The Bunny Project

It was a lot of fun on Sunday to make my letters for the bunny project.  After the word was finished, I crazy patched scraps of fabric to make my bunny.

I already had the outline drawing that I planned to use, so just needed to make sure that the crazy patched piece was large enough.  I finished the reverse applique this morning.  I wish that there was a bit more contrast, but I think that embellishment will take care of any problem in that department.

Now I'll think about how to fit things together.  I'm almost completely out of the light green print that I used for background, so will have to come up with something else.

 

No Discipline

OK, I know that a lot of other quilters will identify with this.  After working last night and all morning on the "serious" quilt that I showed yesterday..........I totally fell off the wagon!  One of those ideas in my head got more and more insistent until it just popped out!

I think you can see where this is going!  I have been a fan of Tonya Ricucci since I found her mentioned on Bonnie Hunter's website.  I love the wacky, crooked letters and have used them before, once in the shop banner that we take to quilt shows and use as a logo on the website.

Tonya's book Word Play Quilts is new and I recommend it.  What else is in store for the bunny quilt?  I haven't done any reverse applique for a while.  I'll do a crazy patch piece of bright, springy, pastel colors, then reverse applique the bunny outline, something that I learned from Jan Mullen's book Reverse Applique With No Brakez. 

Some of my quilting buddies were online today, talking about cleaning and sorting stashes, including pre-cutting pieces to be used at a later date.  WHY?  With my luck, I would NEVER need the sizes I had cut!  That would just take away from sewing time!  I'd rather dig through the pile and pull out likely candidates like I did today.  I don't mean that my stash is super messy.  Fabrics are folded and stacked, mainly grouped by size.  The only fabrics I have segregated are the 30's prints and batiks.  Just my 2 cents.

Oriental Tiles

I started cutting out this quilt at the end of January.  It's a commercial pattern, designed by Ursula Riegel and I think it will really be pretty made with these fabrics I've chosen.

Lots and lots of pieces!  Three hundred pieces, to be exact.  All stacked up in neat little piles.  I finally got back to this project this week and started the sewing.  Here's what it looked like when I was getting started.

The reason there are so many pieces is that each big piece has four corner triangles.  No one wants to sit and draw that many lines.  There is another way to do it!  I drew a line on a piece of masking tape and lined it up with the needle on the sewing machine.  Each small square is lined up on the corner of a larger piece.  The machine needle is lowered into the exact corner where the sewing begins and as I sew across the square I make sure that the opposite corner travels up the marked line.  Like this:

I still have a ways to go, but I have enough sewn to give a good hint as to where this is going.

Currently I am teaching a beginning quilting class here at the store one day a week, finishing the hand quilting on a bed-size quilt, working on a new pattern design and just itching to work on a couple other ideas rattling around in my head.  There is never time to be bored!

Big Stitch Quilting

Yesterday and today I worked on a table runner that I'm hand quilting with #12 pearl cotton and an embroidery needle.  I've quilted quite a few things this way in the past few years (taught workshop for Kinston, NC quilt guild last year) and really enjoy it for a number of reasons.  One is that it is faster than traditional hand quilting with tiny needle and quilting thread.  Another reason is that it adds a decorative element.  It can look "country" or it can mimic sashiko for a dressier look.

Like the scrappy pink pineapple that I showed in an earlier post, I'll be using this as a sample during my "Binding 101" class on Feb. 19.  Then I'll have a few more FINISHED pieces to show off.  Here's another picture, taken a little closer, so hopefully the stitching will show up:

What if?

When I finished cutting out the pieces of "Crooked on Purpose", I had some nice little batik scraps left over.  I decided to see what I could make by strip piecing them and incorporating them into a new design.  The aqua/turquoise were eliminated but I used everything else (heavy on the green/brown/orange).

I like crooked things, so I sewed strips together the way they were.  If any were too wide, I cut them in half.  I trimmed nice, neat little rectangles.   For my new idea I needed some strong contrast, so I found the dark brown and strong orange, strip pieced and trimmed.

I have some design options to consider:

I'll let you know how it turns out....................





  

The Shop Hop Quilt

With the shop hop over, I can show off the quilt.  This was our 6th year, the "wood" anniversary, so each owner was challenged to create their own original log cabin quilt.  Mine is titled "Aunt Glady's Permanent Wave", named for my Great Aunt Gladys, who had a cosmetology license for over 60 years!

I used 30's reproduction prints and solid blue and yellow Kona Cotton.  The size is 74" x 86".  Here's a close-up, so you can see the pretty machine quilting done by Lilly Lucier of Vanceboro, NC.

I'll set up my machine tomorrow morning and get back to work.  I have at least 4 projects that need attention.



Shop Hop

We are participating in the "Romancing Eastern North Carolina Shop Hop" that begins today and runs through Saturday.  Anyone interested can find COMPLETE details on our website:  www.cottonfieldsnc.com.  Even though the shop hop is a lot of fun, it also means that I have to clean up the classroom and put things away/out of sight, so there won't be too much sewing going on this week.  I DID finish cutting out "Oriental Tiles" and I will post a picture as soon as I have something to show.  Also, I basted a table runner the other night, so I can quilt on that.

We have had an unusual amount of cold weather and snow here in eastern North Carolina this winter.  Since there aren't any "quilting pictures" today, here's one of Baby, one of the shop cats, as she sits at the window on the day after Christmas.  It snowed and snowed and she watched all day.