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!

Last month I showed you this mandala that I was marking to get it ready for quilting. As I was marking it I decided that I wanted to use some threads that I hadn't used on the longarm before and I felt like I needed to test them. I had a little fat quarter mandala that's been hanging around my sewing room for a while and decided that it could be my practice piece. It was in the same colors so I could test the threads.

Boy am I goad I did this! You can take all the classes in the world, like my awesome ruler class next weekend, but nothing beats loading a quilt and practicing. Over the past year I've pulled this out several times and started marking all over it in Crayola Washable Marker. I think I had 5 or 6 different ideas marked on it. It was kind of a mess but I left it and just started quilting and tried to ignore the marker.

I marked the petal shapes in one design, quilted in another and hated both. Then I ripped out the stitches.

Then I got smart and traced the shape on paper to work out a design that I liked. 

To quilt the ring of red around the center I marked guidelines for every other stitched line.

But that wasn't enough so I went back and added even more lines. They aren't perfect but from viewing distance they look just fine.

This is after quilting and before washing. There's so much marker on it that when I soaked it the water turned dark purple....and it wasn't from the fabric bleeding!

This photo shows off the quilting best and helps show some of the things I learned:
- the acrylic thread runs beautifully on the Innova so I can use it on the next quilt confidently
- but my color choices need some reconsideration. Those Spirograph shapes are really cool and you can't see them! I should have quilted those areas in dark grey or black.
- I love the effect of the white stitched ring behind the petals. The back stitching shows but not as bad as I expected.

But, you know what I really, really love?

The back!! I hand stitched the binding just so I could display it from the front or back.

There's one more lesson back here too.
When I did this I used the same thread top and bottom throughout to see how it behaves. I think that I should not use the acrylic thread in the bobbin. I'll use one of my "normal" threads.
I also learned that I wan't the quilt to show well on the back so I'll use a solid for the back of the next quilt and I can't wait to get it loaded and started.

Just in time for end of the month accounting I’ve finished a project! The King Sized Rainbow Quilt is officially done except for the label. But I’m counting it for this month and I know I’ll have the label done by May 20 because that’s when I deliver it to Ashley and James. As the newest member of our family I wanted Ashley to have this quilt as her own and that’s why it’s called Ashley’s Rainbow.

​This quilt is HUGE but it came together pretty quickly. The quilting was fast and the binding is done all by machine. I expect this quilt to be a “blanket” for them so I’m not at all concerned about a machine stitched binding. For the quilting I did ruler work but I used a 6” circle ruler and traveled quickly across the rows in a continuous curves path. Just Google continuous curves longarm quilting and you’ll find lots of tutorials to see what I’m talking about.

​For the border I did some CC in the triangles using a couple of different ovals and I did straight line chevrons in the black areas ¾” apart. The thread is Rainbows on top and So Fine in the bottom.

​I’m really happy about the back. I had dyed this back for another project but it didn’t work out. It’s been waiting for a home for a long time and was just barely big enough for this quilt.

​I took the time to center it and you can tell by the quilting motifs that I got it pretty darned close to perfect. I have a lap quilt version and a baby quilt version of this pattern left to quilt…someday.

2017 got off to a very slow start for me. I had big plans to have so many things done by now but my immune system had other ideas. Maybe a late start makes the first finish more enjoyable because this feels like a big accomplishment.

 This should have been my 3rd QOV for 2016 because all that was left was the binding. But I'm not delivering it to a QOV coordinator until next month so it matters not whether it was a 2016 or 2017 finish. It was just another pile in the sewing room needing attention.

​This quilt is made with the leftovers of my first 2016 QOV. I also made a veteran's size coins quilt. By the time I was done with those I was completely fatigued by these fabrics and gave them to a friend in my quilt club and she made 2 more veteran's tops. I think those fabrics are truly done now.

My patched binding looks just fine. If the recipient notices they will just think that they discovered a secret and will proudly point out their astute discovery to their friends.

The quilting is a simple double stipple or ribbon. This goes so quickly, keeps the quilt soft and is great for masculine or feminine quilts.

Of course I had to add a little of myself with a hand dyed quilt back. I love this mottled blue. You can see there there are some very dark areas and I cut those from my scraps for the binding patch.

This one is washed and ready for a label and then I can deliver it and my other QOV next month. 

​Time to start thinking about another QOV quilt to do.