Spring Fling Virtual Quilt Show

Have you visited the Spring Fling Virtual Quilt Show yet? There are 6 categories of quilts to enjoy.  I had a great time looking through the entries. Lots of gorgeous quilts to use for inspiration, creativity and motivation. You can also watch live demonstrations of products and techniques. There are prizes drawn every day, as well as some prizes at the end for the entrants. You can vote for your favorites while you browse. I recently completed a new quilt design, Diamond Lace, so decided that I would enter it in the Color Pop Category of the show. You can see and vote for it here.

Diamond Lace

Michael, a local quilter, did some amazing custom quilting in the negative spaces of the quilt. Enjoy the show!

Critters

 

I am a fan of Sew Fresh Quilts (Dog Gone Cute) and her cute animals, so when I saw she had this elephant pattern, I had to get it. I have a loose plan for how I want to put them in a quilt, so I made a few last week. Since I'm going to do my own layout with them, I decided I needed a few birds too. 

Are they adorable or what? 

Some are facing right, some left. The birds are sitting on a branch with leaves as shown below. I haven't sewn the block together with the branch yet since the branch might have to be longer or shorter depending on how I place them. 

I cut out some squares of both greens to make a few flying geese and half square triangles too. Grass...maybe...

Fabric folding fun

A few weeks ago I saw a video online about fabric folding to make these fantastic stars by Cheryl Phillips. She is updating the original pattern from the book Wedgeworks. As soon as I saw the cover of the book I realized I had that book, so went to find it. 

I gathered some gorgeous pieces of fabric I got recently and got to work. I meant to take more pictures as I assembled it, but forgot. She gives a good demo of the process of folding the fabric and inserting it into seams which is much better than my explanation anyway!

The trickiest part for me was getting the folded triangles layered around the center evenly. You wouldn't think it would be that hard, but surprisingly it was when I placed the center on it. I used a little glue to help hold them in place as pins weren't enough. 

I was at this step yesterday when I got it out to finish it. I sewed the scalloped edge down carefully with matching thread. I always use matching thread when topstitching. I've had plenty of experience topstitching, but that doesn't mean it will turn out perfectly. It was approximately 19.5" at this point. Since I made it to try the technique, I was only going to make one block. I added a one inch border to it and an envelope back so that it can be used for a 20" pillow. It could also be used as a tabletopper.

 The folding technique was fun to try and a pretty easy way to accomplish these nice points. 

 

Spinning Stars

Night Sky Sampler 28

A couple of years ago, I designed the Night Sky Sampler 28 quilt to teach techniques to other quilters in my classes. I used a combination of blocks including one I designed, Spinning Star. Since that star turned out to be a favorite of mine, I wanted to try a design using only it and some small star-colored squares.  I wanted the stars and faux stars to be scattered across the quilt which is sometimes harder to do than making rows of blocks. So I spent a lot of time playing with them once I had them constructed.

I made a large star out of like fabrics for the backing and added some half square triangles and borders to make it the correct size. Conrad was busy helping me that day.
 

A friend, Michael, quilted it for me with an all over star pattern. 

Truer color on this pic.

     

I like how it turned out...on both sides!

The coloring on the picture above is truer to the color of the quilt. 

Night Sky Sampler 28...You can see the spinning star blocks across the lower half of the quilt.