Miniature and much more precision than I thought was possible

These are at least miniature for me...  I admired a little quilt at guild on Friday.  My friend had joined a group at one of the local quilt shops and was going to make a little quilt every month for a year using Jo Morton fabrics.  I was intrigued because the pieces were so tiny.  I went to the first class yesterday.  These aren't really my usual colors or style, but I wanted to see if I could do it...

The little pinwheels are 1" across and the entire piece is about 11"x12".  The trick there was to make bigger pinwheels, starch and press them, and then trim them down to size.   The pieces would be way to little to actually make the pinwheels the proper size.  The inside square is also 1" in the squares in a square quilt and that one is about 13" x 13".  These were fun, though a bit time consuming, to make.  (I know I could have made a bed sized quilt in almost the same time.)  These are just the tops, I'll probably hand quilt to finish them.  I'm going to do a series and hang them together.  

Hand Work

I've finished hand quilting the 1" diagonal lines and flowers in the Tropical Flowers quilt.  I would like to quilt a couple more lines between each of those diagonal lines and then decide if I want to do diamonds or just diagonal lines.  I'm also hand appliquéing the stems and berries on the be thankful quilt.  I have finished the piecing, the borders, the freehand letters, and the stems in the basket.  I have to do the border appliqué and the buds on the stems.  Slow work, but the Tropical Flowers is turning out well, and the be thankful quilt will be perfect for my bedroom, where it will remind me every day to be thankful.    

Baskets this week

Wow this photo is funky.  I really don't have a blue light in the florida room...

The acrylic base in this basket is made with one of mom's brazillian agates.  I made 20 of them or so for my basket guild.  I used dyed reed with a continuous weave base and a woven rim.  Everyone's baskets turned out really nicely.

This is a project from a Pat Sloan pattern that was started last weekend at a weekend quilting retreat at a  friend's house.  I took this pattern, a handful of blues, greens, browns and all the light gold/yellow that I had.  It took a fabric store run to get the rest of the background fabrics, but I finished the backgrounds on Friday.  I pieced the baskets and started appliqueing them to the backgrounds on Saturday.  I finished them this week and still need to piece and applique the borders, but I'm getting closer and I think it will look lovely in my bedroom.

I finished the long arming on Easy Street this afternoon too, so will bind tomorrow and take photos this week.  It turned out well and that is good because I want to hang it in my guild quilt show in April.  I have also spent several hours hand quilting this weekend.  The vacuuming did not get done...no time,  hmmm.  Wonder why? 

Easy Street, the Flimsy

Hard to see on my brown flannel board, but the outside is a 5 1/2" black piece.  I literally used every lime, turquoise, and purple scrap that I had in order to piece the middle border.  It's big, 102" x 102", and it will go on the longarm just as soon as it is fixed.  H got another part today, hopefully this one does the trick and I'm back on the machine.

On the other hand, I'm still hand quilting on the tropical flowers.

I need another project, string star or more appliqué?  And I have a basket going too.  More about that later.  

Easy Street

What a learning experience!  This is a lousy photo, but Easy Street has been assembled, except the borders.  It was my first Bonnie Hunter mystery.  It was lots of pieces, more than 2000, and looking at the box of 3 1/2" pieces, I thought this one was going to end up in the trash.  But I followed the directions, used a few pins putting the rows together, and it is done and amazingly, pretty much square, though with a few missing points on the geese.  I didn't buy any fabric and really did use lots of scraps of purples, greens, and blues.  I had a few yards of a white fabric with little multi color designs on it, hence the bits of color in the whites.  This being the first time, I followed her color recommendations, except that I used black instead of gray and I'm glad that I did.  I like the black and white four patches.  They really set off the colors and the blocks.  I'm sure there will be a pinstripe of black in the border too.  This will be carefully quilted with an over-all pattern on the long arm.  There are lots of bumpy corners on this quilt.   Thanks to Bonnie Hunter for the free pattern and for the opportunity to watch the progress from quilters all over the world on the quiltville.com Monday link.  It was fun.       

Hand Quilting

Yep, hand quilting, slowly.  

Working on Easy Street

Bonnie Hunter has started a Mystery Quilt on her blog called Easy Street.  She evidently does one periodically and the last few years, they have been made with LOTS of pieces, but she promised an easier version this time, hence the "Easy Street" title.  She has a link to people doing it on her blog and the numbers are impressive.  There are lots of folks all over the world working on this, so I thought I would join the fun.  However, we are already at several hundred pieces with several weeks to go, so everything is relative.  My colors are similar to what she is doing, though I traded out her gray for black.  I'm using turquoise, purple, and lime, as she suggested and a white background with a little multicolor in it.  I didn't know what I was going to do with all the leftover Susan Branch white from EB's quilt, but now I have a lot less of it.  When I saw Bonnie a few weeks ago in Ann Arbor, one of the things she said was that there weren't any ugly fabric, the pieces just weren't small enough and sure enough, if you cut it up into 2" x 2" squares, you don't see any of the pattern at all.  But after this is done, I'm still building the string lonestar.