabric swatches and the Cotton and Steel fabrics passed the "hipster" test.

Sewing downstairs (and away from the distraction of the computer) was a lot of fun. Definitely going to have to do more of that in the future!

Linking to Design Wall Monday.