2 finishes!

I am pleased to report that I was able to meet my goal of finishing 2 quilts before the weekend. I just couldn't post this good news on my blog because my lovely son cut the phone line while cutting the grass! Of course it took a lot of investigation, a few phone calls to India (since that is where the Bell Canada employees are located!?!) and finally a service call this morning to determine the cause of the lack of phone and computer access...ugh! I am delighted to be back on the computer (the phone I could happily do without)!!

Here is my finished Kwik Scrappy Star (pattern by Two Kwik Quilters) and I am really pleased with how it turned out...and proud that I was able to finish it in record time! I bought the kit in May, sewed the blocks and top in July, then basted and quilted in September! I am also very happy that the quilt hangs flat against the wall.

Here are a couple of close up shots of the block quilting ...a light star and a dark star. The quilt will hang in my husband's office, and I found a really neat thing to hang above it. I'll show

you a picture of it when it is installed in it's new home.
And my second finish was one of my 6o degree series. You can see the first one here. I still have 2 more in a "semi sewn" state, and maybe yet another one to come since I just got another idea of a different layout...it never ends!!

I call this "60 degree series -Hexagonal Whirlygig." I quilted all the seam lines...boring stitch in the ditch, horizontal and diagonals, and then just echo quilted in the border. Here is a close up of the border quilting.

Not very exciting, but FINISHED!!

And on to the mystery quilt....

Quilt Classes

I have finished the baby quilt just in time! I'll be leaving shortly for the reunion party. I will post photos later today since I want to include a photo of my friend with her quilt.
But here are the photos from my last 2 classes of the quilting year. The first one is from a fun class that I teach called "3 step". One of the students is missing, but here are the other 4 brave souls with one of the pieces they chose to work on. They were so creative and enthusiastic that it was pure joy to work with them.
And here are the mini quilts from the last monthly miniature class. I posted about my interest in the 60 degree angle quilts here

and here. I have finished one of my own ("Hazardous Materials") and have 4 other quilts in various stages of completion. It is lots of fun and I still think I want to make more. Of course I am thinking I could go even smaller on these pieces and have also hand pieced one of them. I'll post more on that another time, but look at these fantastic mini quilts! All made with the same technique...amazing!

60 degree triangles

I was first inspired to try my hand at 60 degree triangles last summer when I saw the quilts that Libby (of the Simple Girl blog) was making. You can read about the start of my interest in this idea here. It turned out that the layout I showed you on that blog entry was a royal pain to sew, and is still a UFO! But I had lots of fun with other layouts and here is one of my finished minis called "Hazardous Materials".

Libby told me that she used a ruler called a "Clearview Triangle" ruler to cut her triangles, but I wanted to try to use my Omnigrid ruler for the cutting. I really had fun figuring this out. No really! It was fun. I sewed together a light and a dark 1.25" strip. Then I lined up the 60 degree line on the seam and cut the first angle. Then I tipped the ruler to the left, placed the other 60 degree line on the seam line, and put the edge of the ruler at the edge of the strip and cut...first triangle done!

Then I tipped the ruler back the other way, lined up the 60 degree line with the seam line and cut another triangle, and so on, until the whole strip set was cut into triangles.

It got a bit trickey if the angle ever got a little wonky, and then I would just recut the edge and keep going.

To deal with all the bias edges I sprayed the strips with "Spray

Starch" and then pressed them before I started cutting the triangles, which worked well.

Today I had my mini quilt class over to my studio to work on their 60 degree projects. I could tell that they weren't loving those cute little triangles as much as I do!! Here they are with their nose to the grindstone, labouring over those triangles and forcing them to fit together in their chosen layouts. Check back next month to see if they persisted in fitting them together, or will they throw their project in the garbage (gasp!)?!?!? Hopefully you will see some wonderful triangle quilts!

60 Degree Triangles

We have a light dusting of snow on the ground here, which always makes me feel like machine quilting a large quilt! So today I am going to buy a backing and batting for my Christmas quilt so that I can work on it that this week, and maybe even finish it in time for Christmas.

I have been slowly working away on a mini quilt series that was inspired by Libby on her blog called A Simple Girl. Her blog is not set up for me to link to the specific posts, but last summer (June 15, 2007) she posted about having fun with 60 degree triangles, and I really liked the little quilts she made using the triangles. I had been admiring my pretty "Reichard's Roll-Up" (2 1/2" strips of Batik fabrics) for a few months...I loved looking at it, but decided it was time to use it up. I cut the strips in half to 1 1/4" and sewed light strips to dark strips. Here is my pile of sewn strips waiting to be pressed. Then I cut the triangles and learned the "ins and outs" of working with the 60 degree angle. I tried all my various rulers and found that I preferred the 4" x 8" Omnigrid ruler for this job. Then I had a huge pile of triangles to play with. Here is one design that I might sew together. I am having so much fun with this step that I am not rushing myself to make any final decisions. It is truly a luxury for me right now to just relax with a cup of tea while I enjoy looking at my triangles, rearranging them and thinking of more ways to assemble them. When I stop enjoying this, I might actually start to sew something!