Holy Backlog!

So I have not blogged in a while, but I have made many things....so here it goes.

Bright Pinwheel Quilt for New Nephew:

I bought a remnant of this adorable dinosaur print back when I first started quilting...awaiting that great day when I would have use for it. The dumb thing was, being a remnant, it was a tiny piece of fabric. The lucky thing was, Joann's still carried the print. I like to foist my favorite things onto quilts for other people. Case in point is the dinosaurs here, and bright colors. You might remember my robots fabric from previous quilts as well...

Fabric themes I will buy if I find a good one (or one exists):

Microsoft Excel theme
Breakfast cereal
Target (the store)
Ugly animals - especially camels or warthogs or anteaters
Amazon.com
Fruit juice

I decided to try a close quilting pattern. Spiral was enticing because I could do one continuous line and the quilt was small. It worked out pretty well. I backed it with flannel for softness. I decided to choose a low-key backing because the quilt top is so loud and in-your-face.

I like that the print says, "DINOSAURS" all over it. In case you couldn't tell what they were....

Manly Quilt Attempt:

I decided to make a quilt for my bro-in-law as a high school graduation present. The daunting task was making it not girly. I also wanted to experiment with low volume versus high volume/ dark vs. light, whatever. This is a log cabin block tweaked so the dark parts are made with skinnier strips than the light parts. My grandma had given me some old sheets a while back, and they worked out really well here - some of the light green stripes and the only floral-ish print. The old sheets made it nice and soft too. The dark colors are pretty eclectic as well. Some of the navy, greenish plaid, and grey are from old shirts or robes.         

   

I really like the quilting I did on this one two; I added the star in the middle of the light circles at the end, and am very happy I did. I might make this pattern again.

Fastest Baby Quilt:

My friend Emily asked me to make a quilt for her sister-in-law's baby shower. It was in two weeks, and she said don't worry about finishing it before then. I took that as a challenge, and was curious how fast I could make a quilt. Another challenge was that they didn't know the sex of the baby (wanting a surprise seems crazy to me, but I admire the self-restraint). So, I had to make it gender neutral.

I think I decided first to do some type of color fading/transition. I knew I wanted some bright solids. So I came up with the design shown below, and then went to the fabric store to find a matching print that could go throughout. It took me forever and a day, but I found this cool giraffe one.

Next  thing I knew, she had taken off with it. I chased her across the playground, and after landing a few good punches, I got the quilt back.

Originally, those white blocks were going to be giraffe print too. I decided that the solids got drowned out and re-started. I think I had made like 8 blocks or so, but I am very glad I restarted.   

Chevrons are so hot right now

Since I had already made a bunch of blocks, I decided to throw in a pillow case as well. So here you can see what it looked like with all giraffes all the time.

Many a Zipper Pouch:

I got this awesome Japanese quilting book from the library (in fact, months later I have re-checked it out, and it is 2 feet from me right now). There were all these cute zipper pouch projects in it, so I decided to try to eliminate a bunch of my scraps. I kind of keep everything, and so it was convenient that the patterns called for pieces down to 1.25"x1.25". I didn't realize til I was halfway through the book that everything was handsewn. Well, I said screw that. For the most part. I found that hand sewing the zippers in wasn't too bad. 

I was intending these for Christmas presents, but I had too many that looked too different, and not enough females to give them too. Luckily, I got invited to a party where we were exchanging gifts and so I brought these! 

 

These are the fabrics I bought in India...that I still haven't figured out what to do with...

Actually probably my favorite. I like the old-fashionedy fabric look and the color contrasts.

I thought this would be my favorite because it is made with scraps of some of my favorites. It isn't, but I still like it.

I learned that some of the larger scale prints don't translate as well when they are 0.75" squares. Still like it also though... 

Made this a while ago; one of the first embroideries I did that I had no idea for. 

Did this embroidery a while back, and had no plans. When I got invited to the party, I didn't think I had enough pouches, so I made this the night before. It is mostly scraps from the next quilt in this blog entry.

 Emily's Queen - Adjusted Kaleidoscope:

My friend Emily (also my best and only client!), apparently was pleased with the 3 other quilts I have made her, so this time she asked me to do a queen-size quilt for her bed. I sent her all these links to quilts from the blogosphere that I liked, and had her fill out a spreadsheet with any comments she had on them. She wasn't into red - and it turns out I apparently am, because nearly all the quilts I showed her had some prominent red. She also wanted it to coordinate with her steel blue sheets.

I had come up with this general pattern a while ago, and was waiting for the right project. This worked out perfectly because she like the idea of having a kind of medallion-ish thing in the middle, and it fading a bit into the background. The pattern is like a kaleidoscope quilt, but there is an extra couple squares in it. It also is all about volume. Since I was ordering fabrics online, it was a bit harder to tell how they would compare, but I think it worked out alright. I LOVE how it turned out, and it has some of my favorite fabrics in it: Animal Menagerie from the Indian Summer Line, and a bunch of Kaffe Fassett in the middle (the ones that look like Venetian glass).
 

I worked on this quilt partially while I was down in Santa Cruz for work, staying in a house with five dudes. I told them I brought my quilting stuff with me, and they didn't believe me till they realized that vibration they could hear through the floor was my machine. I brought a suitcase that was almost as big as my regular suitcase....just full of quilting stuff.

Zippy Bags and Sexy Hexy Quilt

I bought some fabric as a Christmas gift for myself about 2 years ago now. I was too afraid to use it because it was more expensive and therefore special. I saw a quilt idea in one of the many quilting books I have checked out from the library and decided that is what I wanted to use the fabric for, a queen-sized quilt for our bed. I also decided I wanted a fluffier quilt to be used in the colder parts of the year (ie, SF Bay Area  52 degrees instead of 62 degrees). So here she is:

I had a fun time making these blocks because they are almost all different. The only duplicates are ones that I liked enough to duplicate. There are probably about 30 different fabrics in this, some are from Kaffe Fassett and Brandon Mably. I also want to note here for my future reference that I used Hobbs Cloud Loft. I liked the loft and it was fine to work with. Though, obviously it is a little harder to run a thicker quilt sandwich through your machine.

Backing fabric by Brandon Mably. I kind of liked my shadow in this picture for some reason.

Bottom corner right block is my favorite for some reason

The next thing is some zipper pouches I made for gifts recently:

I made my dad a little zipper pouch as part of his birthday gift. He really likes Futurama, so....more fun embroidery! I really enjoy embroidering cartoon characters while sitting in church or on a plane.

Why not Zoidberg?

 Other awesome things about this pouch:
1. they sell packs of zippers at the Japanese dollar store at the mall
2. The fun rainbow thread I used for quilting was on clearance for 99 cents at Joanns!

If you don't like it, you can kiss my shiny, metal....

Inside the pouch...

The other pouch I made was for a girl in the Sunday School class we teach at church. She was aging out of our class, so I decided to make her something. Also, because I like her.

I also filled it with random things I found around our house that I maybe a 12-year-old would like:

1. Some nerds I took from our candy bowl at work

2. Some Japanese cutesy tissues

3. Some fruit snacks from our pantry

4. A Hello Kitty eye mask that I somehow had

Strangely (or not strangely?) enough, she seemed to like the eye mask the best.

Her name is Kai, those aren't just random letters...

Babies on Quilts

I made quilts for friends who were having babies and requested some pictures of the babies with the quilts. I figured what new mother wouldn't want another chance to take a picture of their baby? (The correct answer is "none").

Stan the Man and his Robot Quilt

I like this one because it looks like he is mesmerized by that robot. Don't worry Stan, robots only steal old people's medicine...

Cool nail polish, Emily!

 High as the Skyler and her Not-Your-Average-Baby-Quilt (Note: Infant was not using drugs during photo session)

Look at her smiling with her eyes. However, I think Tyra would like it better if that dress was made of raw meat and climbing up the rigging of a pirate ship.

Yay! It goes with the color palette of the room!

A special thanks to this blog entry's contributing photographers and teeny tiny models!

Cross-stitchery

Today I want to post about some of my embroidery I have been doing....

I like embroidery because the product looks fancier and harder than it is. If you can draw a picture and thread a needle, you can embroider. And you don't even really have to be able to draw, because you can just trace pictures....of anything, which you are indeed about to see. You can embroider anything as silly as you want. The point being that an embroidered picture of a bouquet of flowers looks a lot cooler than just a pencil sketch of it on paper. And it being embroidered magically turns it from "doodle I did on a post-it
during boring conference call" to "wow that's pretty, I'm gonna hang it on my wall." Or at least that is what I think.

My next project....

Anyway, they first one I made was just some flower I drew, inspired by various Turkish tiles and ceramics we got in on our vacation a while back. I got the idea to frame the embroidery with fabric strips from Anna Maria Horner's book, "Anna Maria's Needlework Notebook." You will see the same thing in a project that I did from her book. Anyway, I like this one, but I didn't plan out how to frame it and whatnot before I did it, so that is why the corners of the white part and cut off and different sizes on the top and bottom....

The next project I did is what I was referring to earlier about how you can embroider anything as silly as you want. My husband showed me these funny video clips of an "abridged" version of the kid's cartoon show "Dragonball Z." It is abridged in the sense that it is actually abridged - each episode is shortened, but the voices are also dubbed over to be funnier. Anyway, this embroidery has some of our favorite lines...

Must admit, still don't know exactly what to do with this one.

 And here is my embroidery I copied from the Anna Maria book. I really liked this as she did it, so I didn't really change anything except maybe some colors. A lot of this was done on the 9-hour flight from India to London while watching various crappy movies...perfect plane-time activity!

Yes, I think that purple flower was done during "The Amazing Spiderman," and the blue flower during, "The Perks of Being a Wallflower."

Not your average baby quilt

So this post is for a quilt I made for my former college roomie Taylor, who is pretty close to popping out a baby last I heard. She is having a girl which is good, because truth be told, it is easier to make a girl quilt. This is because about half the fabrics out there are floral and it is hard to make floral not seem a bit girly. BUT, when I heard Taylor was having a baby and started thinking about a quilt I knew I didn't want to do something traditional baby-ish (if you know Taylor you would probably agree). By this I mean overly baby pink or princess-themed or something. To show an example of what I mean, I just now googled "ugly baby girl quilt," and this is my favorite result:

So you can see that I did not want to make something that would devour her child  while she slept.

Luckily, it seemed like Taylor and I were on the same page, because I asked her if she had any color preferences, and she said she is decorating the room with "Black/White, Gray, Red, Yellow and Turquoise/Teal." Definitely not your traditional baby girl colors. I took her quite literally and this is what I came up with:

I used all solids except for a few red pieces that have little white flowers - some vintage fabric I found in a bin somewhere (a bin of fabric for sale, not a trash bin). If you are familiar with kaleidoscope quilts (google it) you will notice that the design in the middle is made up of nine kaleidoscope blocks, I just chose specific colors to create the design. You can see my other kaleidoscope quilt that looks quite different. For the backing I found a perfect matching floral print. It had teal, red, white, and gray; really perfect.

I had a fun time coming up with the quilting design on this one. I like baby quilts for experimenting because they are smaller and more manageable on my machine. I decided to try to highlight the design in the middle by outlining it with closely spaced lines and I also made some diamond designs in the gray fabric. I do like the little star I did in the center.

Decent job hiding the ugly 80's apartment building in the background (my apartment building)

 All in all, I am very satisfied with the end result! It is fun experimenting with kaleidoscope quilts because I enjoy making them and they are pretty versatile in terms of the design.

Blue-Purple-Chartreuse Kaleidoscope

Okay sorry, I have a backlog of quilting projects to blog about. Well like two. Three if you count the bag I made. Two entries in one day...

I hate to pick favorites, but this is one of them. This quilt was given to my mother-in-law for Christmas. Or should I say JanuaryNineteenth-mas....because I was here during Christmas:

My brother pointed out that this should be an ad for Lonely Planet (notice the guidebook strategically held in my hand)

The Quilt

I decided I wanted to do a kaleidoscope quilt based on some cool things I saw on the glorious Pinterest. I decided to make it for my mother-in-law because I figured she would want a quilt; especially because she is always cold (cold body + quilt = slightly warmer body). I thought she might like these colors, because uhhh...who doesn't like blue? Have you ever met anyone who doesn't like blue? Now some people might not like chartreuse, but I like chartreuse, and if I have learned anything from Project Runway it is that you have to be "true to yourself as a designer" (said in a obnoxious, I'm-quoting-Project-Runway, voice). I have also learned from Project Runway that the character Mugatu from Zoolander was not a parody, but in fact Michael Kors dressed in silly clothes.

seriously. and even more obvious if you hear them talk.

I debated the arrangement of these blocks and whether I should strive for some larger pattern, similar to Lizzy House's "Diamond Mountain" Quilt (Diamond Mountain). I chose not to because I wasn't confident in my ability to pull it off. Coincidentally, I had some of Lizzy House's fabric that I was already planning to use in this quilt. I forgot the name, but it looks like blue Agra-ba from Aladdin. That fabric also has a tiny bit of chartreuse, inspiring me to use the straight-up chartreuse fabric. Ahh...connections. In the end I decided to do..., well you can see for yourself:

But first:

Like this, minus some people and genies

For the quilting, I outlined some of the stars. After doing that, I decided it wasn't enough (I should have taken a picture!). I decided to do diagonal stripes across the blocks, which I really liked in the end. Especially on the back. The backing is a really pretty blue and purple batik that I splurged on because I liked it so much. I ordinarily think the batiks that are so popular right now are over-rated and can look old-ladyish, but as I said, I liked this one a lot. And it matched the quilt top perfectly (Again, I was lucky that I found something to use as a back after I had already finished the top).

Back with quilting....and mustache men!

Thank you grass across the apartment building parking lot!