Thursday, January 30, 2014

Pinwheel, Pinwheel Spinning Around....

Every time I make pinwheel blocks, this song comes to mind.  Oh 1980's, you were such a simpler (is this even a word?!?!) time.


I am not anywhere near finished with the pinwheels that I should have been able to finish this week.  I fully admit this is my fault but I had to take a few days off sewing to work on stuff around the house and just got behind.  I have cut all the pieces I need and sewn all the triangles together.  I am working on pressing these to make into the lovely pinwheels that I love so much.  I did one to make sure my seams were all OK, here it is:

I love that this is scrappy!  I like doing scrappy quilts, they just appeal to me.  I love picking up fat quarters in the quilt shops and then just seeing where they end up when working on something new.  This is the first quilt in a while that I have dug into my fabric stash for.  I tend to work with fat quarter bundles as it is easy to coordinate with those and still have something that ends up looking somewhat scrappy.  I had to pick a color other than orange for it because for some reason I only have like 3 of those... maybe 4.  I chose purple/pink for this and I love how it looks with the yellows.  I'm excited, I am about halfway through making this quilt now! 

Wednesday, January 22, 2014

Chevrons and Pinwheels!!

I have been working on step 2 of the Celtic Solstice quilt ALL WEEK and I am still not done!  I guess I am really not surprised that it is taking longer than a week for each step.  I picked the larger size to make and I still have to go to work and spend time with the family as well.  That being said, all I have remaining in step 2 is to sew the remaining 100 halves together as I have pieced the sides of each and have already completed the first 144 of them.  Here is the first one I did to make sure my seams were good and see how it looked for me.

Chevron #1

The next step is 1/2 square triangles and pinwheels!  I love pinwheels, they are super cute and fun to put in quilts!  Here is a pinwheel quilt I did many years ago... well, I pieced the top many years ago at least.  It was the first king size I put together and it is one of my favorites!

Pinwheels!!
I remember with this one I had all the fabric for the borders set aside and ready to put on and then I took several years off from quilting as life was just too hectic and we were living in a smaller place.  There was just not the time or the space to do anything. When I finally got around to putting on the borders I found that I had miscalculated the outer border and was short on fabric... by less than 6 inches!!!  As all that time had passed there was no way I was going to find the fabric that I had selected so it was time to improvise.  


Ta-Da!!  I had plenty of green and purple left over from the rest of the quilt that I just made more pinwheels for the corners.  It added an interesting element to the border and made the quilt that much more special to me.  Love it!!

Thursday, January 16, 2014

Hello World

Hello everyone.  Welcome to my new quilting blog.  I am currently working on Bonnie Hunter's Celtic Solstice quilt.  This was a mystery quilt at the end of 2013 but at the time it was being done I was busy putting a quilt together for my little brother and his wife for Christmas.  This is an Irish Chain quilt and I was really happy with how it turned out.

Irish Chain


Now that is all done and they loved it, I have time to work on something for me.  I have finished step one of the no longer a mystery quilt and am currently cutting out step 2.  I hope to be done cutting this evening so I can begin putting the next step together.


These were pretty easy to put together, just quite time consuming as I have decided to go with the larger option from the pattern so I needed 380 of them!  It took most of the weekend to get them all done.