X Plus ScrapBeeLicious Equals Awesome...

Every quilting blog could use some good math puns, right?  No?  Guess it's just me then.  Alrighty...let me distract you from my lame jokes with some fabric goodness.

November's ScrapBeeLicious Queen was Alyce and she requested X Plus blocks with this Liberty print as our color inspiration:

Gorgeous, right?  Now a print like this makes me very, very aware of a big blind spot in my stash - prints.  Not to say that I have mostly solids, but about 95% of all my fabrics are monochromatic prints.  Not that this is usually a problem, but probably something that I should be more aware of when I fabric shop.  But I digress...

It's obviously not November anymore but thankfully (according to Wombat Quilt's very helpful Bee Etiquette post) I am not technically late yet!  This gave me a chance to scan our Flickr group and see what other bee members had already created.  I saw a lot of red centers so decided to mix things up a bit and use the mustard yellow along with Alyce's requested dark greys for the plus lines.

I got to sneak in one of my last few Birds & Bees scraps and a little 1001 Peeps too!

The X Plus block has been pretty popular lately and I've seen a lot of versions that are fantastic but this was my first attempt and it was a pretty fun block to make.  I can see how people can crank them out assembly line style!  

One thing that I am really glad I had read on Little & Lots' blog about her X Plus Quilt was how to use the large amount of triangle scraps that these blocks create.  She found a tip and turned the scraps from her X Plus into a WHOLE OTHER QUILT.  Love it!  So I followed suit and from just these two blocks, I now have a nice little pile of 16 pink and teal HSTs - I think they'll find their way into a small finish one way or another!

By the way, do any of you have blind spots in your stash or difficulty with prints like me?

Linking up:

Crazy Mom Quilts Finish It Up Friday

Instead of Sewing...

...I've been mostly just thinking about sewing.  Especially after we took the girls to the movies over the holiday weekend and saw Frozen.  Not only was it a great girl-power sort of fairy tale, it was visually gorgeous.

Image from Disney Concepts & Stuff by Brittney Lee

All the scandinavian designs, the details on the costumes, the colors...everything about it just screamed out quilt to me.

If only I could get all the ideas to gel into something!  But for now I'm good with just letting all this stuff marinate for a while longer.

Image from Disney Concepts & Stuff

And since I've been avoiding the actual sewing machine, I decided to gather the girls together for a baking project instead.  We kept the Frozen theme going with some melted snowman and snowflake cookies (excuse the poor-quality cell photo - they got eaten pretty quickly!)

One Step Closer To An Amis Finish...

There's always such a great feeling of satisfaction when a quilt top is completed!  Although these few photos aren't great, I'm sure that there will be lots more photos to share when the entire quilt is finished - and I'm smart enough to avoid photographing on a windy day at the height of the noon sun.

I was so pleased that the Rangoon blocks (and partial seams in general) were not as difficult as I first worried!  It really is quite a lovely block both on its own and in a crowd of friends.

My other fear was that the brown when paired with touches of lime green and peach would read too seventies.  I think that once the entire top was together, I didn't have anything to worry about.  Does anyone else habitually have that panicky feeling about two-thirds of the way through a quilt that nothing is working out quite like you'd hoped?  It seems like I have that happen a lot...but when all is finally sewn together and seen as a whole, it all turns out pretty good!

I really love the border design on this quilt top - those small squares let me throw in a few extra fussy-cut owls and wolves for fun.  The Les Amis line is just so cute and made for fussy cutting!

Now it's onto figuring out how to create the back and then a quilting design...

Linking up:

Crazy Mom Quilts Finish It Up Friday

Little Bits Add Up...

I'm definitely sorry to say that I don't have another big reveal to share yet.  The Rangoon quilt top is still just shy of being complete, so I didn't end up meeting my self-imposed deadline of an October finish.  I guess I just got carried away with my black and white herringbones!  But since I finished that top, my week has been filled with a few little successes that have been on my to-do list for FAR too long.

I was simply buried under a pile of minky scraps from my cuddle blanket finishes in August and was trying to figure out if they were worth saving.  My oldest kept playing around with them and eventually asked me to make her a scarf with them.  "Sure - that's easy!" I said...and then promptly got around to it two months later.  Ah well - it's done now and checked off the list!  Of course, I still have enough minky scraps for at least 4 more scarfs, but all in good time.

The girls have been pretty interested in painting and crafting lately and our arts and crafts area is always the kitchen table.  Until this point, I had been using a fairly small scrap of laminated fabric that only covered about half the table but a trip with a friend up to Mardens gave me the excuse I needed to finally get off my butt and get some materials for a tutorial that I had seen in the August 2013 Parents magazine for a DIY tablecloth.  Laminated fabric is a mom's best friend - gorgeous fabric to decorate your table and you can clean up food messes, spilled and dried on paint, glue stick remnants and even markers with a simple swipe of a wet wipe.

Wait - did I say proper tablecloth?  How about this instead...I bought 2 yards of this beautiful cranberry Joel Dewberry oilcloth for $10 - that's right $10!! - and simply used my sewing scissors to cut curves around the fabric pattern, slapped it on the table and called it a day.  Check!

And that pesky pair of jeans that has needed a patch for a while now is finally fully dressed with a scrap of Salt Water that's a pretty good color match.  Check!

So not much showstopping stuff happening around here, but it feels awfully good to have so many little things done and off my list!  But speaking of a Showstopper - I saw this new pattern by Don't Call Me Betsy earlier this week and have been drooling over it ever since.  It looks like a lot of work, but certainly seems worth it to me!

Linking up:

Crazy Mom Quilts Finish it Up Friday!

Back with a Black & White Bang!

Alright gang, I know that it's been pretty darn quiet around here lately.  But rest assured that my sewing machine has truly been getting quite a workout.  I just didn't think that you'd want to see a long line of posts about my continued machine production of black and white Broken Herringbone blocks for my MSBHQAL project.

I really didn't think that I'd manage to submit anything for Molli's wrap up linky party that has some fabulous prizes on the line, but I busted out over 20 blocks in just over a month and was able to throw together this quilt top.

My color scheme was based off of this beautiful palette

Source: flickr.com via Stephanie on Pinterest

Even though my blues turned out a little more electric and bright, I think the colors still play really nicely together!

I don't know why I've kept black/white prints mostly for bindings before now.  I love how sharp and crisp they look next to those bright colors - each block that I created was so much fun to see as a completed square!  The scrappy black sashing gave each block a little chance to breathe without breaking up those geometric shapes.

I also had fun sparsely throwing in a few prints that showed a pop of color. The stripes of goldfish below were what sparked the idea.  They were just too cute to not make an appearance.

My original plan was to make it 6 blocks wide by 6 or 7 blocks tall - I'll probably end up going back to block making a ways down the road and add to it when I can put a fresh pair of eyes on it.  But for now, I think it looks exactly as I was hoping it would - scrappy but still fresh and bright!

Linking up with:

Crazy Mom Quilts Finish it Up Friday

Molli Sparkles Broken Herringbone QAL

Soft {Block} Rock'n...

Soft rock isn't usually something that I associate with anything truly pleasant, but let's see if I can't try to expand my own horizons.  We're into the third month of our ScrapBeeLicious year and so far, so good!  Each month has made me try something a bit out of my normal color/pattern/comfort zone and I'm really enjoying feeling stretched this way.

This month, Cath of the amazing Wombat Quilts is Queen Bee and she requested low-volume paper pieced blocks.  At first I thought - low volume?  Not really my thing, but I'm sure that I have oodles of fabric and scraps for it.  Apparently not.  In reality, I have a seriously screaming fabric stash.  Hard to imagine, I know.

But I did manage to gather up enough dominantly white fabrics with a very muted rainbow palate to create two different but cohesive blocks.  I love paper piecing and since I've been all wrapped up in Broken Herringbone's lately, it was really nice to step off into something different.  It's no secret that I'm in love with Julie's Block Rock'n Series and yet again I referenced her amazing catalog of paper pieced blocks.  Here is my Mercury block in some soothing hushed tones.

I also tried a variation of her Penny Lane block.

I truly love both blocks and their whispering ways.  It's making me toy with the idea of low volume projects for myself.  I guess there is something to be said for soft rock after all.

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I Got 99 Posts But This Quilt Ain't One!

Disclaimer 1:  I really, really don't like hip hop.  I swear.  I think I maybe only know a handful of artists, a few less song titles and perhaps only a few lines of actual lyrics - I can't decide if that makes this post title a small miracle or a total abomination.  Probably an abomination.  Go ahead and call the Quilt Police to have them take away my card.

Disclaimer 2:  Yes, I actually have blogged about this quilt before, but never showed you all the actual quilted and finished product.  But when I realized that this would be my 99th post, the idea stuck in my head and I couldn't shake it loose.  I like puns and quilts and it made me laugh - what else can I say?

Disclaimer 3:  I am not actually endorsing this song in any way (really dislike it if you want to know the truth) and am cringing a bit at the possibility of my mom reading this post, clicking on the link and clutching her pearls.  Just don't click on it, Mom.  It's Jay-Z.  Let's leave it at that.

Disclaimer 4: Alright, my mom doesn't usually wear pearls.  But you get the gist.

When I got all of my quilts back after the Lowell Quilt Festival way back in August, I realized that I was in such a rush to get it quilted and finished before the show, I never took pictures or blogged about it once it was finished.  Here is my finished Glam Rock Girl - my mini quilt for our BMQG Challenge to base a quilt off of this inspiration:

It finished off at 24" square and the blocks are paper pieced using this block design called Icky Thump by Julie at 627 Handworks.   It turned out to be really hard to properly photograph the mix of colors used in the quilt - the light blue and gray mixed with a dark red on a black and white background just did not add up to great photos by this mega-amateur.  But I really love how it all turned out.  

I took some of your suggestions on quilting and ended up doing echoing only on the black and white text print.  It puffed out the colored stars nicely and gave it even more texture overall!

For the backside, I took a couple of my scraps and created a couple quickie hourglass blocks then surrounded them in a black background.  I actually made the backing large enough so that I could fold it over to the front and machine stitch down it for an easy peasy binding.

Just don't look too closely where I accidentally cut right through the fabric when I was trimming down my batting and top and then had to (very messily) darn it back together.  Oops.

By far the most fun part of the challenge was seeing all the entries put together at the Lowell Quilt Festival!  Here are a few pictures I took at the event of all the minis together.

 Here was my favorite of the bunch - all of those pieces are SO tiny!

So there you have it folks - my 99th post.  I can hardly believe that in another week I'll have been blogging for an entire year now.  I've had such a fabulous time sharing my projects, getting heaps of advice and making new crafty friends along the way.

And how do I honor all that amazing quilty goodness?  By quoting freaking Jay-Z.

Blerg.

Linking up:

Crazy Mom Quilts - Finish It Up Friday