Charity quilt for school fundraiser

Once again, I have found myself up against a rapidly approaching deadline. The school auction is on April 21 but it would be better to finish before the deadline so it can be included in the auction catalog.

Will I make it?

I have completed the hand quilting in 25 out of 30 blocks and I need to do the binding as well.





Stay tuned for future developments.

Happy Friday!

I needed to whip out a baby quilt for a coworker ASAP and realized a pieced quilt would simply take too much time. I turned to my copy of Last-Minute Patchwork + Quilted Gifts and made the Baby Quilt.



You take one yard each of contrasting fabrics and sandwich them with some batting. I cut off the selvages and squared up my yardage and simply laid the fabrics together and cut the larger piece down to size and then did the same with the batting. No measuring! The quilt is tacked together with "ties" made with machine stitched ovals. Besides being a super easy quilt to construct, the cost is minimal. I spent less than $20 on the entire project.

Recently purchased fabrics from Peapod Fabrics. http://www.peapodfabrics.com/

Liberty of London printed shirt from Target! Wouldn't the dots with the Liberty print make a GREAT quilt?

Crazy!

I visited my sister in Santa Cruz yesterday and we drove down to Watsonville to attend the Pajaro Valley Quilt Association's annual quilt show. I hadn't intended on taking any photos, but this one spectacular crazy quilt stopped me in my tracks.
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The quilter made a block for each month but instead of incorporating the 12 blocks into a quilt, she hung these in a series of three panels. I'm ordinarily not a big fan of crazy quilts, but I thought this was spectacular.

My purchases:




A yard of each for a baby quilt


Some cute novelty fabric (who could resist a cat doing the hula hoop?)


Vintage button, an impulse purchase

A couple of non-quilting related photos from my daughter's Chinese New Year performance at school last Thursday:

New York Beauties anyone?

For my February block in my virtual quilting bee, I was forced to learn how to make a New York Beauty block. Intimidating, no?

My first attempt using my own fabrics:



The paper piecing template can be found here: http://www.lenzula.com/pattern/free/nyb.php.

I had never before attempted paper piecing and sewing curves. I decided to use tracing paper for my template. While I found it to be a tedious process to draft the pattern onto tracing paper, it wasn't difficult nor was the stitching. Sewing the curves proved to be much easier than I imagined. I pinned the center point and ends, then used a lot of pins to smooth out the sewing line. I used my small applique pins, sewing right over them.

This is what it looks like from the back:



The points come out nice and sharp using the paper piecing method.



I decided to try a different template for my final block and so made up another practise block with my own fabrics.


And the final using Jennifer's (bee) fabrics.



I added the purple print batik and raspberry solid from my stash to give it a little more pizzazz.