Hope Valley Pinwheels: A Finish

DONE!

Wow, I never thought it would happen. While I will admit that it isn't my favorite quilt, I do feel that it has a certain charm to it.

The pumpkin binding really does work well. I am glad that I stuck with it. Thanks to all of you who gave me the extra vote of confidence!

Please excuse the dog toy. It was so bright that I couldn't see anything in the view finder and this is the best shot I got!

So bright!

I finished the binding with a zig-zag stitch. This is becoming more and more common for me. I love the extra durability that it gives and how flat it makes the binding lay. Also, with the baby, I just don't have as much "sit around and hand stitch time" as I used to. He was kind of enough to take a long snooze so that I could finish.

I even remembered to add a tag! That never happens!

This quilt is listed for sale in my Etsy shop.

Linking up!
Confessions of a Fabric Addict
TGIFF
Richard and Tanya Quilts

WIP Wednesday: Hope Valley Pinwheels

As I mentioned last Wednesday, I have a couple of smaller quilt tops in the queue for quilting that I want to finish before tackling my bigger quilt tops, Fireworks and Hopscotch. I made pretty good progress, but am not sure when I will get more sewing time again before heading off to my first agility trial since February. Squee!!! I know Dexter will be one happy dog!

Stuck at home, doing nothing, makes for a very sad boy.

One of the hardest parts of being a new mom, for me, has been feeling like I am letting my two fur kids down. Dexter has been quite depressed and Fractal is going stir crazy. It has been very hard for me to watch,especially when I am stuck in the glider nursing the baby and can literally do nothing for them. I know it is not as bad as it is in my head since they have had trips to the dog park, one class, a journey to a friend's house and Buddy plays with them regularly in the backyard. But still, nothing like what they had pre-baby.

Pinwheels

I can't believe it, my pinwheel blocks are going to make it into a finished quilt. I am in shock really. These have been sitting around for so long and I was at such a loss for what to do with them that I was pretty sure they would never amount to anything. Which bummed me out severely since I had made them from precious Hope Valley Fat Quarters won when my mom and I saw Denyse Schmidt at a local quilt store.

The first pinwheels I sewed. . . in 2012!

In the end, as it always seems to be, the answer was to keep it simple. Really simple. I just sewed the squares together: no sashing, not setting on point, nothing.  Originally, I had really wanted to do a very modern, non-grid layout with these very traditional blocks, but it just wasn't mean to be. Mostly because that would have required more blocks and I have no interest in making any.

The odd number of blocks I ended up with before quitting.
I managed to talk myself into sewing one more to
make it an even 20.

I was really nervous when I went to get backing for this quilt since I knew that there was no way to get something from the Hope Valley line. My thinking was to do a shot cotton since to me they have bit of that worn vintage-y look like the Hope Valley prints. Instead I ended up with a plum and orange print for Denyse's new Franklin line (which I like quite a bit).

It is very helpful that designers often use the same color palette from one collection to the next.

Again, I went simple with the quilting. The plan was a one inch grid, but after getting all the vertical lines done, I felt like adding the additional quilting would be too busy for the small quilt. So I called it good.

All that I have left to do is bind the darn thing. I have this pumpkin colored Kona for the binding, but I'm not totally sold on it, so I have working on quilting my Bento Box baby quilt instead.

What do you think, should I just go for it with the binding, or could I do better? Something a bit more unexpected perhaps?

Linking up with WIP Wednesday and Let's Bee Social!

Penny Patch: A Finish!

I did it. I free motion quilted a whole quilt. A pretty big quilt at that. And . . .  IT'S AWESOME!

I don't really know what else to say about it. I am over the moon proud of myself on this one. Plus, I said most of it here.

I will make one confession though. When I very first sat down and was quilting my first row, I was having a heck of a time. I couldn't figure out what I was doing wrong. I knew it would take a bit to get back in the groove I was in when I finished my drawstring bag, but this felt like more than that. Not sure exactly what finally made it click, but I realized that I hadn't lowered the feed dogs. DOH! Me, myself and I had a pretty good laugh about that, and now you can too.

It has taken me a lot longer to share than finish than I intended but alas, the short and often rainy days here in the Pacific Northwest make is difficult to get good, well any, outdoor photos. Thanks to our current lovely false spring, I was able to get to my mom's house and take some pictures! We were still a limited on what we could do with the very damp ground and lack of greenery, but still, pictures to share!

I love how the back came out. There wasn't enough of the purple print to do the whole thing so I supplemented with some giant squares of coordinating fabrics.

I almost didn't manage to leave my mom's house with this with the quilt, she has been trying to claim it for her own each and every time she sees it, despite the fact that I made her a quilt all her own, in fabrics she picked out! More on that later!