Rainbow Stars Baby Quilt

Just popping in to share a little baby quilt that I just had to make.  I wanted some pretty stars to quilt and I had: 

1. A sweet little charm pack of Kona cottons in a "Sunrise" colorstory...
2. Yardage of a fun and colourful print called "Birds of Norway" by Michael Miller which seemed to pick out lots of the shades in my little charm pack...
3. Just enough Kona Oyster solid...
4. And a drawerful of colourful perle and Aurifil threads to play with.

I used a tutorial found here but I did have to do some reducing as it calls for 5.5" squares as the centres of the stars and I used a 5" charm pack.  But it was very easy and this block is very forgiving as your points "float" and probably won't get cut off when you sew it to the other blocks, unless you do something very weird.

Then, as you can see, I hand quilted around each star and then machine quilted around each star.  I bound it with Kona Cerise (cut to 2" - my new normal) and it was done!

Apple Autumn Quilt

For this pattern, I was inspired by Camille Roskelley's quilt "Coming Home" in her book Simplify - which I also used here, but with smaller corner pieces. The quilt is quite simply 5 inch charms with 2.25 inch white squares sewn to the corners. I just started pulling fabrics from my stash and was thrilled when I had everything I needed to finish this quilt in a weekend and get it to its recipient, a dear person in need of some comfort, as soon as I could. I even had backing (half of an Ikea duvet cover)! I never have backing!

Anyways, it finished at 56" by 65", it's quilted in an allover meander on my machine with Aurifil colour 2325 50 wt thread. I experimented with cutting my binding strips at 2" this time rather than 2.25" as I usually do. I love it! The binding is exactly the same width on both sides of the quilt! I will be doing the same from now on. I happen to be partial to a wood grain binding, not sure why, but I have bound about 5 quilts now with wood grain prints.

 Isn't it a great colour palette? My son helped me out and named it "Apple Autumn". I was thinking something like "Indian Summer" but I think "Apple Autumn" is just the right kind of juicy and sweet name.

 Ok, off to stitch a label and make a quilt delivery...

Happy, Happy, Happy!

I received an email this afternoon from Amy Ellis at Amy's Creative Side, host of the Blogger's Quilt Festival!  My quilt was a winner in the Hand Quilted Category! Hooray! Thanks to any of my friends and blog followers out there who cast their little vote for me.

It was such a lovely surprise to come home to after a little getaway celebrating 20 years of marriage to my handsome fella. Our anniversary was on November 6.  Here we are on our 2 day date to Banff.

More Minecraft Crafting....

This is one of several Minecraft influenced quilts I've made.  What can I say?   My boys see their favourite computer game - I see quilts!