French General Table Topper

After I made the shop sample for The Vintage Owl, the owner told me to pick out some fabric for a trade- I got this gorgeous Moda French General layer cake and jelly roll! I searched Pinterest and all over the Intraweb, and decided to make a giant half-square triangle star. I did free motion wavy-line quilting and bound it using a faux piping trick I learned from Ricky Tims. I’ve taught a class on it too– it works up super quickly and easily! PS you can also make a small table topper using charm squares, or cut your own size!

I used layer cake squares and a jelly roll strip on the back just to make it more interesting.

And here’s a small one I made from charm squares. The blue floral print was from the Grandmother stash from the 80s! Looks like it was made specially for this fabric. 

Here are projects from my classes. I always love seeing how different each one turns out!

 

Plan Bee– Charity Quilts

My friend Laurie, my stepmom Mama G, and I joined our local quilt guild after taking a class from longtime member Dot Collins in July 2014. I made name tags for us! It’s the Golden Triangle Quilt Guild and it has good programs; I’ve learned a lot!

In learning about “quilt culture,” we found out that within guilds are many bees, small we groups where people actually sew and do projects. Some are highly organized, with officers, minimum project and fabric swap participation requirements, and others are more loosely organized. We decided to form one (we’ve since added our friend Michelle; I need to make a tag for her!) that is VERY loose… As in bring what you’re working on loose. It’s good to have a day set aside where sewing and visiting with friends is THE priority of the day.

We pondered a name for our bee for a long time and finally decided on Plan Bee, because it seems that nothing we do turns out like we expected it to! It’s never ugly– just different. As Dot told us, there are no mistakes, only creative opportunities! Sometimes we get to Plan C, D, E, and F!

The Community Service group in our guild puts together  kits from donated fabric that we can check out to sew, and sometimes people piece a quilt and it just needs quilting. We donate to Veterans’ organizations and our local Boys’ Haven, a temporary housing facility for boys taken from their homes. Our goal is to give every boy a quilt they can take home with them when they return. Michelle pieced these:

Laurie has a new Longarm quilter and she has quilted 2 and pieced and quilted 1 but we didn’t get pictures!

I made 2 with these fabrics from the Grandmother stash. I practiced my free motion quilting and could see it improving! I didn’t mark anything but I did use the squares as landmarks. I made my diet mitered border… You would know I’d do that with a stipe! But I was happy with the way they turned out, and hopefully some little boys have quilts they will use and love.

I quilted these 2:

and pieced this one from kits I picked up from  the community service group at Guild.

So, our Plan Bee count as of July 2015 is

pieced tops: 4

quilted: 4

complete quilts: 3

Moda Winterlude Table Runners

When I was quilting the first time around there was no internet, no Craftsy, no YouTube, no Pinterest… Only Quilter’s Newsletter Magazine. (And paper templates and scissors!) I don’t even know if there were fabric designers who made fabric specially for quilting. But times have changed and now they tempt you for months before a fabric line is released, like the next season of Downton Abbey or something, putting out teasers on Pinterest and on quilting blogs.

I began coveting Moda Winterlude before it was released. Then the Missouri Star Quilt Company featured a charm pack as the Daily Deal, so I ordered 2! A pattern was released with it, but I decided it was too labor intensive, so I went with my old pal half square triangles. I divided the squares into reds, greens, and creams and experimented with different arrangements, finally deciding on the concentric diamonds. I got yardage for the borders and back at Gone Quiltin‘ in Bandera, Texas in August 2014 while doing the Row by Row run. I love the way it turned out!

 

I had had the blue pieces left so I decided to make a simple square with those. This was my first real project that I quilted free motion. I used a holly leaf motif. There were several “eyelashes” where I went too fast around the curves– the machine beeped at me a lot! (Now, several moNyah’s later, controlling the speed is much easier.)

 

S