Blogger's Quilt Festival: Purple and Gray Quilt

Welcome to one of my favorite times of the year in the blogging world - the blogger's quilt festival! If you are new to my blog, please take a minute to look around and thank you so much for stopping by. And if you're not new, thanks so much for visiting again.


Anyway here is what I affectionately call the Purple and Gray Quilt (creative name, I know).

I made this quilt to celebrate the birth of my friend's adorable baby girl in the spring of 2011. My friend is a designer so I thought that a graphic quilt would be perfect. I love the black and white fabrics with just a pop of color. My favorite part of this quilt is the back and the binding. At this time a lot of people must have had a similar idea because I saw lots of quilts popping up on the internet with a similar design...I guess great minds think alike!

Anyway, this is one of my favorite quilts - I love the color combo with the plum and the shades of gray.

Back of the quilt

Front of the quilt

Quilt blowing in the wind

Thanks again for stopping by -- if you have a chance be sure to check out the other entires here!

Zig-Zag Quilt: A Wordless Post

Plus Quilt

The other day I realized I never shared this quilt with you. Back in August, I really wanted to make a plus quilt and when I learned that some of my good friends were expecting their first child this year, it seemed like the perfect opportunity to give it a try. Overall, I'm pretty pleased with the results. 

 

Quilt Stats:

Fabrics: Assorted blue, yellow, pinks, and kona white from my stash. 

Quilting: stitch in the ditch around each plus.

Citrus Sails Quilt

Front of Citrus Sails Quilt

Back of Citrus Sails Quilt

As part of the do.good.stitches charity bee, I've been quilting the top from my month. This entire project has been somewhat of a nightmare to be honest and I was about ready to throw in the towel on multiple occasions. Nevertheless, I persevered and I learned quite a few lessons along the way.

Lesson 1: Being a perfectionist isn't always perfect.  My design involved many half square triangles and lining up the points gave me a headache. I spent hours sewing and unpicking blocks together in an attempt to get them to line up perfectly. Luckily, my husband intervened. He told me that the Native Americans intentionally put a mistake in any handmade thing they make to show that it is created with human hands and humans are imperfect -- acknowledging that only God is perfect. I thought that was a rather interesting way to look at things. So I decided to embrace my inner imperfections and sew together the blocks to the best of my ability.

The front of the quilt - you can't even tell that some of the points don't line up perfectly!

Lesson 2: Sometimes simple is better. When I went to quilt it, I had a complex plan in my head and ended up with some (okay a lot) of puckers on the back. I couldn't for the life of me quiet the perfectionist side of my brain and I spent the better half of a day unpicking the quilting. Then I redid it in much simpler way and I like it much better.

The quilting - diagonal straight lines.

Lesson 3: Machine binding a quilt isn't the worst thing. I've always been opposed to machine binding (mainly because I couldn't get it to look the way I wanted) and have spent hours hand sewing my bindings. But because I was so behind on the deadline for this quilt, I bit the bullet and bound it by machine. And ya know, it doesn't look half bad.

What lessons have you learned while quilting?

Summer Fair 2011: Brick Quilt

Design: Based off Rachel's colorbrick quilt-a-long
Fabric: Various aqua/red prints from Just Wing it by Momo and other stash
Quilted: Machine quilted in the ditch
Completed: March 2011

I made this quilt for my sister's friend who had her first child. I thought this was a perfect quilt for a baby because it is so simple and cheerful. I chose to go with a simple stitch in the ditch style of quilting so it would emphasize the brick pattern on the back...and I adore how it came out. In fact the back might just be my favorite part.

I am linking this up to the gen x quilters summer quilt show.