Tiny Pink Penguin Quilt in the Bloggers Quilt Festival

This is my second quilt entry for Amy's Bloggers Quilt Festival. The first is here.

I am beyond tickled to be able to share this quilt in the Blogger's Quilt Festival Group Category.

This special quilt was made by 30 women. Most of us have never met in person. All of us love Ayumi Takahashi, the generous creator of Pink Penguin blog and most recently Patchwork Please! a must-have Zakka project book.  When my suspicions were confirmed and Ayumi publicly announced her pregnancy last fall, I got straight to work on a Flickr group of people I knew would want to help make a special quilt for her and Joe's baby.  Many more names of helpers were suggested by members of her online quilting bees and swap friends. A very happy discussion thread allowed us to settle on an alphabet quilt design using Kumiko Fujita's Patchwork 318 book for many of the blocks. Ayumi loves Kumiko and her style of quilting! Since the book is out of print, impossible to find and only 6 people in the group own a copy, Ms. Fujita graciously gave us her permission to share her alphabet and motif designs with each other. Several of the motif blocks were designed by members of the group 'specially for this quilt.

Ayumi is Japanese and speaks English. Joe is American and speaks Japanese. We know this baby will learn both languages and hope this sweet quilt will provide many hours of happy learning and eye-spy fun.

quilt photo by Ayumi

 
Here are the two blocks I made - the kite is my first attempt at designing a foundation pattern.

Over the course of five months and on a few continents, 56 quilt blocks were constructed. 54 of them were successfully mailed to me....IN CANADA...this is quite a shocker considering our super slow postal system.  Participants also provided scraps for setting squares so that I could sash and assemble the blocks with an assortment of fabrics in Ayumi's style. Lori Holt provided her bias gingham for the backing (a print Ayumi loves). Berene provided the sashing and binding.

I considered several quilting options, but in the end just went with straight diagonal lines with white thread to accentuate the layout and let the sweet blocks shine.  Initially, one member of the group had planned a trip to Japan and the quilt was to be hand-delivered, but when that didn't work out we held our breath and went with good old mail (I did drive across the border and leave it, nervously, in the hands of the USPS). Within a week, the quilt was in Ayumi and Joe's hands!

You can read all about Ayumi and Joe's receipt of the quilt, see more photos and read Ayumi's unbelievably sweet thank you messages that identifies all of the quilters and the blocks they contributed, here. Please do!

Sweet label embroidered by Jesse in England

For me, this quilt epitomizes the concept of a "group" project. It is not something I could have completed by myself before the baby started elementary school, but more than that, it's got the love and best wishes of a caring community stitched right in. The perfect gift for a Tiny Pink Penguin coming soon. The added bonus is that I got to meet a lot of new friends in the process and feel a tremendous amount of support from everyone.

Check out the rest of the festival entries, nominate your favs and vote!

Une autre Tour Eiffel

My niece's 10th birthday is this weekend. Continuing on the Eiffel tower theme of her last few birthday presents, I put keyka-lou's camera wristlet together for her. The original size seemed rather small, barely fitting an iphone, so I enlarged the pattern pieces to 115% on my printer. Not that my elementary-school-aged niece has an iphone. But lipgloss and a wallet take up space!

Why are Japanese fabric designers are so obsessed with Paris and all things French? Does anybody know? I mean, we have a perfectly good (and much taller) CN Tower here in Canada and you just don't see that on linen.

I decided things were a little dull with my green and natural linen colour-scheme, so I got out my Presencia perle 8 and did a blanket stitch trim around the flap instead of a simple machine top stitch. Next time I make this with linen, I'll skip the interfacing. The lining has a fusible batting attached to it's wrong side and it seems to give the pouch plenty of structure without having to interface the linen.

The closure is a sew-in magnetic button set. Although the pattern calls for it, Velcro and I are not friends. I find it a royal pain to sew in and secure, plus I don't like the sound of it at all. No disrespect to the genius who invented it. Gore-Tex rain jacket cuffs, yes. Cute little purses, no.

It is in the mail and on it's $15.92 plane ticket across the country. If only I could squeeze myself into a medium sized padded mailer. Because I know even though she loves my hand-made presents, nothing compares to a visit avec la vrai tante Krista, and her birthday party sounds like it'll be a blast. She's taking her friends on a PINK double-decker bus tour of Charlottetown, PEI. The probability of PINK cupcakes after the bus ride is very high. Lucky girls.

Dragon.Fly

Are you sitting down? Big news. I finished something larger than a bag, mug rug or mini quilt...don't get too excited, it won't cover a bed. But it is looking mighty fine on my dining room table right now.

If you've been visiting for a while, you may remember that I pieced this table runner last spring (but who's counting the months it's been curing in my closet, right?). I got inspired to complete it by the dangling carrot of EQ7 and 'generous fabric packs' offered up by the crew at Fat Quarterly and their "Win It to Be In It" contest. They are looking for completed projects from any issue of FQ mag and I believe this was in the very first issue!

The pattern is called Flying Fish Table runner and it was designed by the incomparable John, of Quilt Dad. He's been ever so sweet to comment on my Flickr photos, too!

The fabrics are mostly from Japan. B went there on business about 10 years ago and I arranged for the wife of his Japanese colleague to purchase $50 of 'authentic Japanese' fabric for me. There has never been a project that inspired me to use them - they are just so special and I knew that I had to make something for myself with them. The minute I saw John's table runner, I knew it would be perfect. I paired the prints with Kona Ash.

Quilting was tough to decide. I ripped out a lot of attempts. Finally I came to the conclusion that simple would be best. Many of the fabrics (including the border) featured dragonflies, so I took advantage of the larger pieced areas to embroider (Sashiko-style) some dragonflies. The rest of the geese are stitched in the ditch and a simple running stitch fills the borders. The hand work is done with Perle 8 (Valdani and Prescencia) cotton. I have to thank my pal Dianne for donating the 'Fusiboo' batting for this project while we were on retreat. [Side note: the batting initially fused really well by following manufacturers directions, but did not stay fused at all after manipulating the quilt around my machine for quilting]

Even if this goes no where in the Fat Quarterly contest, I feel like a winner just to have completed it! Does anyone else get stuck after finishing a quilt top? I am just so impatient to move on to the next thing - I am terrible at finishing the bigger stuff!

I've linked this post to my pal Lynne's blog, Lily's Quilts. She's got a fun new monthly feature where you link to your fav project of the past month. I chose this one (but I do love this one too) just because it's been languishing for so long and now it's DONE! yahoo.

Click on the button to see what everyone else loved working on in March!