150 Solids in One Quilt

 In 2012 I participated in a stash builder program from Mad About Patchwork in Ottawa.  Over a year we received 150 Kona cotton solid fat quarters.  I kept them together all these years as I had a dream to use all those lovely colours in the same quilt.  I found Tula Pink's 100 Modern Blocks book a few years ago and thought perhaps I could use that for the challenge. But, how to combine all those colours successfully?  

Kaffe Fasset to the rescue.  He mixes warm and cool colours in his fabrics effortlessly and pulls it off.  So, I used all 150 of the solids with some Kaffe scraps in each block and hoped they would go.  It was actually amazing how easily the design came together.  I arranged the blocks by colour from darker to lighter from bottom to top and fell in love with this arrangement.  I was originally going to use grey for the background, but this quilt demanded yellow!  

Julie Cassidy quilted it with straight lines through the blocks and custom feathery quilting in the yellow.  Click on the photos to see the detail of the lovely quilting.  I was very happy with the way this quilt turned out.  It will be added to the pile of quilts for the grandkids to choose from when they graduate from High School.

The yellow is softer than it shows on this photo

I had a large piece of this happy Kaffe Fasset fabric in my stash which I scored in a sale bin years ago and this worked perfectly for the back

A close up of Julie's beautiful quilting

 

Be my Neighbour!

 In May, the London Friendship Quilter's Guild offered its members a sew along to keep us connected during the lockdown.  Each week we were sent instructions to make a house block.  Once a week a zoom meeting was organized and we were able to show one another our blocks (or the lack of one ☺) and chat with one another.  It was a great way to keep in touch and get to know members better.

Kona solids was my choice for this sampler quilt since I have a wonderful collection of them.  I had an awesome piece of house fabric that I bought awhile ago at The Quilt Kitchen in Exeter and used that to choose colours for the quilt.  

 

I had a darker grey Kona solid and used it for background.  I never looked at the size of the quilt and happily started on my first block when I realized it was 18" by 12" or 14"!!  That is huge.  A panic email out to the Quilt Kitchen for more grey Kona.  Yes, she had it in stock and tossed it in the mail that same afternoon and it was in my community mailbox at 9:30 the next day! When does that ever happen? It was quilted by Chris Bogart.

(Click on the photo for a larger view.)

The finished quilt

I saved all the cut offs from the angles pieces of the quilt and used them as leaders/enders and made pinwheels and houses out of them and used them for the back of the quilt since I didn't have enough of the house fabric for the whole backing.  A multi coloured Kaffe Fasset fabric was perfect for the binding.

Chris quilted it with a bird/flower overall pantograph ☺.

 

This summer I got a Bernina 1230 and it has a blanket stitch!  I tried it out on these cute bird appliques on this quilt and it worked very well.

Comfort Quilts

 Last February, my friend Mary Lou came over and we spent a whole day rooting around in my leaders/enders collection.  I've been sewing cut offs together for many years and it was time to get them all organized and sorted.  We had a fun day thinking of projects to make with these.  I found a bunch of sample blocks from classes that I taught way back in the early 2000's!  And these fabrics have been in my stash since the 80's and 90's!  With some small hst's (half square triangles) I managed to make up a few more blocks to finish off one of the rows and we used up lots of larger hst's to make pinwheel blocks.  This row quilt was the result.  I just quilted it with simple straight lines.   Satisfying to use it up!  It will go to our local hospital's chemo unit for a comfort quilt.

The finished quilt - the binding still needed to be sewn down by hand

one of the tiny hst blocks

The second tiny hst block

We also found a whole bunch of black and white HST blocks in our quilt group's stash.  The black part had little tiny paw prints on it.  I had a stack of four patches which I've made as leaders/enders over the years and they fit beautifully with the black and white squares to create this layout.  I found the dog print for the border.  Someone will love this one for a comfort quilt at the chemo unit.  Now I need to start sewing up four patches again!

Finished quilt

Close up of the dog print and paws.  I quilted this one with simple straight lines too.

Playing with Kaffe Fasset fabrics!

My students wanted to do a sampler quilt with 6" blocks, so I dug out the class notes for the blocks I taught in 2002. Here is the quilt I made from the my sample blocks for the original class:

I thought it would be fun to update the blocks this time for my samples and dug into a stack of Kaffe Fasset fat quarters that my friend Els from Holland brought for me when she visited in September. I had a collection of solids as well. It was fun digging through the fabrics to come up with combinations. Here are the first two trees:

This afternoon I made some houses, one with a chimney and one without; one with curtains and one without:



Here are the four blocks together so far. I am liking these wild, bright trees and houses. I don't know what I'm going to do with them yet, but I'll grow some more trees and build some more houses when the mood hits :-)