Up, Up and Away!

Members of Annie's Star Quilt Guild will know exactly what this block is intended for... but for now it's a secret! Shhhhh... :0)

It was fun going thru my stash and found each of these fabrics in one box or another. YES! Even used a ribbon remnant to embellish the balloon. The colors were a match. Love it when that happens!

Stash, as nice as it is to have to pull from, it takes up space that I just don't have any more. I've sold allot at yard sales, donate to the guild and now sharing fabric at Goldie's Scrap happy days. Recently I purchased a new book at Honey Run that is perfect for stash busting... Adding Layers—Color, Design, & Design, by Kathy Doughty of Material Obsession. I was able to pull fabrics in order to make three of the 15 quilt projects in the book! I had fun making a few test blocks and fussy cutting some old brights for one pattern in the book ~ Vintage Spin. A take on a Dresden Plate block. I may call this one Fun in the Sun. A black and white fabric will be added for the center circles as well as the binding.

Following are pix from the book... This is Vintage Spin. This could be made in any fabrics.

All you need are two 9 x 26" pieces of fabric for each block, FQs work with some to spare for fussy cutting.

The patterns can be adapted to both modern and traditional fabrics. Carolina Lilly is a traditional block. The quilt in this book is a bit of a modern version...

There is a giant Churn Dash

also with a modern spin as well as a Sawtooth Star that is very modern. Named Super Nova here it is made into a quilt by Theresa at Honey Run, a quilt sample for Pacific International that she asked me to quilt. Here is a link to Moonbear Designs and Quilting blog with more pix. I actually prefer Theresa's version with her Essex yarn dyed fabric for the background.

 How about this one, talk about scrappy!

It's going to be fun to make a few of the quilts from the book, to play with my Civil War fabrics as well as some Kaffe fabrics, batiks and some vintage favorites waiting to be make into quilts. Oh, but will they be mixed together!?! Shutter at the thought! 

And to the subject of goals... Time to get back to them! Back to my three letter projects (BOMs, WIPs and UFOs) along with the stash busting. I am finally caught up with the back log of quilts after switching from one longarm machine to another. Still have a number to do, 30 plus with another dozen on my list which is why my turn around time is in November.

I would love to get that number down, again, the whole storage thing. I've had to use my personal quilting space for storage. It's my little sewing room that is air conditioned and heated and in the house. My studio is not and in this hot weather is not a fun place to be in the afternoons. I start very early in the morning, literally at the *^#% crack of dawn.

Since I no longer qualify for A Lovely Year of Finishes, I guess I'll have to go it alone!

Enjoy your weekend, take some time to take a few stitches! Groetjes, Jo

Goal for May

My May goal is to put together the blocks and borders to make Cactus Flower a flimsy. The blocks are cut and up on my design wall. I have been playing around with the colors and placement after adding some fabrics that I had in my stash, the fuchsia centers in the SIC blocks and the gold in the star blocks are two of those fabrics. The majority of the fabrics are Northcott's Stonehenge.

The pattern is Cactus Flower by Kate Mitchell Quilts

My May goal for A Lovely Year of Finishes 

Enjoy the rest of the weekend!

Freezing to Flipflops and a Finish

My April goal is quilted, binding on and finished with a label.... for A Lovely Year of Finishes.
(Goal post # 83 and Finish post # 74)
  2014 MidWinter Blues QAL with Lori/Humble Quilts... 

Happy with the fabric choice added to the blocks and setting corner triangles
 I also used it for the binding.

Quilted with a feather and scroll b2b design and a border/corner set.
 And the label... with a Daf added for a Spring finish...

I had to work fast to take a few pix outside this evening, the mosquitoes are terrible already! After a weekend of thunderstorms and hail we are now in the 90's today and I'm wearing flipflops!!! This morning I tipped everything with standing water from the storm. Sadly there were a few flower casualties...

The first of my all time favorite... my China Red Poppy

The first 2 blooms are a little worse for wear from the rain and hail

Not to worry, there are many more buds ready to open soon :0)

Follow this link to see more April finishes at a Lovely Year of Finishes with Shanna and Melissa

Jo

April Goal

Considering how hopelessly behind I am in my longarm quilting duties I am setting another easy goal for April for A lovely Year of Finishes. My goal is to quilt, bind and label a flimsy. This is MidWinter Blues, a QAL with Lori ~ Humble Quilts blog. The link will take you to her post and the linky with everyone's finished tops. I am the only crazy person that made the original inspiration quilt. I do wish I had taken the time to add sashing like Lori did in her version for the QAL, it would have been way more forgiving with these blocks set on point and all of those little triangles!

I plan to do a b2b (border to border) in the center field and a border with corner design for the outer border. I have a feather and scroll design in mind. Found some tea stained muslin in my stash for the backing and am good to go! It will also be good practice to do on my Innova. I love my Innova... and the Auto Pilot, well lets say we are beginning to get along a little better! 

This week as I was chatting with Nancy and Marna at Cathy's Honeyrun quilt store, Nancy was asking about my Innova. We started brainstorming ideas for names and I mentioned it had chrome handlebars, which I have yet to see on another Innova! With the names Innova and Auto Pilot she thought it sounded more like a spaceship or fancy motorcycle! So we thought of Harley! I like it!!! and the Auto Pilot, I'm thinking it needs it's own name... Hal because that computer has a mind of it's own!!! 

Harley and Hal. What do you think?

Quite happy that it's Friday altho I will be working this weekend to try and catch up. Had a wonderfully evening last night. Met for dinner with Donna, Esther, Brandie and Gail at the newest TBar on Forest/FlyingV in Chico that opened last week. Food was great! After we all went to our Annie's Star Quilt guild meeting with a trunk show with Rob Appell. Very entertaining!

Enjoy your weekend! 

Jo, who is looking forward to some Spring soon!

March finish

My NYD Mystery quilt is a finish for A Lovely Year of Finishes. (Goal post #44 and finish post #113) Thank you Shanna and Melissa for hosting :0)

Quilting, binding and a label are finished. After reading a thread on labels on Pinterest and theinboxjaunt, I made this label by folding it in half, machine sewing it on to the edges of a corner, the binding is stitched over the edges and then the one fold is hand sewn down. Worked great!

Hummm, I'm thinking there needs to be a moon added to the corner :0) Janie, who joined me on New Year's Day and started her top, finished her top this week. It's here on my table waiting to be quilted. Along with my label I also made one for Janie with a butterfly :0)

Besides finishing our mystery quilts, we cut out the center block of Amaretto Cottage. Here is my finished test blocks up on the design wall.

Post update: Amaretto Cottage is a BOM from 2012 by Marianne Elizabeth, Classically Home collections for RJR fabrics. Janie asked me to help her put this quilt together. She is working with the RJR kit fabrics. There are errors in the directions including cutting sizes. number of cuts and finished block sizes. We have done allot of unsewing and we are not sure if Janie will have enough fabric to finish if we remake blocks.  I am now "testing" the pattern for Janie so the blocks above are pulled from my CW stash and are different from the original kit.

The fabrics in the kit are gorgeous and the designer deserves kudos for that. Hopefully she has a better pattern tester now for her new kits.

LynCC in Colorado made Amaretto Cottage, HERE is a link to her post to see her finished quilt in the RJR fabrics. Also a link to one of her posts as she was struggling with this project, the same two blocks Janie and I just finished. We contacted the designer and heard back from her assistant Amanda who has been wonderful! She is sending Janie some templates.

Mother nature is not playing nice this year. Now that Spring is on the calendar, Winter has decided to show up! Good that we are getting rain (lots of it) and snow because we were headed for a drought. Along with the rain have been days of thunderstorms and tornadoes, yep in California. Forecast is more for tomorrow.

After a busy month, happy to choose an easy goal as it took until this evening to get it finished for A Lovely Year of Finishes. I do appreciate setting a goal each month to stay focused and make it happen! Yea  Click this link to see all the finishes for this month, over 100! 

Now to think about what I would like to finish for April

Enjoy your April, hope we have Spring soon!

March Goal

Goals for March ~
My one goal for A Lovely Year of Finishes is an easy one. I have allot to do to get my longarm business back up and running. With all I have going on I am choosing to be kind to myself.

This is my 2014 New Year's Day Mystery quilt top pieced in January. It was an online mystery with Planet Patchwork, an annual event which I've participated in over the years. This is the last year with Planet Patchwork which has folded. The pattern designer, Diane may be Mary Mayhem will be setting up future mysteries on her Facebook page. 

My goal is to finish the quilting (almost there), binding and a label for a complete finish. 

Other ongoing WIPs and BOMs to work on this month. Amaretto Cottage, a BOM I am doing with my friend Janie. Barbara Brackman's Threads of Memory block 2. A baby quilt for a March baby shower and I hope to get a little further on a quilt I pieced last month, The Big EZ. This will be a window treatment for my longarm studio. First priority is to get me and my longarm running and back to quilting my customer's quilts, then the windows.

Pattern photo of The Big EZ (with my red pen marks)
 

Jo

Looking forward to Spring this month too!


Post update: I forgot to include Cheryl's Easter Baskets QAL to my list of WIPs.
Part one was posted Friday on The Olde World Quilt Shop blog, this is the link.
I have my HST papers printed out and am ready to get started on this little guy :0)

February Finish

My Tree of Life quilt top is a flimsy for my February goal and a Lovely Year of Finishes!

(Goal post 24 and finish post 104)

 I used up every single HST cut from the corners of another project and made another two dozen to finish the sawtooth inner border...

 added to the center field with corner and center stones.

With 8 inches of red fabric left for borders cut into four strips at 2 inches each. Not quite long enough for the second set of borders, I added the dark brown tree truck fabric for cornerstones to make it work for a finished quilt top!

Earlier this month I finished The Big EZ

and MidWinter's Blues 

Very happy with three flimsy finishes this month!

Starbursts

I won this quilt pattern! This quilt is called Starbursts from Honey, Bunny and Dolls and Craftsy. Also posted on Little Bunny Quilts, as a BOM in 2013. My name was drawn by Shanna and Melissa for A Lovely Year of Finishes for my quilt finish in January. The quilt pattern is a design by Amanda at Honey, Bunny and Dolls. Thank you Amanda, Shanna and Melissa. I am looking forward to making this quilt. I love paper piecing and this will be a fun project!

Hope you had a sweet Valentine's Day. My sweetie surprised me with flowers from the garden, 2 bars of my favorite chocolate from Trader Joe's and a Delft kissing couple.
Michael is a keeper!

Also a sweet Valentine's card from Pam with a card of really good hand needles.

 Thank you Pam!

If you follow my longarm quilting blog Moonbear Designs you already know that I spent the week clearing out my longarm studio in anticipation of a new Innova longarm. 

Today Michael and I broke down my worktable to move it to the other side of the studio. The new longarm will go here, where the table used to be

We cut almost a foot off of the table so that I will be able to fit in my industrial straight stitch. 

My table before and after in pieces

My table will stay in pieces until the Innova is set up. It will give Jim and Nicky of the Sew So Shop plenty of room to set up the longarm frame. 

I did have some fun this week, after getting teased by my customers for having a plastic table cloth for a window treatment, I cut out and pieced a quilt top, pattern is called the Big EZ which it was! It will be made into a Roman Shade for one of the windows. It will be the first quilt on my new longarm, once it gets here...

Soon!!!
Now to get back to making more blocks for MidWinter Blues QAL with Lori of Humble Quilts.

Groetjes, Jo

February Goals

First February goal is to finish my Tree of Life quilt top for A Lovely Year of Finishes. I've been working on this for a long time! I love designing my own tops but it takes more time to make with lots of decisions! Falls under 'The Pleasure is in the Process'. With most of them made now, it's on to finishing the top...

Second is to work on Lori @ Humble Quilts QAL ~ MidWinter Blues. Got a start on my cutting...

This is Lori's finished top

 and the antique inspiration quilt that she is working from...

I love this antique quilt and am toying with the idea of reproducing it for my project. Love how the alternating blocks form another pattern and how, altho set on point, looks like a straight set.

Third is to continue on with the Amaretto Cottage BOM with Janie. She and I got started on the next block last Wednesday, there are four of these, this is one of mine...

Fourth is to make the first block in Barbara Brackman's new BOM Threads of Memory...

 

Kathy, a quilter participating in A Lovely Year of Finishes posted her finish (#66) for January and it's her Civil War Sampler top from Barbara Brackman's 2011 Civil War BOW!  It really got me thinking about my sampler and getting that back on to my list of goals for this year. My January finish is #87 the NYD Mystery quilt top. Last night I finished quilting it so it is also quilted for a finish!

Lofty goals considering all I have going on this month switching out longarms and reorganizing my studio. It will be a fun month, once I shake this cold off!

Have a great Super Bowl Weekend!