the one I made

Finally I can show off the little quilt I made for Julie, for PQS5!

For this quilt, I started out just by making some selvage rainbows. Then I trimmed them all down to the same width (4", 4 1/2", I can't remember for sure) and made half-square triangles with the selvages and some Kona crush.

I wanted to do something interesting with the quilting... I think I achieved that. The swirls weren't too difficult, it was the straight-ish line spiral in the colored triangles that was challenging to get right.

Here's a view of the back, another look at the quilting:

These swap quilts are a good chance to try out new patterns, or piecing ideas, or quilting ideas, without committing to something huge and super time consuming. :)

Hope you had a great Valentine's Day! The We Love Jenny auction will be open until 10 pm EST, Tuesday February 15. Please check it out, and help out if you can.

have a heart

Last night I read Amy S.'s latest blog post and was reminded of the We Love Jenny Auction which will be held on Valentine's Day. The auction is to raise money for medical and housing expenses for Jenny Reeder, who was diagnosed with leukemia in November and is working hard to beat it! I met Jenny when we were teenagers and have a lot of great memories of our neighborhood, camp, and church activities during our high school years. I was so sad when I found out she was sick... and I hope and pray she will make it safely through this ordeal. So anyway, I decided to go ahead and make something relatively quick for her auction. I found this Valentine Flag tutorial at Nanette's blog--I saw it a couple years ago and finally decided to make one.

I made one heart instead of two... The fabrics are mostly from a Love is in the Air layer cake I've been slowly using up. :) I will be finishing this mini-quilt up in the next few days so it will be ready for the auction on Monday!

Holiday Gift Swap

I had a great time at the KC Modern Quilt Guild meeting last night. We had our holiday party and for the gift swap we were divided up into groups, then we had discussion questions to talk about so we could get to know each other better. We talked about our sewing spaces, what "modern quilting" means, what we want to learn next year, and more. (My goal is to learn how to do invisible zippers.) Then we opened gifts in our small groups according to age with the oldest going first. (I was not first, or last.) Here's the present I got, made by Stephanie:

Isn't she pretty? I think so. :) My little girl likes her a lot; we are calling her the "Christmas lady."

And then the youngster of our group got the last present, which was from me.

I had a hard time deciding what to make but here's what I ended up with. I sewed all the applique on ticker-tape style, after the 3 layers of the quilt were all layered. I wish I could have come up with something for that upper left corner but I guess it's ok the way it is.

My 6-year-old is in a VERY LITERAL phase of life right now and he did not approve of my crooked and messy lines in this project. He said, "That's not a star" about my star and then told me the whole thing isn't very good. It's ok though, I told him it was supposed to be this way, but he thinks everything should be as neat and realistic as possible right now.

Here's the back:

It has the look of a string quilt block, only I didn't use any foundation paper or fabric for it. My advice on this kind of back is not to trim it the same size as the front until after the quilting is done! I wasn't thinking quite right on that one, should have left the back a little bigger.

Oh yeah, I didn't point this out last night, but one of the tree fabrics is the feather fabric designed by Lauren--I'm glad she ended up with this and I hope she likes it as much as I do!