Triple Rail Fence quilt top finished! and more!

Except for the borders that is... the book i am working through has us do all the borders at one time.  this is quilt top 3 from the book that i have made, also a sampler is in the works too from the book.

so i laid this quilt top out on my seriously unattactive basement floor, i really need to look for other places to photograph stuff like this!

 Heres a closeup, so you can get a look at the fabrics.

and of course here is a sideways pic of the quilt top.  I plan ( i think ) to do a narrow black(perhaps white) border and then a wider one with larger floral print.


So last summer on vacation, i bought to quilt kits from a quilt shop in Williams Lake, B.C. with the intention of making my 2 oldest granddaughters quilts for their 5th birthdays, one on Dec 21,2011 and the other Feb 13, 2012.
  and i got them both done.
the first one for Daphne is a ballerina theme, made of  4 large blocks and about 16 smaller blocks all with printed ballerina designs. the shop had also included co-ordinating ballerina fabric .  man what a pain!!!  the blocks werent printed on the straight of grain, and man i had someheadaches with it LOL  plus being a very beginner quilter, I am amazed it turned out so well.
DH and I took our other soon to be 5 year old granddaughter Venessa with us in early December to celebrate Daphnes birthday early. About a 5 to 6 hour drive away in winter conditions.

 As you can see by the smile on her face, Daphne really liked it!!  Thats Venessa hiding behind her fan!

My first time machine quilting, I did stars on the big corner blocks and a stipple design on the others, with a not so dense stippling on the border. I was in a time crunch and sewed the binding on by machine and i like how it looked. the whole quilt turned out okay for someone who really didnt have a clue  LOL sometimes ingnorance is bliss :) she brought it with her when they came for christmas too so its getting well loved!

Venessas quilt for her birthday in Feb was a mermaid, theme, same idea , printed blocks, not square, swearing , ripping out etc. but perservered and got it finished in time for her birthday.  Sadly i didnt get a picture of her with it before they left in March to go back home to Manitoba. They had been here at my DIL's parents while my son was doing a tour in Afghanistan from Oct to Mar. 

so here is is layed out on our bed, really pretty colours in this one love the deep pinks and tourquises.

I did spirals in the large printed blocks and stippling with variegated thread in the pieced blocks.

In the border i sort of did circular stippling around the circle design of the border fabric.  Venessa does really like it she told me !

Right before making these i did a flannel quilt from a kit from the same quilt shop ( i dropped a whack of cash there that day )

for Venessas baby brother who was born Dec 2 ( she also has a sister Ainsley, who will be 2 next aug)  It was very simple blocks and qulted on the diagonal by machine. The backing fabric my DIL picked out in Edmonton when we took my son there in Oct when he was deployed. 

 This is little Darrens quilt which was pretty much ready by the time he was born.

I also made this tablerunner for my MIL for christmas last year. made from moda coins, i dont know if thats the right word, they were precuts , 2 1/2 inches by 5 inches , just sewed together and stitched in the ditch . 

I also pieced these two table runners, before christmas , the brown one was machine quilted and binding finished about 3 weeks ago and lives on the coffee table, it was a quilt from a store in Jasper Alberta that i picked up about 2 years ago. 

 the yellow and blue one which was a kit put together by a quilt store here has the binding on but needs it to be hand sewn down, (that is a travel project for the upcoming long weekend)  I did a very simple machine quilting with my walking foot on the yellow and blue.  just kind of echoed one one side of each seam in the center and simple lines in the border.  I could sure tell that the piecing of these was done before i started learning properly how to piece.   YIKES !   and also the dark green in the brown runner was of course supposed to be down the middle  OOPsy!! 

The yellow and blue one is about 4 feet long and will be going on my dresser.

well thats it for now sports fans! hopefully tomorrow i will get up my WIP list.

New Directions!

It's been a bit since i updated my quilting blog and trust me it's not because i havn't been quilting or shopping :)  I was trying to play catch up with some of the quilt tops i had worked through in Quilters Academy Vol 1.  i had worked my way through the first quilt top ( see previous 2 posts) but never got around to posting about the 2nd.   And as i finished the 2nd one nearly 2 months ago it is hard to remember all the ups and downs, mistakes made and lessons learned.

so i have decided to just kinda recap show some pics,  post a  list of wips, and some pics of a couple of quilty things i did before i got totally smitten by quilting!

so here goes with the 2nd quilt top from my lessons in Quilters Academy Vol. 1

This is the design in the book, its called Cowboy Corral by Carrie Hargreave

Basically a fussy cut, with Rail Fence blocks, not unlike the first one, but a different layout of the strip set blocks to form frames around the fussy cut blocks.

 

Cowboy Corral from the book



 

main block fabric



 

fabrics for striped blocks

 

with the border fabric I chose

 





Did have a little of this going on!!





closeup




Finished!!



So there it is all finished ( except for the border)  with this series Harriet Hargreaves has us do the borders after we have done the quilt tops in the lessons. 

I didnt have too many problems with this,I still think my pressing is a bit erratic and moves things more than it should. I did sew one row on upside down or something and hence the pic with the seam ripper :)  On the whole i am happy with this one, much better piecing than i did last fall and i like the colours i chose too!  That can be kinda scary when you are at the fabric store and trying to decide if two fabrics will really look good together! 

The next lesson is a triple rail fence quilt top , which i have of course finished already...... still playing catch up!

I went with a black, white and red scheme this time, and was really leary about the fabrics i chose

I liked them but wasnt really sure if they would work???????  so i read ahead a bit in the book and made a mock up of the design by photocopying the fabric and then laying it out to check out the look of it.  pretty wild eh!!

Heres the mock up, of course being just printed on paper the colours were not as rich and vibrant as in real life!

so il liked the mock up well enough to go ahead and start cutting the fabric out. This design was somewhat more of a challenge for a beginner as there were 2 different strip sets instead of just the one.  But i followed Harriets directions ( as on the 2 previous quilts) for laying out the blocks and strip piecing. Works like a charm!

After the blocks were cut i layed them out on the floor downstairs and checked again to make sure the pattern stood out using all those prints.

the final layout before sewing, I moved the black and white swirl fabric ( lower left corner of mock up block) by mistake or something and ended up with it and the one above it in the mock up switched around, sadly i didnt notice until i had sewn it all up ....... but i still think it works fine. Now if i could only find a picture of the sewn up quilt top.......  I guess i will have to go take one and add it LOL