Good Morning friends, it's a lovely morning here in Paradise and I'm glad to be in the library in my cozy chair, enjoying my coffee, hearing the birds sing and watching the morning rise. It's been a good while since I've made a post. I've been working on various projects that have kept me away from my computer, but this week I'm playing catch up with any number of things around the house and yard, and now it's time to get a new post going.
Over the last two weeks I have sent three quilts to the grandchildren of two of my sisters who live in Alabama. The first one I finished was for Ellis, my youngest sister's grandson, but I was working on completing a quilt for his sister Blaire so waited until hers was finished to send the package. It was a surprise to them and their mom, my niece Hannah.
Back in November I finished a queen size Magic Star quilt and realized that I had enough fabric left over from that quilt to make another Magic Star quilt, though a small one with smaller sized blocks. It was completed in December. I thought of this quilt while the large one was on my design board. It struck me one day that looking at the block design diagonally one could almost imagine a turtle instead of a star. So I started searching the internet for turtle sketches and found lots of them.
I chose one for my quilting pattern and made a template of it. I think you can see most of it in this shot okay, the sun is shining on just a part of it, the head isn't really showing. I was able to enlarge the sketch to fit the blocks perfectly. The layout I did had the turtles going in different directions all over the quilt.
I found a good fabric for the back that I though went well with the turtle theme but had to add a little bit of another fabric to it. I was glad for another green fabric that went well with the main one and it turned out well because it shows up the turtle design on the back much better.
Ellis was delighted with his gift, Hannah sent a little video she took of him dancing around on it the evening it arrived.
I completed the quilt for his big sister Blaire on March first. It was a UFO that had been waiting for my attention since 2016. Here is the picture of its beginning on the design wall in Mom's studio. I'm afraid it's not a very good picture. I think I took it at night with the florescent lights on in the studio. The heart in the center came from the quilt I did for my niece Sadie. Her quilt had four large pink hearts on it, that you can see here. They were appliqued to a yellow background that I then cut away before quilting it. The yellow heart in the center here is one of the background pieces cut from Sadie's quilt.
The design went through some significant changes before it was settled and I could finally work on completing the quilt. I had blanket stitched by hand around all the hearts on Sadie's quilt with a darker pink to make them show up against the background better and knew I needed to do that with Blaire's quilt too, but didn't want to do it by hand again. Also, the embroidery thread I used on Sadie's quilt ran and stained the quilt - I didn't want that to happen again. We ordered an open toe foot for my machine to do the blanket stitching on Blaire's quilt. It doesn't show up in this picture, but does help the heart stand out a little bit better from the background than it would otherwise. The border fabric is also left over from Sadie's quilt. Blaire is happy with her gift and sent me a picture of it on her bed, which it fits very nicely. Last year I sent a crib size Elephant quilt to my great nephew Beckett, you can see that post here. I did manage to get it to him while he was still the baby of the family. It wasn't long though before his little sister Danleigh was born. The third quilt I sent to Alabama went just last week and was for Danleigh. I've posted about the beginnings of her quilt, the pink and yellow string quilt I made, you can see that here. I stopped writing about it though because I didn't want to publish pictures of the final design or my progress on the quilt knowing that her mom, my niece Sheena, reads my blog and I wanted the quilt to be a complete surprise to her, which it was. The open toe foot we got for my machine made the finish of the string quilt possible. It allowed me to satin stitch around each of the butterflies that I appliqued to the quilt.
The butterflies are very special. I had tried to make some using a butterfly coloring book I have. The tracing worked okay but the ink that I used to color them which was supposed to be permanent wasn't, so I didn't dare use them. I had about given up on the idea of getting butterflies on the quilt when I got a comment on a post I had made about the difficulty from Rebecca Grace of Rebecca Grace Quilting. That started a conversation between us that ended up with her sending me the beautiful butterfly fabric that was left over from a quilt she had appliqued with them. It was so kind and thoughtful of her. You can see her post showing the pretty quilt she made using the butterflies here. The butterflies made both of our quilts extra special, and Danleigh, even at nine months old notices and is attracted to them. I am very grateful for the gift.
Now that those projects have been completed and sent I feel like I can relax a bit and work on something for myself. So I've pulled the Spring Tablecloth top that I made last year out of the closet to finish. I've added borders and am working on finalizing the quilting design and getting it marked. The corner squares were very serendipitous. I have a stash of charm squares cut from a variety of scrap fabrics. There was barely enough border fabric to cover the sides and top/bottom portions of the quilt, but not enough to reach the corners. So I pulled out my charm square stash and there just happened to be four squares of just the right floral purple and green fabric to get the corners done.
I also have pieces cut for some of the blocks I'm going to use for another tablecloth. I am using them for leaders/enders while I piece together nine patch blocks for another project that I'll write about some other time. For now I'm making quarter square triangles, part of a larger block.
There are more projects, so many more, waiting for me to get to them. I could do this 24/7 and still never catch up because new projects keep coming to mind. For now though what I have going for the moment seems like enough to keep me busy for a while.
Thanks for reading!
I hope you are having a lovely week!
I'm linking up with the following blogs as their links open up.
Cynthia at Quilting is More Fun than Housework for Oh Scrap!
