quilts – Stars & Sunshine

Sparkling Stars Quilt

October 16, 2014 Julia 5 Comments

My mom is fantastic. She loves everything I make. I don’t think it actually matters how it turns out, she’ll think its beautiful and amazing. Since she appreciates things I make more than just about anyone else, I figure it was about time I made her a quilt!

Sparkling Stars Quilt

She loves the color blue, so I decided to put all my favorite blue fabrics into one quilt for her. This quilt has (16) 12″ stars around the outside, each of which has two different fabrics.

Blue Lone Star Block

There are also (2) bigger 24″ stars in the center. The spokes of these stars are each made with (8) smaller triangles of similar shades.

Lone Star Quilt

I used Michael Miller’s stitch square in sea for the background – I love the low volumeness and how it reads as white, but has a bit of blue. I’m hoping that it won’t look dirty quite as easily as a solid white background would.

Blue Green Quilt

I was also excited to get to use bits of things my sister and I love, like penguins, stars, and elephants.

Sparkling Stars Blue Quilt

This was really my first attempt at free motion quilting on a big scale, other than my sister’s jewel star quilt – which was technically free motion quilting, but really just straight lines. I did feathers and squiggles in the smaller stars, and then giant feathers in the big stars. They’re not anywhere close to perfect, but I’m really happy with how they turned out. And of course, my mom is impressed.

Minky Quilt Back

My mom’s one request was that it have a soft, cuddly back, so I used minky. The quilting doesn’t show up super well in person, but it adds a neat texture to the minky where it tacked some of it down.

Quilt Specs:
Pattern: self-designed. I’m calling it ‘sparkling stars’ because I like to think the mixed fabrics in the center stars look a bit sparkly!
Size: 50″ x 75″
Fabric: lots of quilting cottons on the front, Stitch in Sea background, and minky on the back.
Made for: my mom!

Penguin Mini Quilt

October 11, 2014 Julia 5 Comments

I’m becoming a big fan of mini quilts. No, they’re not especially practical. But its so fun to try out new things on a small scale without committing to an entire quilt. Plus, everything’s cuter in miniature form, right?

Fractured Penguin Mini Quilt

As part of the Houston Modern Quilt Guild, I got to participate in the Michael Miller Fabric Challenge a while back. They sent us all a few free fat eighth pieces of fabric, and we got to make whatever we wanted with them and whatever solids and other Michael Miller prints we wanted.

Fractured Penguin Mini Quilt

I fell head-over-heels in love with pictures Violet Craft’s Forest Abstractions patterns when I saw them on instagram, but the patterns hadn’t been released yet when I was trying to decide what to do with my challenge fabric. I also am kind of crazy about penguins, so I decided to have a go at designing my own paper pieced penguin pattern in a similar geometric style by sketching it out on a piece of paper, then having it blown up and printed on copy paper at office depot.

Fractured Penguin Mini Quilt Pattern

I used 6 gray kona solids (charcoal, graphite, ash, medium gray, smoke, and steel, I think), along with some of the gray, orange, and yellow bits of the challeng fabric and michael miller stitch for the background. I had a lot of fun free motion quilting this! I used a solid black on the back to really show off the quilting.

Penguin Free Motion Quilting

I’m thinking about tweaking the pattern a bit and trying to put it together as a pattern to release. If anyone is interested, let me know!

Quilt Specs:
Design: Fractured Penguin – designed by me!
Size: 14.5″x19″
Made for: me! as a part of the Michael Miller Fabric Challenge (2014).

Puzzled Hearts Quilt

February 21, 2014 Julia 4 Comments

A couple of our friends got married back in July, and I made them a quilt. I actually got it done reasonably on time (not before the wedding, but at least before they got back from their honeymoon). Each of the colored squares on the front is 3.5″ finished, and the whole quilt is roughly 56×70″ (16×20 squares with 12 hearts)

I had talked with the new Mrs. about colors they’d and we’d decided on greens/blues/purples, and I knew she loved puzzles – and this is what I came up with.

At a Houston Modern Quilt Guild meeting, I’d completely fallen in love with and , and ended up kind of putting them together in the colors we’d chosen.

For the back, I made a giant heart in the same style as the ones on the front, and appliqued their initials and wedding date (kind of like this tree quilt I made for another friends’ wedding)

I then did all over puzzle style quilting, which was deceptively easy and a very forgiving!

You can see a few more quilts I’ve made here 🙂

Wonky Jewel Stars Quilt

June 29, 2013 Julia 3 Comments

I haven’t posted anything sewing-related here in quite a while, but that doesn’t mean I haven’t been doing any sewing! I’ve made one quilt, started another quilt, made several pillows, and started practicing free motion quilting all in the past couple of months. More on the rest later, but here’s the first quilt. It’s made of lots of wonky stars in jewel tone colors, but with prints in the centers.

The quilt I made was for my sister, Steph. We’d kind of talked about me making a quilt for her before, but I think it was kind of a surprise that she got one now for her birthday. We’d decided that she liked my taste/style enough to completely surprise her with the colors/design, which was pretty scary for me. Quilts are a lot of work, and the idea of giving one to someone that isn’t really their jam – yikes! Anyways, I think she really likes it – crisis averted! The finished quilt fits a full-sized bed nicely.

I completely stole the idea from here, but only used 4 solid colors. I used 21 prints: 6 purple, 6 navy, 6 green, and 3 gray. There are two stars of each print – 42 blocks total. This was one of my first bigger projects using my much-loved Japanese fabric. Its good that I’ve finally started using it though, because I’ve just gotten back another work trip to Japan right now and bought more fabric this time as well 🙂

The backing fabric is flannel, and is this really fun bold print. I also added a pieced border using all the print fabrics from the quilt top, which was a last-minute addition that I completely love.

Baby Quilt

April 12, 2012 Julia 41 Comments

Friends of ours in Austin just had a baby last week! I’d made them a super simple baby quilt, and since we were in town to celebrate my sister’s birthday, we got to drop it off in person and see the baby (who is seriously one of the cutest babies I’ve ever seen) at only three days old.

From the mom’s own blog and her pinterest nursery board, I knew she loved gray and white chevron and had pinned this fabric. For the quilting, I stitched down the centers of some of the stripes (with white thread on both white and gray stripes). I’ve only just now realized this is two chevron quilts in a row, but they were both because the people I was making them for liked chevron separately.

I’d been eyeing this super cuddly minky fabric at JoAnn’s with these adorable whales for months, just trying to come up with an excuse to buy some. When Eddie and I decided we wanted to make a quilt for this baby, I knew I wanted to use this for the back. It is so, so soft! I also love the seafoam green color with the gray and white on the front.

The quilt is roughly 2.5′ by 4′. I machine sewed on the binding using the plaid scottie’s tutorial to make sure it would be durable.