Almost Wordless Wednesday: Stash Building

My first ever charm pack. Make Life by Sweetwater for Moda. (Plus I bought a little extra yardage) I am going to make a runner for our dining table from this. The colours are perfect, but what I really like are the words. What great motivating words to read each morning at breakfast! A nice way to start the day!
For some unknown reason, I have been buying some purplish fabric lately.
You know. Must haves.

Nearly the last of the Halloween fabric for my son's quilt. I love, love that crow. We feed the crows breakfast at our house. I throw out the toast crusts that the kids don't want. I yell "Breakfast crows!" and it is pretty hilarious when I sometimes hear a "Caw!" in response.

Still Seasonally Inappropriate

So I made some more Halloween blocks. 10 more to be exact. These go together quite quickly. I really like the ones from today, more so than yesterday's. Today I started slicing up a Halloween panel I bought. I fussy cut it to my own fancy to make many of the blocks above. It worked out well and I was able to mix and match the pieces from it with my other fabrics. I still have more left too, for future use.
-

As you can tell from the blocks so far, I am sticking to traditional Halloween colours of mainly black, orange and white for this quilt. This is my son's quilt. When I make my daughter's later in the year, it will be every colour goes!

Seasonally Inappropriate

Sometimes my husband and I joke that our two-year-old daughter only likes to dress seasonally inappropriately. She chooses her own clothes each day and often has to be coaxed out of a pair of shorts or summer skirt into long pants (it is still quite chilly here). Maybe it is all my fault. I mean, look, here I am making more of these Halloween blocks in April.

-

But I can't help myself. It's fun. And I must say that going back to making more of these squares is a perfect change of pace after finishing all the free-piecing on the Princess Castle quilt. These Halloween blocks are very straightforward and I can work on several, assembly-line style, at a time.

-

Each one is an eight-inch block. Each has a fussy cut center and one or more borders. I am not sure exactly how many I need in total yet. At least 56, probably more. I have 21 done now. They will all be different, to make this quilt as wonderfully I-Spyish as possible.

Wordless Wednesday: Possibilities

Princess Crown or Art Deco Skyscraper ...

I am very close to being done The Princess Castle quilt top, now also known as Royal-T (it is for my daughter Tess). I am hoping to take it to the long-arm quilter early next week. Anyhow, it will be a twin-sized quilt, so I have been busy making borders. This is where the block above comes in -- for the corners. It is of course a crown. I wanted to make a big Princess-tiara-Miss-America-style crown and this is what I ended up with. For my inspiration of how to make this I remembered seeing this tutorial (FFP Quilt Corner) It is a tutorial to make a cool block that looks like flames. I kind of freestyled it from there. That is how I ended up with this art deco skyscraper, er, I mean princess crown. I thought the jewel on top would help. I tried it in a contrasting colour, as in a ruby, but it didn't look right. Oh well, in the context of the whole quilt I think it will be fine ... and fancier than just triangles at least ... ;-) It is an eight-inch block.

Almost Wordless Wednesday: Construction Update

Probably the last post on this until it's done ... having some roofing issues ;-) but working away.

Renovations

Hee, hee ... so this evening I knocked a few bricks off the bottom of a tower and busted some out of the middle to make room for an awning over the entry. I am quite pleased with how that yellow Michael Miller fabric looks above the Jennifer Paganelli door. I think they both have a type of elegance about them that a castle deserves. I am wondering if something can be elegant, whimsical, mod and childlike all at the same time? Who knows, but that is the look I guess I'm going for. As long as my 2-year-old daughter and I like the finished quilt that is all that matters. Speaking of us, notice us up there in the very top window. It's little details like that which make this fun for me, and balance out all the frustration of figuring out how to sew what to what (the angle of that awning drove me crazy, but I have seen other people's quilts made with about a million gorgeous angles everywhere). Oh, and yes, things do look crooked in the picture, as sections aren't sewn together yet and are just laying there for now. And the colours definitely look better "in person." It is nice to have a picture to look at though, to really get a good perspective. That tower on the left is either too tall or not tall enough ... hmmm.

Brick by Brick, Of Course ...

How else would you build a princess castle? ;-)
And every princess deserves a fancy door for her castle right? It's important to make a proper first impression when guests come along.
-
It was fun to fussy cut that Jennifer Paganelli fabric for the door (actually double doors). As I was going through the fabric I had to use, the idea just kind of struck me. I also love the arches in the fabric which were perfect as molding for the door and windows.
-
I made the bricks from sewn strips, sliced them up and sewed them back together with off center placement to create the staggered look you see. This has taken a lot of thinking to piece together so far, but it has been a great challenge!

Big Mess or the Start of Something Good?

So this is a picture of my design area, also known as "the floor." I have these fabrics chosen and somewhat arranged for my next quilt. When I look at this I see a sky, sunset, mountains, trees, a flower-covered lawn, and of course a princess castle ... lots of free-piecing fun ahead!

False Starts and Fabric Fun

Along with the fun of learning to quilt without a pattern, I have certainly had some false starts. Two are shown in the photo above. The letter E block is my first attempt at what would become the Eli's Log Castle quilt and the T block is from what ended up being the Vitali-T quilt. The E block wasn't used because I just wasn't motivated to do a whole quilt of "E"s after doing a whole quilt of "T"s. Also, my children are very different from each other, so I wanted their letter quilts to reflect that ... I didn't want my son's to simply be a less inspired copy of my daughter's. Anyway, the Eli's Log Castle was a lot more fun to make than just lots of "E"s. I had 4 "E"s done before I changed my mind, so they may go on the back of the quilt, or perhaps on a pillow or perhaps ... who knows?

-

My problem with the first T block was just realising it wasn't the direction I wanted to go in. I had envisioned something like a T sampler quilt with "T"s incorporated within various styles of quilt blocks. I soon knew it would be too much. The fabrics I had were crazy enough without making every block wildly busy.

-

Anyway, hopefully with more experience there will be fewer false starts. It's all part of the learning process I guess though, and fun nonetheless.

Now, onto the fabric ... I fortunately got to buy a nice little pile of fabric this weekend during a trip to the beautiful state of Maine. I don't have much of a "stash" yet, so it is great to be able to add some nice variety. I have three quilts in mind to make with what I purchased. I just love the bright springy colours and of course the Halloween fun!

Happy Hallowe--Ooops, I Mean Easter!

First off, here's my admittedly slightly disturbing looking binding-and-bobbin Easter Bunny. He seemed like a good idea to make and use up a whole two minutes of my day, but oh well. Hope no one has nightmares. His head is the multi-coloured binding I made for the Eli's Log Castle Quilt and his body is the first Halloween I Spy Quilt binding. I am really far ahead making the Halloween binding as I only have nine squares done for the whole quilt so far, but I figured once the binding was made I could use the leftover fabric from it for some of the squares. It is a really bright orange, yellow, and black stripe, which is perfect.

Secondly, here are a few more of the aforementioned Halloween blocks. More fussy cutting fun.
-
Hope everyone has a wonderful long Easter weekend!