Finished Mini Quilt

Back in May when issue #15 of the 100 Blocks magazine came out, I was immediately smitten with Bonnie Hunter's block. In the magazine this block was called "sawtooth flutter" but I'm calling my version "Bonnie's Star". 

I sewed her block pattern using leftover triangles given to me by one of my quilt guild members (who would have otherwise thrown the pieces in the garbage). It was a fun challenge to turn the baggie of scrap triangles into this 133 piece 12" block. 
Since I already had the walking foot on my machine because I was quilting the Bear, I thought a quick little diversion with some instant gratification would be nice. And it was! I just did some stitch-in-the-ditch quilting around the block pieces and some parallel lines in the border and it's done - including a label and hanging sleeve.
A quick finish is just what I needed to maintain my motivation for my larger long term projects. 

Mini Trees are Finished

The first set of tiny trees are ready for gift giving! 
You can find the tutorial to sew these little gems over at Kevin the Quilter. 

I quilted the tree centres in the same way, but I quilted the backgrounds differently just to reduce the boredom factor of working on the same thing over and over. The hand binding was the step that took the longest. I sewed a split hanging sleeve into the binding so that a little wooden skewer can go through there and the quilt can hang on the wall on one nail. This could also be a hot pad or a mug mat if the recipient didn't want it to be a wallhanging.
Are you making some of Kevin's trees for fun and/or for gifts?!?
Linking up to Sew Fresh Quilts.

A Finished Gifted Quilt

This is my version of the Temecula Quilt Company's mystery quilt called "Hugs and Kisses". It was such a fun and quick project to sew. What took quite a bit longer to complete was the hand quilting. But I enjoyed every stitch since I made this for a wonderful friend. With every stitch sewn I thought of all the fun and laughter we have shared over the years we have known each other. 




This quilt is full of love and prayers and smiles. Miniatures quilts are just the perfect gift for someone special!

Market Day Reveal

**Spoiler Alert**

If you are sewing Pam Buda's Market Day Sew-Along and haven't finished it yet and solved the mystery, don't keep reading today's blog post!

The final step was posted last week and if I wouldn't have become recently obsessed with my IOP blocks, this project would have been completed already!

However... here is the big reveal:

I sewed the miniature version, so it measures 11" square right now. Pretty, eh? I changed the gold in  the centre block (you can see it here) and I like it better now. 
I have an idea for a pieced border and look forward to some sewing time over the weekend to try it out.
Did you make your own Market Day? The parade posting is not until September, so I have lots of time to quilt and finish this little cutie before then!

A Mini Finish

I finished this little miniature quilt, which I am calling "Civil (War) Kisses"! Once I decided that scrappy sashings wouldn't work (read more here) the quilt came together really quickly. Because I was using up scraps, the options were limited for the sashing, but I really like this fabric with the little hearts. It was perfect to sash the kiss blocks! The little sashing pieces were cut 1" x 2" - very tiny to work with. I like how the touch of red before the binding brightens it up a bit. The finished quilt size is 8" square.

I love this photo taken in the maple tree in my backyard. You can see that the buds are just starting to grow and soon we will have leaves again!

A Mini Finish

While at Quilt Camp last month, I made a cute little

mini quilt and almost forgot to post about it on my blog.  My quilty friend Sue made a larger size quilt from the red scraps in her stash, and she had some leftover pieces which she generously shared.This little gem finishes at 4" x 3" plus binding. So cute and tiny! My friend Barbara helped with the cutting, so it went together really fast.

The best part was the machine quilting... hearts all over the place!
It was so tiny, I was afraid it would float away, so I put some "quilt weights" on it just in case! Maybe the best part was eating the quilt weights?!




I have found the perfect place to hang it in my quilt studio! It makes me smile every time I look at it.

Slow Sunday Stitching

I finished this adorable little mini quilt with scraps from my friends. The HST's were garbage rescued from the trash from one friend's (Diane) project, the border and backing was in a scrap bag (from Cynthia), and the batting scrap was from a 3rd friend (Helen). 
It was a quick and fun project that I called "With A Little Help From My Friends". 
The HST's are .75" finished, so the quilt is about 5" x 6". The binding was super quick to finish!
What are you stitching by hand this week? You can share your project by linking to your blog below.

Hugs and Kisses Blog Hop

If you are new here, welcome to Kathy's Quilts! Make yourself at home, look around (not in the UFO closets) and enjoy your visit. 
Who could resist a Hugs and Kisses Blog Hop?!? Not me!
That is exactly what the world needs more of, and we are thankful to Madame Samm and CheerleaderJane for helping to spread the love!
Here is the love quilt I made for the hop, in soothing pastel colours...

The pieced heart blocks are 1.5" and the quilt finished at 10" x 11.5". I love the little sparkly heart buttons I found for the corners (at Triangle Sewing). I machine quilted some hearts and loops in the border, which you can maybe see a little of in this photo.

And here are some chocolate kisses to go with the love quilt...
one kiss for every heart!



If you would like to be in the draw to adopt this little quilt that I am calling "Spread a little love", just leave a comment. I'll draw the name of the new owner on the weekend.

Here are the other bloggers that are sharing their quilty treats today...spread the love and leave them some sweet comments!

Wednesday February 13th The 4 R's Em's Scrapbag Kris Loves Fabric Kathy Quilts Cherry Blossoms Quilting Studio The Distracted Domestic  Selina Quilts Terry's Quilting Time Rosemary B @ that other blog as sweet as peaches  Karma Willow Designs

Dare To Dresden

Welcome to the "Dare to Dresden" blog hop! 
The Dresdens on this blog hop have been absolutely stunning and I have enjoyed each day of this hop as much (and maybe even more!) than the others I have been a part of.  A big thanks to our organizer Madame Samm and chief scheduler and cheer leader Christine. 

I made a Dresden wallhanging last year (click here to see my Joy Spring Dresden) 
so for this blog hop
I challenged myself to make a "daring dresden" in a miniature version. 
It is made of civil war reproduction fabrics and ended up to be 8" square.


The center circle is hand embroidered and I beaded the tea dyed rickrack around the circle.  I finished off the little quilt with some hand quilted echoed lines around the plates.
"Dare to Dream" will be donated to the upcoming silent auction to raise money for aboriginal services at the college where I work.

My quilt model Molly says that she dares to dream of warmer weather so she can get a spring hair cut and see better!!

What are you daring to dream?!?

Here is the list of Dresden makers today...ENJOY!

A Peach in Stitches

Nancy W @ “that Other Blog”

L3 Designs

Bungalow Bay Quilts

Quilted Delights

Quilt Crossing

Lixie Makes it

A Quilting Sheep

Charlotte's Creations

Quilt-n-Queen
Domesticity and Other Ponderous Things

Sew Much 2 Luv

A Quilt and a Prayer

Amanda Murphy Design

Little Mushroom Cap
Kathy's Quilts (that's me!)

Sandra Kaye Design

Find Your Bliss

My kids are now at an age where they are making many big life decisions. It's not easy for kids these days because of the unlimited choices with which they are faced.

It's the same in the quilting world....unlimited pattern choices, unlimited fabric availability, hundreds of quilting blogs and websites with constant inspiration.

How do you find your direction and make your choices of what quilts to make?

My answer is to find out what makes your heart sing, and go in that direction. If it gives you energy and you have so much anticipation you just can't wait to work on that project, do more of that. If it feels like trudging through mud, and you procrastinate working on it, there's a clue!

I always say to my kids, just take the next right step.

My first lesson of finding what makes my heart sing was in 1996. I was at a much needed quilt retreat after my son was born. It was my first quilting retreat and I knew we couldn't really afford for me to be spending that much money. I remember that I felt guilty about the money, and being away from my little ones, but knowing I NEEDED to be there. Lesson #1 - a weekend away from my children (to fill my own well) made me a better Mom when I came back.

In my first weekend quilt retreat I learned how to make baby (or "bonus") half square triangles from the flying geese units in this quilt that I posted yesterday.
I was immediately smitten!

After the retreat, I came home and became completely preoccupied with those HST blocks. 

I made a series of 7 mini quilts using those tiny blocks and enjoyed trying to figure out different layouts for each one. All the while, the quilt blocks from the retreat held no interest for me, and the project eventually became a UFO for 16 years! 
But the minis...I couldn't get enough of them!
Lesson #2 - I love sewing miniature blocks and quilts.

I even made a series of labels for these scrappy treasures. 

Nicest labels I've ever made to be truthful:)

Miniature quilts are still one of my greatest joys and I always have a few in production... can't wait to show you my newest one that I am working on this week.

What is your bliss? What do you want to do more of? 

Bingo Mini

The May for Me Bingo game is over. Although I didn't win a prize, it was lots of fun to check the blogs everyday and see what words were called.
I enjoyed looking through my buttons and beads, and picking something special  to fit in with the image on each of the squares. I have amassed quite a collection of Nymo threads in every colour.

I also sewed some foil sequins on the border to cover up some of the hand stitching that came through when I sewed the binding down.

Here is my finished Bingo card. I haven't yet sewn on the penguin button called yesterday, and the spaces not called were:
I - cat and Sunbonnet Sue, 
N - beehive, and 
G - Grinch.
It's now a cute little eye spy mini quilt!

Another mini twister

I finished another twister in miniature size this week. The mini twisters are made with the Primitive Gatherings ruler (which produces 1" blocks). This one was made from the scraps of a tablerunner I made last year. The smaller the block size is, the more you need a high contrast in the fabrics, and while I love the tablerunner, in miniature it looks a little too "blendy" to me.


This is my 4th twister quilt and here is a photo of the 3 minis on top of the tablerunner. Even though I've made 4 quilts using this technique, I can't wait to make another one! What is it about this method of producing quilt blocks that I enjoy so much? Does anyone have any insight to share with me about that?!? LOL

I also taught a twister class at the local senior's centre and look at the wonderful variations they made!

As much fun as piecing these twister blocks is, the quilting is also fun! I machine quilted this one with tiny little swirls and loved every minute of quilting it. I took a photo with a quarter so you could see the scale of the blocks.



I quilted some tiny swirls in the 1" border which are just so cute!
Have you made a twister quilt yet? Click here for a YouTube video showing how the ruler works. And if you hop over to Connie's blog, she has a great tutorial for another version of the twister that I'd like to try. Actually, it's probably best not to get started with the twister quilts, or you might get addicted like me!  
P.S. - If you haven't yet signed up for the Shop Hop giveaway, click here. If you haven't signed up for the 100 Blocks magazine draw, click here. 

Guild Challenge - Post #3: Mini Quilt

The second challenge quilt I made was for the mini category. In this category each quilt has to measure less than 36" around the perimeter, which means less than 9" per side. 
I decided to use my favorite "Itty Bitty Primitive Pinwheel"  ruler again. I LOVE this tool and it is such a fun project to sew, I just couldn't resist making another one. I made my first twister in a tablerunner size (click here to see it) and it was so fun I decided to try it in mini size last October (click here to see it). I think I am addicted to these things! Funny that it hasn't occurred to me to make a large/bed size quilt though, eh?


Here is the start of my quilt with one of my favorite Kaffe Fassett paperweight fabrics for the border. It's bizarre that I feel so sad when I run out of one of my favorite fabrics :) LOL!




And here is my finished "Spring Pinwheels" quilt. I just did "stitch in the ditch" quilting because the piece is so small and has a lot of bulk from the seams. It measures 6.5" square and has 124 pieces. I was wishing I had put some yellow fabric in, and decided to sew a tiny golden bead in the center of each pinwheel. It's amazing how much more I liked it after adding the beads :) 

I can't wait to see all the challenge quilts hanging at the quilt show on May 4th and 5th. It is always amazing to see the creativity of quilters who make completely different quilts starting from the same inspiration of 2 fat quarters of fabric.These are the two challenge fabrics...can you see them in the finished quilt?

Scrappy Saturday - Last pink post

Pink is the colour of the month for the Rainbow Scrap Challenge.  Last Saturday I showed the first mini quilt I made from some Kaffe Fassett scraps from my friend Marjorie. 
This week (in between machine quilting my March UFO) I made another little mini using one of my favorite techniques, which I would call "confetti piecing". 
I have heard it called many other things, but I first saw the tutorial on the Lady Harvatine blog in 2007 and so that's what I've always called it. It's a very fun method of sewing little scraps to background strips and making a quilt from the resulting blocks. 
I had a great time picking out some pink threads and after I did some random lines of vertical machine quilting, I became obsessed with adding some hand stitching. And then some pink beads jumped on there and the lines became curvier, and...well, it was just too much fun!  
This quilt made me realize how much I have changed from the days of following a pattern to make a quilt exactly like the one on the pattern, and worrying about if the quilt will "turn out right", to just enjoying the process and just making each decision as it comes along according to what I intuitively feel is best, and trusting that the decisions I have made will result in something good. A great quilting lesson, and a sometimes difficult life lesson.
Then I had to put on some pink nail polish to co-ordinate with the quilt binding (and the colour of the month) to stitch down the binding. The finished size of this quilt is 10" x 14" and will be donated to my quilt guild's mini quilt raffle at the May quilt show.

To see what other scrappy quilters are sewing with their pink scraps today, hop over to SoScrappy.

Busy Hands Guild Mini Quilt Workshop

The weather turned quite cold here, with frost overnight, and a high of 3 degrees today. The daffodils are laying on the ground this morning wondering what the heck happened!!
And what better activity to do on a cold spring day than quilting?!?!  I taught a mini quiltmaking workshop for the Busy Hands Quilt Guild and it was a fun day with some very creative quilters! Here are some of the students showing the mini quilt projects they started...

I have had a couple of email questions recently about mini quilting details, so thought I would answer them in this blogpost.  I have no affiliation to any of the mentioned products, just my personal preferences which are subject to change at any minute, if I find something I like better LOL :

-thread: I prefer Aurifil, but sometimes will use Mettler Silk Finish to get the right colour. Yep...I use a LOT of Aurifil! Now what am I going to do with all these saved spools people have asked me?? I might make something, maybe a Christmas wreath from them? Or not...it's hard to say what I might do!!

-batting: I use Warm & Natural since I like 100% cotton, it always lays flat and has a nice weight that I prefer. However, it is only good for machine quilting (hand quilting through W & N is way too tough for me). I buy it by the bolt for large quilts and use the excess side trimmings for mini quilts.

-quilting: the easiest finish is a quick "stitch-in-the-ditch", but it's boring to do so I prefer a free motion design most of the time these days. You can see how tiny my quilting is on this piece where the "coins" average about 3/8".

-embellishing: I love to do beading on quilts, but usually only bead the quilts that insist on it, or quilts that I dislike and think that the beading will help me to like it more! I usually use Nymo thread to attach beads or embellishments.

-binding: I prefer a double fold binding cut at 2.25" but will do a single layer binding if I am running out of fabric.

Scrappy Saturday - Pink

At quilt retreat in February we each received a little bag of our friend Marjorie's scraps to make into a mini quilt. Some of the bags were civil war fabrics, and some were Kaffe Fassett scraps. I could have enjoyed sewing with either of the collections, but this was the one that begged to come home with me. I split this pile of scraps into two groups since there was more than enough to make 2 little quilts.


Co-incidentally the colour of the month over at  Rainbow Scrap Challenge is pink, so the timing was perfect for me to play with these scraps. And if you're going to play with pink scraps, of course you have to make hearts! My heart blocks measure 2" x 2.5"(finished).
Wow...that's a lot of pink!!
I put a tiny 1/4" sashing between the blocks for a little bit of breathing space between the hearts.  I didn't do much quilting...just straight lines in the sashing and the border. Then I added 4 little pink shell hearts (mostly to cover up the seam intersections which didn't quite meet, but don't tell anyone!)
I am donating this little "Pink Overload" to my quilt guild's mini quilt raffle at the quilt show in May. The finished size is 8" x 9". I hope to finish the second little mini quilt in time for next Saturday's post. To see what other quilters are making with their pink scraps, hop over to SoScrappy's blog.

Another finish!

Wow! Two quilts finished within one week?!?!
(Truth be told...I am aiming for a hat trick by the end of the month!) This is my second finish...the Pink Lemonade quilt along by Lori at Humble Quilts. 

This quilt is not as big as it seems to be on the computer screen. I made my churn dash blocks 2  1/4" (finished),  so the quilt finishes at about 10" x 13", and is as cute as a button (and we quilters know just how cute buttons can be!)
Somehow the "lemonade"(yellow) pieces fell out of my version of the quilt, and I don't know why, but they were replaced with more of a cosmopolitan (red) essence!
I used up a lot of scraps on this one. You hopefully can't tell, but some of the red squares were pieced from smaller scraps, and some of the half blocks were really using up the tiny bits so they don't have the same pinks within the blocks.

I did some straight line quilting as recommended by Lori. I didn't draw any lines as you can probably tell on this photo of the back of the quilt ...just "eyeballed" it across the blocks. I had already quilted it when I read this blog post by Debbie about using a hera marker to mark your quilting lines. I have a hera marker and really like to use it for complex quilting designs, but just didn't think about it for straight lines! Funny how a solution is sometimes right in front of us, but we just don't see it.
Thanks again to Lori for a fun quilt along and a great little quilt!
For some quilty inspiration, hop over to one of my favorite blogs Crazy Mom Quilts and visit the links for "Finish It Friday".

Tiny Twister

Last month I finished a tablerunner using the Lil Twister ruler - click here to see that project. It was really fun to make, but imagine my surprise when 2 of my quilting friends found an even smaller twister ruler, called the "Itty Bitty Primitive Pinwheel"!

I got out some scraps and went right to work/play. It was fun fun fun!

I had some trouble when I tried to machine quilt this little treasure with invisible thread - look at the size of the skipped stitches! It reminded me how much I hate invisible thread! Once I switched over to Aurifil thread...smooth sailing quilting!


Then I got out the bead box and sewed a tiny bead in the centre of each pinwheel.




To compare the size of the blocks, I put my thimble on the quilt...it sure is tiny!

Just how tiny is it?!? About the size of a Tim Horton's coffee!
Thanks to Deanna and Barb for sharing their tiny rulers!