WIP Wednesday

I am so excited today! Why? Because I finished the top for my Supernova quilt!!!!

 

 

It could probably use some ironing.

 

I was unsure about whether to add the border or not, but it seemed too small without it. I had to square the blocks down to about 13.5 inches? I think? because the edges were so uneven. There are some places where the quilt really looks weird as a result. But all in all I am SO pleased with how it turned out. I'm a VERY new quilter--I've made one quilt-as-you-go rag quilt, and one small quilt top for a Sunkissed Squares quilt, so this was my first attempt at doing any complicated piecing. The bias seams are kind of a disaster. Oh well. :)

 

The next question is how to back it and how to quilt it. I was sort of inspired by this picture:

 

 

I really like the way the points match up like that, so I'm thinking about getting a half a yard or so of each of those point fabrics and doing a big cross like that on the back. Problem is, the purple is a FQ from JoAnn's and the chartreuse is discontinued. I can get the yellow and I already have the pink, but I'm not sure how I would do the other two colors.

 

Alternately, this line came with these other prints:

 

I was initially drawn to the eggplant plaid (the only one of these that I used in the quilt). I'm not a huge fan of the vegetables--I don't think it goes. I would LOVE ideas from anyone that has them! :)

 

Kaleidoscope Quilt Along:

 

I've started cutting and I've done a little bit of piecing, but right now I'm mostly laying out the fabrics and seeing how I like them.

 

The first three I'm thrilled with. The last one in the top row is really not that orange in person. With the exception of the left-hand one on the bottom row, I'm really not sure about any of those--so much so that I haven't even cut the fabric yet. I have fat quarters of all of these, and I have enough fabric to do 3 blocks of each print. I've got two that aren't pictured here and I might replace those three. I'd like to wind up with a total of 10, for 30 blocks. We'll see how it goes.

 

Garden Squares quilt: no progress

 

Skillbuilder Sampler blocks: caught up

 

Other news: I signed up for the For the Love of Solids swap. I'm excited to do some work with solids, since I haven't done much with them yet!

 

Finally--on Saturday I will be taking a break from vacationing to take my students to a national math competition. This is a competition in which we won second place last year, which was the best we've ever done. Wish us luck to do as well or better this year! There won't be any sewing going on, since we're flying to Dallas and I'm not hauling my sewing machine on the plane, but I'm sure I'll be doing some knitting while we're there.

 

Linking up with Lee at Freshly Pieced!

 

WIP Wednesday

Hi all! Back from vacation, lots of exciting crafty things going on... ready to get back to the sewing machine! So here are my WIPs for the week:
Finished:
I made a skirt! I did not finish it in time for skirt week, oh well. I'm just proud that I finished it. 



No cute pictures of me modeling it, but take my word for it, it DOES fit and it looks pretty good. I still need to sew the clasp onto the waistline, but other than that it's completely done.
The pattern was a "learn to sew" pattern from New Look (I posted about it in my previous post) and it was straightforward and easy, though the fact that I had to make it in a size 18 still rankles.

Continuing WIPs:
The Supernova is getting to the finishing point!

I mentioned previously that I wanted to make three more blocks so that I could have 3 of each color, 3 rows of 4. At the point when I took this picture (pre-vacation) I was stalled because I was waiting for the last little bit of fabric I needed to arrive. I'd run out of the lime green in the corners of the green block, the pink in the corners of the pink block, and the dark purple in the diagonals of the purple block. I ran into trouble when I realized that Connecting Threads had sold out of the lime green! But fortunately, they still had precuts of all the fabrics, and the amount I needed was small enough that a charm pack did the trick. (Of course, now I have charms of all the other fabrics in the line left over...).

Here's a tentative layout for how I plan to arrange the blocks, once I've finished the last three. (Peanut really likes it, as you can see...) Then I just need to do the border and it'll be time for me to quilt my VERY FIRST QUILT!! Gulp. I'm terrified. I'm debating waiting until I take the long-arm quilting class in August, but I'd really like to finish SOMETHING this summer.

New: Kaleidoscope Quilt-Along
I wasn't sure about doing this one. Then I saw this and it inspired me. The background color (teal in this picture) will be the charcoal gray. The foreground color will be the various pink and teal prints.



Garden Fence Quilt:

The block is from a tutorial from Hyacinth Quilt Designs--I LOVE it! I bought this stack of fat quarters from Sew Fresh Fabrics a while ago in a bundle with a yard of June Jubilee by Alexander Henry. I really love the fabric but I wasn't sure what to do with it. I definitely think, though, that this is a great fit of fabric and pattern! I've cut out enough for 4 squares of each color, but I've run out of all the solids. I'm going to hold off on ordering more until I have some of the squares put together.

(Both of these pictures are saved from Sew Fresh Fabric's Etsy store.)

I have super exciting sewing machine news too, but that will come in a later post!

(I also switched over to Blogger, with the idea that it's a little more user-friendly than Wordpress. All previous posts have been copied over!)

Linking up to Freshly Pieced!

Are we done yet??

Yes, we are!!! It's officially summer vacation! I had to go to work today to finish packing my classroom, but as of about 4:30 PM I turned in my keys and went home :-D

I'm posting a work-in-progress today. I started participating in the Freshly Pieced Supernova Quilt-Along when it was first announced back in March. Many people are already done. I am.... not. :-D But I finished my first 4 squares this weekend!

 

Most of the fabrics are from the Homegrown collection at Connecting Threads, with a few fat quarters from Joann Fabrics thrown in.

The quilt-along pattern calls for you to make 9 blocks and arrange them in a 3x3 pattern. But of course I picked 4 different color combinations, and well, 4 does not go evenly into 9, does it? (Yes, I AM a math teacher.) So this was my original idea for a layout:

But I don't think I like it anymore. So now I'm going to do something like this:

 

I think the blocks look a lot better than these little stacks of fabric though :)

This appeals to me more because it's more even--I have three blocks of each color--and I prefer rectangular quilts to square quilts. This also probably means I have to buy more fabric, at least of a couple of them, because I only had 2 10x10 pieces of each of the Homegrown fabrics.

Things I've learned thus far:

• The seams look MUCH better when I press them open than when I press them to one side.


• Piecing when you've got diagonal seams is HARD! This is only my second pieced quilt top and it might have been slightly beyond my skills when I started. I feel like I'm improving a lot.


• My sewing machine sucks. I have to rethread it about once every 5 minutes. This makes the chain-piecing process rather difficult.


• Looking at the blocks, it's hard to notice all the wonky seams--so this is a good thing. :)

There are lots of really pretty finished Supernovas at the Supernova Flickr group, if you want to check it out!

Linking up to Lee's WIP Wednesday for the first time :-D