Quarter Hour Quilting

Because of the inspiration from visiting the International Quilt Festival and a desire to try to preserve what sanity I still have, I thought I'd try to break a quilting project down into 15 minute increments. So I thought I'd detail my steps in hopes that it can help others. Too often people say quilting is too time consuming -- but if done in small steps, I think it can be accomplished without spending hours at a time. We'll see how this little experiment works!

Of course, I didn't decide until after I cut the fabric and just now thought of the journaling aspect, so I dont' have pictures of the early steps -- but here's what I've accomplished so far.

The pattern is called Top Hat Tessellations by Rebecca Boline. It's one of four twin size quilt patterns I received when I bought a fabric bundle at the quilt festival. There were 5 1-yard fabrics in the bundle.

Day 1: Cut the fabric into the initial strips called for in the pattern.
Day 2: I sewed the  larger strips together.
Day 3: I ironed the strips in preparation for cross-cutting.
Day 4: I cross cut the strips.
Day 5: I pinned the first set of strips to the left side of  one set of the cross cut pieces.
Day 6: I pinned the second set of strips to the left side of one set of the cross cut pieces.

Not a very exciting picture -- but this is what they look like now. I've got 72 of these to sew over the next few days to create two different blocks.

International Quilt Festival

Last month, I had the chance to go to the International Quilt Festival with my step-mom. We had a great time and there were an incredible number of beautiful quilts there.

Here are some of my favorites.

Mike's Quilt

It's scary that already almost a year has passed since I've posted anything. Since then, I finally completed Mike's quilt.

Bless his patient heart. I stopped and started on this so many times. But it's done.

It was machine pieced and hand quilted. Given my thumb issues, it's probably one of the last large quilts I'll do by hand, but wanted to do so with his.

This is called a box-in-box pattern. It was designed on EQ6. I was able to scan in the fabrics and Mike and I were able to play iwth the design to get this effect. I'm glad he liked the optical illusions. I do too.

The colors go with our family room.