A Very Special Delivery - Blogger's Quilt Festival

Welcome to my Bloggers Quilt Festival post!  Some of you may recognize this quilt I've chosen to share in the ROYGBIV category because a very similar one made by Tracey and her friends was featured in the festival last year! I sent Tracey a block for her quilt and it became my inspiration - not only the design, but also the sentiment - for this quilt.

I had the great pleasure of delivering this beautiful quilt to a very special person earlier this week.

This is what I've been busy with over the past 5 weeks, with regular updates on Instagram. A mom in our school community received the worst possible news while on vacation with her family in March. She has a long road ahead to regain her health and she needs to know that we are with her all the way.  There was a sense of urgency to get a quilt around her brave shoulders, so I put out a call to my retreat customers and fellow members of the VMQG to help.  They responded as quilters do: with generosity and grace.

I also organized several sewing days around my dining table for mothers and friends in our community so that they could learn how to piece a scrappy sprouts block and put their love and strength into this gift as well. Several women had never sewn before and others hadn't touched a machine in years, but they patiently laid out their blocks and carefully sewed the patches together for their dear friend.  I had pre-cut squares and pre-pieced half square triangles from my stash ready for them to select.

In the end I was overwhelmed with the number of sprouts blocks that came in. I couldn't bear not to use every single one, so there's a lovely stalk of them holding up the back. Piecing 74 blocks made by over 30 different people has it's challenges but I was determined to let this project come together peacefully. This isn't perfection of technique, but it is absolutely perfect.  In the final layout, a vertical sashing between the columns and a slight offset of each stalk of sprouts keeps things interesting and hides the subtle size differences in the blocks.

A sweet purple Dresden just for Deanna - the four full stalks of sprouts represent her incredibly supportive husband and their three amazing boys.

The VMQG retreat over the first weekend in May was my opportunity to assemble the top and backing, sandwich this 78" x 82" quilt and complete the quilting.  It's quilted with an all-over swirly and looping meander using a gorgeous variegated Aurifil 28 wt in pale yellow/cream/lilac. The backing fabric is a Michael Miller print called Old Script with lilac-coloured cursive text.  It's bound with a V & Co. Color Me Happy green bead stripe cut on the bias, plus a little strip of purple Lizzy House pearl bracelets around the lower left corner. I used 3 strands of coordinating lilac embroidery floss to blanket-stitch the label on.

There's just something extra-special about this sweet sprout block that makes it the perfect choice for a group-effort comfort quilt.  I send a heartfelt hug and thanks to Tracey for allowing me to share her mini-tute for the sprouts block, and the same to every woman who had a hand in the making of this quilt. 

This quilt is so cheerful and full of hope; it is made with love and just plain feel-good vibes.    I know it's already working wonders.

Visit the festival at Amy's Creative Side and have a look through the festival links to see hundreds of amazing quilts made all over the world! Amy does an incredible amount of work organizing sponsors, categories and voting twice a year - it truly is the biggest quilt show online! Thank you Amy!

A Dresden-a-thon

Recently, I taught a class using my Dresden Pillow pattern to members of my traditional guild. We held this class last year as well, but there were still plenty of keen quilters wanting to try it (many had pieced dresdens by hand previously and were anxious to learn the speedy way on their machines!).  I just love teaching for the guild because the members are so supportive and kind. They welcomed me as a brand new quilter 12 years ago and continue to be as supportive and encouraging as ever.

Betty, our President, even came to the class a second time so that she could get a Christmas pillow made. One of the gals who attended last year has made almost 20 pillow covers! This makes me so happy.  Here's the gang from the recent class with their pillow tops in progress:

I always build the project along with my students so that I can demonstrate each step of the pattern. This time I used a charm pack of Briar Rose by Heather Ross for Windham Fabrics. It's so cheerful! The blanket stitch around the fused centre circle is a nice accent.

I substituted straight borders of the adorable hexie bee print instead of making flying geese. It's now all quilted to Pellon fusible fleece and ready for a pillow back.

I'll stuff a pillow form in there and this will be my donation to a local charity auction to raise money for schools in Vietnam.

Pillow Pretties!

Back in February I taught a 'dresden plate by machine' class for my traditional guild showing how to make a lovely pillow cover using my Dresden Pillow Pattern.  My friend Colleen, (also a fellow member of the VMQG) recently posted these gorgeous pictures of the two pillows she made!

She used a beautiful charm pack of Kaffe Fassett prints purchased from Matt, yet another member of the VMQG at his shop The Quilted Bear.  This close up shows a fun variegated thread buttonhole stitch Colleen used to highlight the dresden centre.

I love her beautiful hand quilting around the dresden plate. Thanks for sharing Colleen!

If you're looking to get a start on some holiday gift sewing, check out my pattern right here. It's a great one for using a Christmas-themed charm packs or collections (like this, or this ) to make some decorative holiday decor.

Pattern Release: Dresden Plate Pillow!

Thanks to your encouragement, I am super excited to offer my very first .pdf downloadable pattern for sale!! I've written several patterns for magazines, a book and workshops I teach, but this one is a direct result of your kind comments and requests for a pattern. Thank you, friends!  I've labeled this pattern a 'weekend project for the intermediate quilter'.

Buy Now

I set up the .pdf  file for booklet printing. That means if your printer can manage double-sided printing, all you have to do is choose "landscape view" and "2-sided printing" in your printer settings (only 3 pages of paper required).  If double sided isn't an option, then simply print single sided and fold the pages wrong sides together to make a booklet. Presto!  There's also a handy-dandy cutting checklist so you can prep all your fabrics in advance, making this pillow cover a perfect retreat project.

The pattern is charm-pack friendly. In fact, I recommend using a charm pack for a scrappy look to your Dresden and flying geese border. Make a 20" bound pillow cover (with super-easy hidden zipper backing) or a lovely mini-quilt to adorn your table or wall.  For completely different look, check this one out!

I'm always an email away if you run into any issues.  I'd be tickled if you'd add photos of projects you've made with my tutorials or patterns in the Poppyprint Projects flickr group.

Ready? All you have to do is click on that "Buy Now" button and you'll have that pattern in your inbox before you can wind a bobbin (or just as soon as your payment clears). If online shopping isn't your thing, drop me an email (see top left corner of this page) and we can organize a paper copy sent to you the old-fashioned way.

Happy Sewing!

Mardi Gras Dresden Pillow & a WINNER!

When I look at this wild pillow, I see a Caribbean Mardi Gras parade: giant feather headdresses, (lots of) sun-kissed skin, gold body paint, bling'd-out bikinis, and smiles.

Cabana Blooms charm packs, DS Quilts Aunt Edna for Joann Fabrics background, Essex linen grey, Aviary II woodgrain yellow binding, Kona charcoal backing.

With some advice from Tracey, I'm almost ready to offer my first .pdf downloadable pattern! (check out her gorgeous new quilt pattern here!). You could be making this Dresden Plate Pillow (or mini-quilt) by next week!  My pattern was tested by 15 members of my traditional guild at a workshop I taught in February - everyone had a great time and it was a real thrill for me to see the pillow covers come together in so many different fabrics!

This one is pretty colourful. I've made two others with French General that are equally pretty, but an entirely different look.

So, who will receive an advance copy of the pattern, plus 2 Cabana Blooms charm packs? That would be lucky number...

Congratulations Martina!  Send me an email with your mailing address and I'll get your prize in the mail very soon.

Aurilux Kapow! and a Giveaway

Windham Fabrics kindly shared some charm packs of Melissa Ybarra's new fabric line Cabana Blooms with me recently and I thought it would be fun to make up my Dresden Pillow pattern with these vibrant prints. I paired the Cabana Blooms with a DS for JoAnn Fabrics bright orange hounds tooth print. You'll see the whole thing once it's quilted, but for now I can tell you it's quite a different look from the French General version!

Cabana Blooms paired with Essex linen in grey

I was perusing my thread stash, looking for just the right colour to topstitch the dresden centre when I had a brainwave to try a variegated thread and decorative stitch.  After all, my poor Pfaff QE 4.0 rarely has the opportunity to strut her stuff and show off her killer 9mm decorative stitches because I typically stick to straight, zigzag, blanket or triple stitch.  

KAPOW!

I had a partial spool of Aurilux polyester thread leftover from quilting a bright batik quilt years ago and it was perfect. I mean, once you've got all that colour and pattern, why not add more, right? For enquiring minds, I used a regular 40wt cotton thread in the bobbin and a 90/14 Inspira quilting needle to sew this stitch through two layers of fabric and fusible Pellon polyester batting.

Oooooo-aaaaaah, shiny!

Here's a tip for those of you wondering how to choose a variegated thread: you'll get a better idea of the distribution of colours if you look at the end of the spool, not the wrapped threads.

Aurilux, the details

I have two charm packs of Cabana Blooms leftover and would love to share them, along with a copy of my (hopefully soon to be released) Dresden Pillow pattern with one of you.  Leave one comment here for your chance to win and please make sure I can contact you via linked email, or email address in your comment!

I'll choose a winner on Wednesday evening, April 25 with the help of the RNG. Good luck!

ETA: Comments are now closed. Winner announced soon. Thanks for visiting!

Pillow Party under the Tree

If you are my sister, or my SIL who is also a mother to five children AND you don't want to see what your children will be getting from me for Christmas, then make a hasty exit now please. No paging down first.

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For the rest of you: they are done! Seven quilted reading pillows for all of my nieces and nephews (yup, one of my brothers has 5 kids and my sister has 2). For specific fabric lines used, click on the photo and it will take you to flickr where I wrote that info in individual photo descriptions.

All 18" pillows except for the pink/purple dresdens in the bottom left corner, which are 20". You can see the pictures individually once you get to my flickr photostream - they're all there.

I didn't use any specific tutorials to make these pillows, but I got the idea to use my GO!Baby tumbler die for the boy pillows after seeing Katy's. Check her Tumbler Pillow tutorial at Fat Quarterly. If you want to try a dresden plate there are several free tutes I found via the google searching wonderdog here and here. Or if you want a hybrid tumbler/dresden pillow, check out this tute! For my dresdens, I used a 22.5 degree ruler made by Nifty Notions, but you can use any dresden ruler. To know how many blades you need to complete the circle, just divide 360 degrees by the number of degrees in your ruler's arc.

I like dresdens with long blades and a small centre circle (trying to use up my scraps after all), but chubby dresdens can be very cute, too. Nova just published an adorable pattern that is a chubby dresden pillow with a pocket in the centre circle. Brilliant!

On pillows for the younger kids I did a simple envelope closure for the back (plus I ran out of long zips. Note to self, an 18" pillow requires a 16" zipper, not an 18" one). I covered the couple zips I did use to protect furniture and long hair. There are different ways to cover a zipper, one is here and another here.

Next up, gifts for grown-ups.

Dresden Pillow part deux

Early in the year I made this pillow/mini quilt for a private swap with my friend Tracey (who, by the way, has just given birth to the most adorable little girl, so if you have a sec, stop by and wish her well!). Before mailing it to California, I shared the project at my traditional guild's show and tell. The response was lovely and the workshop coordinator asked if I would give a workshop on how to piece and applique a dresden by machine. Why yes, of course I would! I love teaching workshops. It helps when all of your students are friends from guild!

So, due to the fact that my sample is a couple thousand km south of our meeting hall, I made up another one.

It is a slightly simplified version in the hopes that people will be able to complete the top and back during the one-day workshop. I nixed the narrow inner selvage border and went with a covered zip closure instead of a buttonhole placket on the back. I couldn't resist duplicating the fabric, though. I just love this French General red for fall decor and the hand of this fabric is luscious....just buttery soft.

Everything is done by machine, except for the hand-tacking of the binding to the back. The alphabet print is my favourite from the La Petite Ecole line. The binding is a striped print from the line, but I cut it on the bias (bias stripes on a binding are just happy-making, don't you think?).

The double centre wasn't intended. It became a necessity when the original larger circle fabric turned out to be rather transparent after it was fused on with steam-a-seam. The seam allowances of the dresden blades showed through and I didn't like the way that looked, so I slapped on the smaller red circle: problem solved! I love the machine blanket stitch around the circle edges. It was a major selling feature of my Pfaff Quilt Expression 4.0 because it's got a 9mm throat plate which means you can do a HUGE blanket stitch if you want to.

I have to write up detailed instructions for the workshop, so I'm considering making this my first official .pdf pattern for download. I'd love your feedback on what you like (or could do without) in .pdf patterns. Lots of photos? Detailed explanations? Quilting instructions? Do you follow those patterns via laptop beside your sewing machine, or do you prefer less pages so you can print them out? Bring it on people, I'd appreciate your thoughts!

Since this pillow is ideal for sprucing up your armchair for autumn, I'm linking up to Rachel's Celebrate Color event. Stop in and see some of the other gorgeous projects there!

A Dresden Day

Just home from running my 13 hour retreat Quilt By the Bay. As luck would have it, I received Corey's fabric packet just yesterday. It's Corey's month in the VIBees and she put together the most adorable dresden fabrics. Fun, modern prints all floating on a dotty centre and background. The plate went together in a jiffy because Corey very kindly pre-cut all of the blades for us!

Almost a third of the regular 24 or so quilters that attend my retreats are proud owners and users of Featherweight sewing machines. I have not properly introduced you to my family's 'Agatha'. She deserves a full post because I have to share her back story with you...but for now this is what she helped me with today.

I completed the block with the help of my secret quilting weapon, the incomparable Roxanne's Glue-Baste-It. I've said it before and I'll say it again. I love this stuff.

It is incredibly helpful for so many jobs. In this case, it held the centre circle in place so that I could topstitch without having to deal with pins. The glue dissolves instantly in water and with this new teensy container, it is easy to apply in small dots wherever you need a hit of glue!

I made another Dresden today as well, but it needs a bit more work before I share it with you.

Have a fabulous Sunday. We'll be busy here preparing for the arrival of Grandma and Grandpa on Monday. The blog will take a back seat to visiting with my parents for the next couple of weeks. We only get to see each other about once a year so you'll understand if posts are a little sporadic for a while. We are all excited to spend Easter together and the timing works out perfectly for my Mom to attend a couple of guild meetings with me, too!

VMQG Retreat Redux

If you haven't entered my follower's giveaway yet, please go here so you don't miss out!

Last Saturday I hosted a 13 hour retreat for members of the Vancouver Modern Quilt Guild and some other friends. It was the same format of the Quilt By the Bay retreats that I put on about every 6 weeks. We all had a wonderful day! Snow started falling in the afternoon, which was beautiful, but sort of put a damper on any late nighters at retreat - many people left early when we started getting reports from husbands that roads in the city were in really bad shape!

I am having difficulty getting photos off my 'big' camera, so those will have to wait, but I can show you the project that I completed. It is a wall hanging for my secret partner in the Urban Home Goods swap on Flickr. It looks pretty on that late season snow!

It's a good thing Krista did join me for retreat, because she brought the perfect fabric for binding along! It's the herringbone print from Joel Dewberry's Modern Meadow. Krista is using the blues/greens of that fabric line for her Single Girl Quilt and got a big start on piecing her arcs.

I did some running stitch by hand using my gorgeous new Presencia Perle 8 cotton from these skeins. I felt some more quilting was necessary in the white linen background areas, so did some echo stitching with Sulky 12 weight thread. Krista suggested some ditch quilting in the dresden blades to balance everything out and luckily Andrea had some grey Invisifil that I could use (two of the many advantages of retreating: great advice and unlimited supplies to borrow/share with friends!!).

So, the dresdens were pieced from a charm pack of It's a Hoot by MoMo for Moda. The background is Essex linen in white, and the backing is a print by Tina Givens that I won in a giveaway on Heather's blog last fall.

I hope my partner likes it!

Queen of the Dresdens

Tracey received her Dresden Doll Quilt/Pillow cover so now I can show you the whole thing!

She wrote the nicest post about it and made me blush all over with the sweet things she said about me. It is a joy to make gifts for fellow quilters who really appreciate the effort you put into your projects.

This 20" square was made using almost every charm in a French General "La Petite Ecole" charm pack, one fat quarter from their Rouenneries line, some charcoal yardage for binding, ricrac & buttons on the closure and Rouenneries yardage for the pillow back (this is a textured fabric almost like tea toweling).

The dresden blades were easily cut using Nifty Notions 22.5 degree dresden ruler (at the narrowest end). You can get two blades from one charm with this ruler! I machine pieced the blades together, but then hand appliqued them to the background using the Piece 'O Cake method I learned from Becky Goldsmith in a workshop a few years ago.

The flying geese in the border were also made using charms from the same pack! Luckily, one charm had the crown sitting right in the middle, perfect for fussy cutting the dresden centre, and perfect for naming this Queen of the Dresdens for Tracey (who has made MANY dresden plate blocks!!).

Thanks to the encouragement of many of you and some of my guild members, I plan to make this into a pattern this year, both for teaching a workshop and (gasp) maybe even selling. That would be a big step for me, but you could help by telling me what your preference is: paper pattern or .pdf download?

Personally, I have bought several .pdf downloads spontaneously and only ever made one of them. I think it's because I forget they are somewhere on my hard drive!

Bitten by the Dresden Bug

They are just so much fun to make! At retreat last Saturday, I got a start on my Urban Home Goods Swap. I was lucky and got a great partner who gave me lots of ideas in her sign up message. This is what I've done for her so far:

I used a charm pack of Momo's It's a Hoot and cut 5" dresden blades using the narrowest end of the 22.5 degree dresden ruler from Nifty Notions. After piecing the entire plate (and the quarter plates) I machine appliqued them onto white quilter's linen using a blind hem stitch. This is a great stitch for machine applique - here I reduced the stitch length and width to the smallest setting my machine would allow. In the close up below, you can see the 5 straight stitches that are made into the white background and the one left hand zag that goes into the applique piece. You just have to take care at the corners and pivot at the right time. I don't get too fussy if the zag lands right at the corner. It all looks great when you stand back a metre!

I'll have some pretty bee blocks to show you soon.

Slow and steady, that's my sewing mantra these days.

For the Queen of Dresdens

I've been making a little something for a private swap with Tracey. I think I'll wait until she receives it to show a full photo, but since I finished it tonight here's a little sneak peek.

Here's the back with a bit of the hand and machine quilting

As has happened in other swaps I've done, there was definitely some quilter's karma at work here. For some reason I was having a creative block on what to make Tracey. She's a very generous swapper, always paying close attention to her partner's preferences and style, and ultimately making them beautiful quilts. So, I felt that I should make every attempt to do the same for her!

Tracey loves Dresden Plates and last year made one for all of her fellow Quilting Divas in the sampler bee group. I know she's given them away in the Pillow Talk Swap, too. I couldn't tell if she's ever kept one for herself. The decision was made: I would make Tracey a Dresden Plate doll quilt. Now all I needed was the right fabric. Wouldn't you know it, I received an email for a fabric sale! What luck, they had the charm pack I wanted!

Then Tracey through some curves at me. In her 2010 summary she mentioned wanting to move away from quilts made with one fabric line. Oh no!

Briefly I panicked.

I second guessed my fabric choice...maybe it wasn't going to work!

Should I go scrappy?

Then one post later, she showed this quilt and revealed how much she loves French General's La Petite Ecole.

Phew. Sigh of relief.

Because that's what she's getting!

Argh, wouldn't you know it, the one mitred corner of the red selvage border that DIDN'T line up is the one I had to photograph in super-close-up. Oh well. Trust me, the other three are perfect! These Rouenneries selvages are courtesy of my friends Sandi & Rossie who donated them to me at November retreat. They are so pretty and perfect for skinny little 1/2" borders!

Knowing she's got a coordinating quilt, I gave Tracey the option of this swap coming as a wall hanging, or a pillow. She requested a bound pillow so she could hang it on the wall OR use it on the couch.....and because I aim to please, that's what I made.