ZigZag Quilt

A couple years ago I had a subscription to some quilting magazines. A year's worth was enough to provide me with quite a bit of inspiration.  This was an ad in one for some fabric:

I liked the zigzag pattern and decided to make myself a quilt out of it.  I chose black and white and red as the theme and got a bunch of different fabrics and cut out lots of triangles (it's a smaller quilt because I'm not that fond of cutting triangles. I arranged an order of the different fabrics and started sewing strips:

 Once I had completed the strips of the two fabrics I sewed those all together to make the zigzags:

Until I had them all sewn together:

Obviously then I trimmed the edges. Then it was just quilting. I quilted along the seams:

This is the final quilt:

This is the backing fabric:

Ta da!

Fabric Oath

I am in the process of buying a bigger apartment that will have an extra room that I will use for sewing/crafting. Because of the expenses involved with moving and preparing my old place for rent, and the general need to get rid of stuff I am making the following oath:

I swear that I will not buy any new fabric for myself (excludes projects I'm getting paid for, or gifts for others - Christmas is coming up, yikes!) until I finish at least one of the following projects that I already have fabric for:

Lonestar Quilt
Zig-zag Quilt
Zombie Dress
Floral Satin Dress
Celtic Quilt
Amish Quilt

This oath should probably include genral crafting supplies, but I don't want to get too crazy.

Crafty To-Do List

Now that Wedding Singer is open and I have no required crafting projects to do, I have been reflecting on all the things I've wanted to do but haven't had time for, and the things that are coming up that I should start thinking about. So, here is my Crafty To-Do list:

1. Tennis Skirts: This is actually a job I have coming up to make skirts for my mom's tennis team that is going to Nationals in Indian Wells, CA in October. I'm not quite sure how many I need to make, but they should be pretty simple to do.

2. Zombie Costume: Thriller is coming up again and since this is the third year, I feel like it's time to make a new zombie costume. While I love my Zombie Ballerina costume, I think it's time for something new (I'll probably let someone else use the costume since zombie ballerina is usually a popular choice that I've always had dibs on). This year I'm thinking Rockabilly Zombie. I've got a great pattern and fabric picked out and I just love dyeing and distressing things.

3. Dress for Lexy's friend: For Lexy's birthday last year I made her a sundress and now one of her friends wants one too. Pretty easy to do, just need to get the fabric.

4. Quilt for Annie: Annie graduates from college next May (she'll be a Doctor of Pharmacy) and I'm planning on making her quilt since Lexy got one for her graduation from high school. I've started it (Lonestar Quilt) I just need to finish it.

5. Other: I'm sure other things will come up. I also should start using up all the extra fabric I have - that might be an interesting challenge.

6. Waffle Week: I don't know what I'm gonna do, but it's coming up in less than 2 months!

Mini-Lonestar

While making Annie's graduation Lonestar quilt I made one lonestar and decided that it was too small for the quilt I wanted to make. So, I made a second, larger lonestar. Since I had already completed the smaller lonestar I decided to use it to make a baby quilt for a coworker who was having a baby.

She knew it would be a boy so the blue lonestar would work great. I had planned to have it complete before this past Wednesday because we were going to have a shower for her at work, but she had the baby early, so I had extra time. I finished the quilt tonight, so I think I'll try to visit her this weekend.



For the quilting I stitched-in-the-ditch for the lonestar and used some decorative designs from my Fons and Porter's Quilter's Complete Guide and increased the size to better suit my lonestar.

Another Old Post from MySpace

How fast can you quilt?
Sunday, June 10, 2007

I went to a baby shower today, so yesterday I was looking for a gift. I don't know much about baby stuff and what's hot in infant couture right now, so I was a little perplexed by what I should get.

Well, yesterday I also happened to be shopping for costume stuff, so I was in the fabric section and thought, I should have made a little quilt. I made one recently four Lexy's graduation...it took me four years. But I thought if I simplified things I could do it in one day. So I bought some fabric and headed home.

I simplified things by doing absolutely no piecing. I made a sandwich of pink and white fabric (with batting as the bologna) and all the exciting stuff went into the quilting part.

And it worked! In less than 24 hours I had made a quilt. Granted it would have been a lot nicer if I'd had more time, but there wasn't much more time then the time I did it in anyway.

So here are some pictures of the quilt (front and back):




And some detail because it's hard to see stuff above:

Lonestar Day 2

Working nights has given me lots of time to sew and I've made all kinds of progress on the star portion of this quilt. Here's what I've done since yesterday:

I sewed strips together to create 4 rows for each point of the 8 point star:


Each set of strips get's cut at 45 degrees to create the rows:


Here's how the four rows go together to create the points:


Sewing the rows together is a little tough because you can't line up the seams because the seams are diagonal. So the seams have to be pinned about 1/4" off so that they intersect where the seam will be to sew them together.

The eight points then become the star:


Now comes the tricky part - sewing the the squares to fill out the corners. This is tricky because the corner on the star is already sewn. More about that next time.

Lonestar

Annie will graduate from Pharmacy School in a little under 2 years (right around the time that Lexy will graduate from Nursing school and I'll turn 30). Since I made Lexy a quilt for her graduation from High School I am going to make Annie a quilt for her graduation (I guess that also means I have to take Lexy to Europe for hers - better start saving now). Since, most likely, Annie will never read this blog, I'll document the process of making Annie's quilt.

I'm going with the Lonestar Quilt design because Annie's always liked the name Lonestar - partly because of Space Balls, partly because the first four letters also start our last name. This is how I'd like the quilt to look when it's complete:


The outer stuff is all border, which is pretty easy, so most of the work is involved in the star part. I've bought the fabric, and I'm working now on piecing the star. To create the star you sew strips of different fabrics together and cut them at 45 degrees and sew those together to create the points of the star.

So far I've cut the strips and I'm sewing them together:


I managed to cut all the strips without cutting my fingers (yay!). I'll post some more pictures once I've done some more sewing.

Ren's Quilt

So, now that I have a follower (yay Jen!) I feel like I should blog since I haven't posted anything since March. I have a couple plans for future posts (I have some free time coming up so I'll be able to craft more), but for now I'll just talk about what I did recently.

Through the theater I have a group of close friends, one of whom just graduated from high school. For her graduation I decided to make her a small quilt, and the others in the group decided to participate and each made a square. Here's the (almost) finished product:



I made the center square and the four side squares. The coffee one is self-explanatory. We're not racist, the burning Canadian flag is because Ren was in a car accident with some Canadians and now has a personal grievance with the entire country because of it. The Diva is because she was a Diva-in-training and has now been granted full Diva status.

The bottom left square (that doesn't really fit in with the color-scheme) is an interesting story. There was one of us who just does not craft, so to make his square we had him donate a meaningful piece of clothing with which I would make a square. The fabric was a bitch to work with, but the jacket it came from was memorable. The cut out's were done via laser cutter which one of the other girls had at work. It was an interesting was to cut, but I don't know if we'll do it again.

It was a fun group project and she loved the quilt when we gave it to her:

Old Post - From MySpace

Here are some pictures of the quilt I made for my sister Lexy. It was her graduation present.

It took me almost 4 years to make it - although I did take a lot of long breaks.

First Quilt

Sort of.

My first large foray into quilting was after I purchased Fons and Porter’s “Quilter’s Complete Guide” which includes a whole bunch of info about a whole lot of different piecing and quilting techniques. It gives you all you need to make a sampler. Well, I started working on it right after moving back home after college which happened to coincide with my little sister’s entrée into high school. I figured four years would be plenty of time for me to figure out the whole quilting thing and I planned on making her a quilt for graduation.

This would actually end up being my second quilt because after spending three years making the quilt top I didn’t want it to be my first try at quilting. So I made a small simple quilt top so that I could understand the quilting process before working on the gigantic sampler I spent ages toiling over.

While working on the quilt top for my sister’s sampler I got to try many different piecing styles and I found that I really enjoyed doing Celtic designs with strip appliqué. I found a Celtic design that I really liked, a triscele, but it wouldn’t work with strip appliqué because it involved width changes throughout the knot. So I decided that I’d make somewhat of a plain background using various shades of blue and purple and use the triscele as part of the quilting design.

I whipped up the quilt top (kind of skipping over the squaring step as you’ll notice in the pictures) and got to work learning how to quilt. This is the result.

I ended up giving it to my other sister who happened to be moving to the Big Island for grad school at the time. She and I are both fans of all things Irish (we’re Irish ourselves) having travelled there after college together, and getting matching Celtic harp tattoos. It’s actually the Guinness logo backward – it was the best picture of a Celtic harp that I could find – fortunately we both really like Guinness.

More about that first/second quilt later.

Get Ready, get set - Start Blogging

Where to start?

Hard to say. I was inspired today to start my own blog after searching for a quilting blog. All the ones that I found seemed to miss the mark of what I was looking for, and I think that my age is partly to blame. I'm in my late twenties and single and I've found that many of my personal interests differ greatly from the average quilter.

So, I figure there's a gap to fill - it'll kind of be like stitch-n-bitch, but more for quilting and general crafting rather than knitting (which I've never really gotten into myself).

A little about me:

I live on Maui and work as and engineer at an observatory. I have a BS in physics. I also minored in Theatre Arts and I do costumes for community theater outside of work. For those of you unfamiliar with it, community theater = tiny budget. So I'm often forced to be really creative when costuming.

I was never really formally trained in sewing - though my grandmother tried. I worked in the costume shop for one quarter in college, which is where my passion for sewing started. After college I bought a sewing machine, but I was too intimidated to try sewing clothes and didn't want to ask for help, so I bought some books and taught myself to quilt.

Since then I've been taking up all kinds of random craft projects - both out of personal interest, and for costumes for the theater. I will try to share what I've done and the things that I've learned as I fumble through my spare time as a truly Crafty-Ass Chick.