One more finish for 2017! 
This quilt had no purpose other than to get me to quilt one of my own hand dyed mandala fabrics. Like a lot of people, I avoid using "special" fabrics and once I do I want the resulting project to be perfect. I knew that I needed to get over all of that so I picked a pink mandala because that's my least favorite color. That helped me not worry about perfection but wasn't much for motivation! I was an admirable procrastinator with this quilt.

But from a purely education point of view this was a really valuable quilt. I learned some things about design and committing myself to task.
Even the thread was a lesson. The only pink threads I had were some acrylic embroidery threads that I bought from Lunn Fabrics when they closed their hand dyed shop. They are beautiful threads but didn't run well on my APQS. I'm happy to discover that they run just fine on my Innova.

I started with the 4 center sections that are cross hatched and regretted it immediately. I knew that I had to repeat the crosshatching somewhere else. I eventually settled on the corners. For the rest of it I built the "frames" for each section and figured out what to do as I went along. I really was a good exercise and now I'm looking forward to doing another. But the next time I will do better planning.

I even took the bold step to use white for the back, which I love. I also love the blue binding.

​This quilt isn't perfect and I don't have any immediate use for it but I'm glad I did it. It has issues and it really needs to be blocked again but it's done and it met my one goal: to get over my fear of quilting the mandala fabrics.

This quilt is the result of leftovers of a King Sized Fractured quilt and it's leftovers quilt, Fractured Fragments.  I took those leftovers and made some crumb blocks. The original intention was to make a baby quilt but then I had a big piece of purple fabric and this large lap quilt was born. I'm going to donate this one to Hanover Safe Place. One of my quit club friends donates lots of things there and this seemed like a good size quilt for them.

There was a vast field of purple with this one and I couldn't see just doing my usual overall type of quilting. I felt it needed something else and came up with this diamond motif to quilt between the blocks.

I used a variegated King Tut thread mostly because I'm trying to use up app of the variegated KT threads on my charity quilts. But that turned out to be a great move because there are a couple of places where I wobbled off of the ruler but you can't tell with the variegated thread. Bonus!

In the block spaces I used Masterpiece which is thin and barely shows. I know that Masterpiece isn't exactly intended for the longarm but it was the best purple match.

I didn't have enough purple for the binding and I'm glad. I think the yellow was a much better choice even though it really wasn't a choice at all. I used one of the Country School Quilters labels and found this fun ladybug fabric in my stash for the back.

Washed, dried and ready for it's new home! With Hobbs 80/20 batting it's really snuggly.

After I finished Beware of Lust I had some fabric left and was inspired to make something else. I wanted to use 2 backgrounds and 2 of the colorways to create a quilt with a transparency effect.

Wondering Star is simply one star block in EQ blown up to 36". I didn't have enough fabrics left to be fussy about how I cut them. That was actually a good thing because with limited options this quilt came together quickly! I cut the pieces from whatever I had with no concern to how it would look next to it's neighbor. 

In this closeup you can see the nice effect of the 2 colorways of prints. The fabrics in each section of the star are cut from the same motifs of 2 of the colorways. I loved this effect and want to do a larger quilt like this.

It's finished off with a Zentangle label and I'll admit that this one idea is totally taken from a Zentangle that I saw on the web.

Now about the names. Every year that I make one of the sample quilts for Paula I try to make some reference to the fabric line name. For Palindromes I named my quilt a palindrome: Murder For A Jar of Red Rum. For Chromazone I found a band name Chromazone and name the quilt after one of their songs: Time in Place.

Clearly, I spent way too much time thinking about names! 

For Wonderlust I decided to split the word and use part in the name of each quilt. Wondering Star came first because it was easy. That left me with Lust. The easy answer would have been "Fabric Lust" but why do easy? The I focused back on the quilt.
I had 9 moons.
Nine moons could translate to 9 months.
Nine months makes a baby. Ah ha!
The result was Beware of Lust!
Now don't try to read anything into this. I'm not pro or anti baby. It was simply a train of thought that let me get to the end of these 2 quilts. 

I really should simply number my quilts. Life would be so much easier that way!

Quilt Market has happened and Paula Nadelstern's new fabric is out so now I can share my quilts! I have one for today and one for next Friday. Paula's new fabric line is called Wonderlust and you can see all of the fabrics here. Cotton Club is taking pre-orders here.

When I make quilts using Paula's fabrics I rarely use the mandalas or the background fabrics. This year I challenged myself to focus on those specifically. 

This quilt could not have been simpler to make. The pattern is the Moon Over The Mountain block. A friend made a MOTM quilt several years ago and that block has always stuck with me. She made hers with hand dyed fabrics before I ever dyed my first piece of fabric. The moon and the mountain are fused and machine appliqued with a zig zag stitch!

Each block is 12" and I used 3 of the Marbella colors for, of course, a gradient effect Each mandala panel has 3 designs and there are 3 colorways. Each colorways is represented in a row and each mandala design is a column. I think it shows off the mandalas really well and I had this together in 2 evenings.

You can see in the first detail shot that the quilting is straight lines with metallic thread.

Of course I had to have a Zentangle label!

Now, for the name. I told you that I made 2 quilts and I like referencing the fabric line name in the quilt make. This one uses the word "lust". You've got a week to think about why I named this quilt "Beware of Lust". The first person to figure it out will win a little prize. I'll explain it next Friday when I share the second quilt.

I've been back from vacation a week and I'm still no quite back into my groove. To get myself focused again I decided to work on this set of 4 placemats. I had purposely left these set up and ready to work on before I left so that they might be easy to jump on when I returned. Surprisingly, that approach might have actually worked.

This project started with these triangles saved from the Rainbow's End Quilt. These are the cut-offs from the snowball block corners. I really should have tossed them out but I'm glad I didn't.

For my placemats I use up some ugly fabric for the backing and I use old flannel sheets for the batting. The pale blue fabric is one that I dyed for another project. It didn't work for that one but it's perfect for these placemats.

Once I made some placemats and did some very dense quilting. They look great but it took seemingly forever. 
I don't do that anymore. 
For these placemats I first did angled quilting following the top line of the triangles. Then I did vertical straight lines about 1 1/4" apart in the rest of the space.

I had dark teal and a red-purple fabrics in my stash so I went to Facebook to see which I should use for the binding. Facebook wisely choose the teal. I even dyed napkins to match.

Now I can be 100% honest in saying that there are absolutely no more scraps left from the Rainbow quilts!

It's done! All 4836 square inches of scrappy goodness is done.

When I started putting all the Rainbow scrap fabrics together into crumb blocks I had intended to make some placemats but you can see that got totally out of hand and now I have this cute quilt. I also intended to donate this quilt to QOV or somewhere else but I'm kind of loving it too much to let it go quite yet. So I'm going to save it for a friend or family member who might need it in the future.

I created a page on the website for this quilt and you can see lots more photos on the Rainbow's End page.

I have my first finish for August!

I started this quilt several years ago when I hosted a half-square triangle quilt-along on my old blog. We called it HSTeria. last month I finally took 30 minutes to sew on the borders and planned to quilt it. I didn't have a plan for the quilt but Alycia saw it and said it would be perfect as a QOV for a female PTSD group that she works with in Colorado. Well that was all the incentive I needed to get this one wrapped up. It will join the Rainbow Lap quilt to be shipped to Alycia this week. I have a soft goal of 2 QOV quilts a year and this will make 3 for 2017 so I'm good for the year!

This is a real girly-girl quilt and isn't me at all! But I do like it and I made it even more girly with pink quilting thread and my favorite quilting motif, wavy crosshatch, keeps it really soft. The batting is Hobbs 80/20 and it's what I use on any quilt that I want to become a cuddly blanket.

Well, one I decided to go pink I went all in with a pink quilt back. While the quilt isn't "me" I do think it will be loved by someone.

With FloMo on hiatus I was finally forced to do binding and here's my second finish for the month! This is the lap size Rainbow Quilt. I finished the king size version in May. This one is going to Alycia for Quilts of Valor in Colorado. 

I quilted it with a quick and easy continuous curve design. This one will stay soft and cuddly as a QOV should be.

I love the back. This is based on the Abundance gradient and I used the purple edges of the backing fabric for the binding. It just needs the QOV label and it will be ready to go!

This is the quilt that the Misty Morning gradient was designed for. You can read all about it in my 2017 gallery.

Here's another of the back with the color better.

​It's washed and dried now and all that's left is the Zentangle label.

As a general rule I don't make any of the veterans quilts that Country School donates, I just quilt them. But occasionally I have just the right amount of leftovers to put one together and that's the case with this one. Some of you may remember my Crossing The Drunkard's Path quilt-along that I hosted in 2015. I made a few DP quilts and one of them was in every shade of brown hand dyed that I had in my stash. You can see the original quilt top on the old blog. I had spent a lot of time making all of these DP blocks and I wasn't going to waste them. There weren't enough by themselves for a veteran's size quilt so I dyed a gradient for a border and even had a 4-patch for the top corner. I really love how this one turned out. I love the big one too and will quilt it soon.

 My rule is that veterans quilts get simple quilting and that's what I wanted with this. But I also wanted something that would at least reference the curves in the block. Baptist Fans came immediately to mind but that is not a fast quilting motif. Then I remembered a filler design that I learned from Leah Day's book. She calls it Echo Shortcut. I use it a lot in tiny fill quilting but is there any reason it can't be done big?

Any fill pattern can be done big and I know I'll use this one again and again.
Here's a photo of it on the frame. The only thing the least bit fiddly about this is that I worked each row left to right. I quilted the whole thing in about an hour and a half.

The back of this one is a nice bit of serendipity. I custom dyed a back for a customer and, once done, realized that I had mixed one color wrong. I made another for her and got the nice one to keep for myself. It worked out perfect for this quilt.

​Another finish!