UFOs No More

I've been on a roll finishing tops recently.  Thanks to H2H for helping to bring in quilts while I take a break from block drives.  This quilt top came from Barb C., she calls it Scrappy Blue Clamshell Tessellation and said the pattern came from Royal Quilt Designs.

This next quilt with the Kaffe fabrics also came from Barb but it couldn't be more different.  Both of these have been gifted to parents who lost their adult son.  

Barb called this one the Kaffe Fassett Garden Quilt. The 9 Patch & Hourglass pattern came from Missouri Quilt Co. 

These next two tops came from Jan at The Colorful Fabriholic. I was able to supplement the crappy shady-day pics with some close ups on the swing.  

That's Paddington Bear, right, on the focal fabric?  A lot of the others are tone on tones with great textures and I love the mellow colors.  

Both of Jan's quilts had some of my favorite color combos.  I love these skinny strings. I think this might be the last of the tops from the last batch Jan sent me? There might honestly still be some buried around here but I'm going to find them!

The spring and the spring flowers are so beautiful here and I captured some of them with fabric dyeing a couple weeks ago, as I teased you with before.  I did make a post about this whole process and these here and I listed them in my Etsy shop :)

 

Covered in Love is a 501(c)(3) charity that donates quilts to patients dying in the hospital, over 700 so far! During March/April we are supporting the Hands2Help Challenge instead of our normal block drive.  Check out the main post HERE if you want to get involved. 

Linking to  Confessions of a Fabric Addict and Finished or Not Friday

First Strings of the Year

I decided to go ahead and get working on the string blocks during our snow storm.  These are the string blocks foundation pieced onto batting that CiL did for our Jan/Feb drive.   You can see my tutorial on how I am assembling and "quilting" them here. 

I'm having a lot of fun picking our color groups and playing with  patterns. The top quilt is pink, purple, and yellow moving in a diagonal across the quilt.  

Next is blue, aqua, and green color blocks.  I've decided it looks best when I have all the stripes slanting the same direction. 

I tried to get pictures of the diagonal wavy quilting I did through the blocks, but it's hard to see. You can just see it on the upper right against the navy blue fabric.  

I've gotten lots of blue blocks already so I did a color fade on this one. Lastly, the one I showed from the tutorial, is an orange and red checkerboard with horizontal quilting lines through the blocks.

They're fun to make and easy because the quilting step is basically already done! Sundae is also enjoying these pre-padded blocks. She's an expert at keeping them from flying away ;)

Covered in Love is a 501(c)(3) charity that donates quilts to patients dying in the hospital, over 700 so far! During March/April we are supporting the Hands2Help Challenge instead of our normal block drive.  Check out the main post HERE if you want to get involved. 

Linking to  Confessions of a Fabric Addict and Finished or Not Friday

Assembling Foundation Pieced Batting

I know a lot of people have been curious about how the Jan/Feb string blocks that are foundation pieced onto batting will be put together.  I took advantage of the snow days to start putting some together so you can see.

I sorted out red and orange blocks for my first quilt.  Step one is to put right sides together and sew with a fat quarter inch seam through all the layers.

Step 2 is to finish the seam. I've done this before by finger pressing the seams open and stitching over them with a triple zigzag (visible in close up photos on this post).  

I decided this time to push the seam allowance to one side and top stitch it down about 1/8th inch from the seam.

And basically that's it. I like to assemble mine in columns and then join those into rows.  Make sure to push your seam allowances in different directions so they will nest. 

It does take longer to basically sew every seam twice, but it's worth it because of how easy the quilting is!

I use glue basting to put my quilt sandwiches together.  (More details in this post).  Since there isn't really going to be much quilting, just enough to tack the backing onto the top, the glue can be sparse.

I FMQ'ed 6 wavy lines across the quilt, through the center of each row. 

Trim, bind, and ta-da! All done.  I hope this helps answer some questions for you, feel free to ask in the comments if you have any others :)

Like many of you, we've had tons of snow and cold weather. I'm told we're breaking 100 year records. Fortunately we have had power and water throughout, knock on wood. Sundae and Fudge were very curious about the snow, I think the bright sunny day confused them into thinking it would be nice to go outside. They dash out the door and straight down the steps before realizing the problem...

Nope, nope, nope.

Covered in Love is a 501(c)(3) charity that donates quilts to patients dying in the hospital, over 700 so far! The Jan/Feb drive is going on now.  Check out the main post HERE if you want to get involved. 

Linking to  Confessions of a Fabric Addict and Finished or Not Friday

Scrappy Scrappy

Happy Scrappy Weekend, quilters! These 3 quilt tops were sent in by Erin and quilted by me this week.

They are all ready to be taken up to the hospital with the next delivery for Covered in Love, which will be a big one!

apologies for the incredibly blurry photo!

Erin has sent in some beautiful tops to CiL before and I especially love her scrappy ones. 

Covid is still raging here and our chaplains are providing quilts to as many of the families as we can.  Infection precautions and the sheer number of deaths unfortunately makes it difficult. 

In my nursing career, I can say without a doubt that Covid nursing is the hardest thing I have ever done.   My previous nursing experience was largely with cardiac patients; if they were going to destabilize and become dangerously ill it often happened very quickly, within minutes to hours.  With the Covid patients we can often, with great accuracy, predict which ones are going to end up intubated in the ICU and dying days before it happens.  We watch them get inexorably worse, requiring more and more oxygen, kidneys failing slowly, day by day despite all interventions, until inevitably off they go. With other diseases when you see a patient declining you can usually stop it, but not with this.  

I'm used to patients declining and dying; but after a long disease course not after a brief respiratory illness.  Please continue to wear you masks, avoid indoor spaces with crowds, and get vaccinated as soon as you can.  This is a terrible disease that kills many and causes lifelong organ damage to many more who will continue to die in the coming years.  

Handsome Fudge says, "Wear your @!#$ mask!"

Covered in Love is a 501(c)(3) charity that donates quilts to patients dying in the hospital, over 700 so far! The Jan/Feb drive is going on now.  Check out the main post HERE if you want to get involved. 

Linking to  Confessions of a Fabric Addict and Finished or Not Friday

Fiddlesticks & Sunflowers Preview

Linda has been a busy bee last year! For the last few drives she finished and sent in completed quilts that I wanted to show you.  This first one is her version of the Fiddlesticks drive, completed with microstippling. 

I find this kind of quilting so impressive! I know I could never have the patience, but I love the texture it produces. 

 

I really love the backing fabric she found to use with for the quilt as well. I haven't started working on the Fiddlesticks block drive quilts yet, still getting the red, white, and blue ones done. But based on this I'm really looking forward to getting them done!

Next, this is Linda's Sunflower quilt. I have started to gradually assemble these blocks into tops since it looks like there will only be about 4 or 5, so I can complete them quickly. 

Nov/Dec is always the smallest block drive due to all the other things people have going on at that time of the year, so I often choose a block that I (selfishly) really like, but I know will probably be less popular for whatever reason.

I know this block had little fiddly pieces and the slants that made it more difficult than usually, but it does look wonderful once it's together!  

Help! I'm being smothered by their affection.  

Covered in Love is a 501(c)(3) charity that donates quilts to patients dying in the hospital, over 700 so far! The Jan/Feb drive is going on now.  Check out the main post HERE if you want to get involved.

 

Linking to  Confessions of a Fabric Addict and Finished or Not Friday

Opening 2021 with Quilts

Here we are in 2021 at last.  My neighbors brought in the year with a huge amount of artillery! (The kitties were not impressed.) It remains to be seen if this year will be much better than last, but we can hope!

At the very least we can start the year off with some beautiful quilts. This batik tumbler was sent in by Jan O. and quilted by Meloney with loops.

This fantastic top was sent in by Kelly C. and also quilted by Meloney.  It's far to big to hold for a picture of the entire thing!  Kudos to Beryl who recognized that the pattern is Bonnie Hunter's 2019 mystery quilt "Frolic".

It has a mix of batik, print, and even cross-weave fabrics that blend together perfectly.  I've been preparing a delivery to the hospital so these will be going up there soon!

Wishing you warmth and safety.

Covered in Love is a 501(c)(3) charity that donates quilts to patients dying in the hospital, over 700 so far! The Jan/Feb drive is going on now.  Check out the main post HERE if you want to get involved.

 

Linking to  Confessions of a Fabric Addict and Finished or Not Friday