Magpie Quilts

Pinterest is a great place for inspiration and I saw this quilt and quickly pinned it, knowing I would be back to make it. The pattern is found in Fons and Porter's Easy Quilts, Spring 2014 edition. Last week, I checked the magazines when I bought my groceries and bought the magazine. I think I could have figured it out on my own, but it's always nice to have a new magazine or two to browse through! I traced the circle template onto some template plastic that I've had for a very long time and dug my stack of old jeans out of the back of the closet. I found a video to play in the background while I traced and cut and in a few hours, I had 168 circles cut from my stack of blue jeans.  The thing that caught my eye about this particular jean quilt was the bright colored fabrics that were peeking out from between the blue jean circles. I have a lot of fat quarters and fabric scraps, but I also had 4 packs of charm squares from Moda's Basic Grey collectio...

Finished Snowball and 9-patch little quilt - For Sale here!  I've had a lot of fun making this little quilt. Sometimes, bigger is not always better and these small quilts let me get something done relatively quickly and practice some of the techniques that I'm slowly learning! Marking the quilting pattern Free motion along marked lines And removing the lines with water I took a class in machine quilting feathers back in May of 2013 and although the practice piece from that class is still not finished, I did learn how to mark a quilting pattern on a quilt top. The blue marker is from Clover (available here on Amazon) and disappears with water. This little quilt had some great open white areas that are great for a medallion motif. This motif was from an old issue of Miniature Quilts magazine and I traced it onto the snowballs and free-motion quilted it. And the back looks pretty cool too! There will be more of these kinds of quilting motifs in my future - ...

Sometimes I have ideas in my head and they just scream for me to get out the fabric and create them. This month has been all about two quilt blocks, the 9-patch and the Snowball block. (There will be a longer post on that later!) And this is the idea that's been percolating in my imagination and the quilt I really wanted to make from those two basic building blocks. This little quilt will finish at about 15" x 21", perfect for a doll quilt, or if you like to collect miniature quilts, this one will look great hanging on your wall or peeking out of a basket. You will need the following fabrics to make this quilt: Assorted scraps (or a pack of 5" charm squares) Light colored fabric (one fat quarter or use assorted light scraps) Binding (coordinating color - one fat quarter) I keep almost all my scraps and occasionally I will cut them up into various sizes, the smallest of which are my 1.5" squares. I pulled out an assortment of the duller fabric squares...

Antique Butterfly Quilt I have a treasure that was given to me by my mother-in-law. It is a beautiful antique quilt top that was made by her mother. It was never quilted, instead, it was finished as a summer coverlet and not used very often as it is in perfect condition. The butterflies on it are all made from different fabrics, and like many quilts made in the 1930's and 1940's, the fabrics were likely from feed sacks or sugar sacks. The applique butterflies must have been an original design as I haven't seen any others with the same black bodies and rounded wings. Looking closely at the embroidery, you can see that she machine stitched the outside of the appliques to baste them to the background and then finished with tiny, meticulous blanket stitching with black embroidery cotton. (The stitches are less than 1/8" long and very close together!) Antique Butterflies The story is that Nana Adams was told to take it easy during her pregnancy with what was to b...

In celebration of the colour purple and especially the Pantone colour of the year, Radiant Orchid, I searched my house high and low for some purple treasures. And found. . Collection of purple items that I didn't have much of anything that was purple! I have a few more fabrics than the gingham one shown. And from the collection of pencil crayons left over from 3 boys, I found more than one of each of the shades shown here! Buttons - I have plenty in pink and red and blue, but only a few that I could really say were purple (and the flower ones are borderline - more pink than purple in my eyes!) Do you have any colours that are noticeably absent from your home? your quilting supplies? ---Ann