The Yellow Daisy Festival Online Market begins on Tuesday, Sept 8th. In celebration of this, I’m making some posts about the quilts I have ready to go. Each day I’ll feature two or three quilts and tell about their process and what I like most about them. These and other quilts can be found in the Quest Quilts shop on this website or in my Etsy shop.
These were some fun wall hangings I made to resemble a bookshelf. I made too many “books” for a bookshelf quilt a while back, and they’d been sitting around for a while. Originally I was going to make another larger quilt, but the idea of a smaller wall hanging was too tempting.
When I made these, I had in mind that someone could take them and get them personalized with their favorite book titles. I imagined them in a classroom or even in an office or library. I went ahead and put hanging loops at the top, so a cafe rod would be perfect.
I’ve sold a third one already, and the friend who bought it did end up getting titles embroidered. It looks gorgeous!
She took it to a local shop and got all her favorite titles embroidered. I love the final look!
The Yellow Daisy Festival Online Market begins on Tuesday, Sept 8th. In anticipation of this, I’m making some posts about the quilts I have ready to go. Each day I’ll feature two or three quilts and tell about their process and what I like most about them. These and other quilts can be found in the Quest Quilts shop on this website or in my Etsy shop.
These quilts were made using one of my favorite forms – the silhouette. I’ve used it for many quilts before these, and I just love it. The idea that you can convey detail and form with just an outline fascinates me.
The wine quilt was one of two that I had made, but the other one sold rather quickly. This one can be draped across a couch or even hung on a wall with the proper curtain hardware. It features a wine bottle and white wine glass silhouette with complimentary wine-themed fabric. In the black area I kept up the theme with a vine quilting pattern. I love this style of quilt and think it would fit in nicely with any wine-enthusiast decor.
The next silhouette set features the often overlooked viola. I like having a silhouette inverted set and think it lends some fun and style to any decor. This set already has a hanging sleeve attached to each hanging. These are meant specifically to be wall hangings. They would look great in any musician’s home or in a school orchestra room. The cool blue, green, silver, and gray tones help it maintain a gender neutral look.
Ok, so yes, all of the craft fairs I was exited about were canceled. However the biggest one, the Yellow Daisy Festival in Stone Mountain, GA, decided to help out their vendors as best they could and is going to offer an online market for folks, Sept 8 (starting at 9am) through Sept. 13(ending at 9pm). It won’t be nearly the same experience, but I am excited nonetheless.
In anticipation for that, I will be posting showcase posts throughout the week. Come back throughout the week to see more features.
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Before this set, I have made four other guitar quilts and one viola quilt in the same style. I bought the music fabric at a Black Friday sale (okay, it was really a Black Saturday sale) at JoAnn’s and had been sitting on it for almost a year. I hadn’t quite figured out what I wanted to do, but the idea of another guitar quilt set had definitely come to mind. When I found a jelly roll at JoAnn’s that featured an earthy rainbow pallet, I knew what I would do!
What I love most about the guitar quilts is the fact that if you cut out the guitar carefully then you’ll automatically have two quilts! If you notice, one of this set is the negative of the other. I love it.
I’ll admit that the guitar pegs at the top of this one are a little more “homemade” than I’d like, but I know how I plan on fixing that for next time.
For these, I used wool batting instead of cotton to give them a puffier look and keep the weight to a minimum since they’re going on a wall. I’m so used to cotton batting that these feel like they weight nothing at all.
In the past, I’ve done a much more detailed quilting design, but since the music fabric already had texture to it, I didn’t want to distract from it. So I ended up keeping the quilting simple.
These are both for sale, and I’m hoping one of them will sell at the December show I’m doing on the 6th.
My main job is teaching, not quilting, and I love when I can bring my quilting ability into my classroom. I teach British literature, and often my students get lost in the 2,000 or so years of timeline. Years ago I made a bunch of demotivational posters about the British monarchy to help my students know “where we are in time”. Those little posters have sparked many conversations, and they are definitely one of my best teaching tools.
However…there are 60 of them, and putting them up and down from my classroom walls repeatedly as I’ve changed rooms/schools has taken a toll. A while back I’d considered making a wall hanging instead of putting up the individual posters. I knew it would be an undertaking, though. When I found out I was moving from my trailer classroom (where there wasn’t enough room for them) to an indoor classroom, I decided it was finally time to undertake this project I’d been sitting on for several years.
I printed the posters onto fabric, and then I color-coded the historical periods/families.
Blue: Anglo-Saxon
Green: Norman
Yellow: Plantagenet
Light Blue:Tudor
Red: Stuart (Bright red embedded for Interregnum)
Green:Hanover
Purple: Saxe Coburg Gotha
Light Purple: Windsor
The last two are both purple because it’s the same family branch…just a name rebrand thanks to WWI.
I used fabric I already had on hand, some pretty green, yellow, and black shirting flannel. Between the front and the flannel backing and the huge size, the wall hanging was getting heavy, so I decided to leave out the usual batting and quilting.
In the end, I’m loving how it turned out! I can’t wait for my co-workers and students to see it.
A friend from church approached me about making a quilt for the church retreat in October. When I heard that the theme was “Connecting Through Stories”, I just knew which quilt design I wanted to do. I’d had my eye on a bookcase quilt for ages and wanted to give it a try, so I used this as an opportunity to finally make one.
I started by cutting my scraps into various strips of width and length. I did stick to fabrics that I felt someone would be able to write on and be easily visible. Of course, every once in a while I threw in a darker color for balance.
Then I sewed those scraps into large pieces of white muslin and trimmed them all to be about 12.5″ long. From there, I sewed the “books” into blocks of roughly 12.5″ square.
Scraps for a bookshelf quilt
I also used some of the particularly smaller “books” to make stacks.
The hard part came when I knew I needed to make about four books that leaned. I did this by attaching white fabric all the way around and then using my grid to skew the cut, making sure to leave .25″ of white at the corners so that my book didn’t look like it was sinking into the shelf.
From there I made my “shelf”.
I did find a nice wood grain fabric at JoAnn’s, and I used it for the shelf. The wood grain fabric was pretty pricey, though, so I went with a more cost-effective brown fabric for the back since it would be in a wall anyway.
I decided to only quilt on the wood grain fabric since the shelves and books needed to be open for signatures, but I do think I’ll go back and quilt those sections at least a little before all is said and done.
I did have one large brown block in the center of the shelves. This actually isn’t a book but rather a frame. My idea was to take a group picture of everyone at the retreat, print it on fabric, and then make it look like a photograph on the shelf.
The last step was to add a hanging sleeve. I can’t wait for everyone to see it at the retreat!
Update- I currently have a guitar quilt listed in my shop!
This quilt was given today. I’ve been sitting on it since earlier this month, and I couldn’t make a peep about it since it was for a friend who was also connected with me via social media. She’s a youth minister, and I was asked to make a quilt in celebration of her 15 years of service at our church.
I thought about several options concerning the design, but we all knew it would be for signing in the end. So this meant it would need a lot of light colors or at least a good sized section.
I remembered I had a picture in my Pinterest quilt section that I’d been wanting to try. It wouldn’t take anything to do a different instrument! And what does every self-respecting youth minster play? The guitar, of course! I loved the blog entry that went along with it.
**This pattern is now for sale on Etsy by the original creator! It seems only fair to post a link to the pattern here as well. Violin Pattern Etsy Link
The original inspiration.
I also had a rainbow jelly roll I’d purchased while on vacation with friends in Mississippi. I’d been waiting on just the right project to come along, and this one seemed perfect!
The urge is to think that you can simply cut out the fabric and flip it, but that would have the wrong side of the fabric and the seams sticking out. I had to make two identical columns of rainbows and cut out a guitar shape from each. The cool part is that in doing this I automatically had two quilt tops prepped!
2x
I couldn’t get to my projector at work, so I got creative and taped a bunch of card stock together, traced half of my own guitar, folded the paper in half, and cut out a full sized guitar! I did it this way to ensure symmetry. I am keeping the template as it looks neat and will, no doubt, come in useful for later projects.
The side with the white half of the guitar is made using reverse applique, and the other side is using traditional applique.
The quilting inside the guitar needed to be extra special. There’s a song that is sung at a lot of the youth events, and it was stuck in my head almost the entire time I was making the top. So it seemed a no-brainer that the first verse of that song would be quilted into the white part of the guitar. The song is “The Servant Song”, and I quilted the following in cursive, “won’t you let me be your servant. Let me be as Christ to you. Pray that I may have the grace to let you be my servant, too.” And although I’m a literature teacher, I had to forego the punctuation. It hurt a little.
For the rainbow side where no one would sign, I really wanted to do some type of vine or tendril look. I did a faint tendril on the white side as well because it needed some type of quilting to ensure it was sturdy.
After that, I did my usual wrap around binding technique and used rainbow thread. The final step was to add a hanging sleeve.
We presented it to her this morning and hung it up at the reception for everyone to sign.
Due to the popularity of the Star Wars quilts, I started thinking about what other silhouettes I wanted to do. It turned out I still had a couple of Star Wars ones I wanted to try out before moving on to other images.
I wanted to do the Rey and BB8 silhouette from The Force Awakens first, but I ended up working on another one in tandem after seeing a picture a friend bought online of Luke’s Last Sunset from The Last Jedi. I remembered choking up in the theater when I saw this shot, and the symbolism was NOT lost on me. So I looked online and found this screenshot.
I traced it as best I could and then got to cutting up my orange, maroon, and dark purple fabric into strips. For the original Star Wars quilts, I used 3.5″ strips because I was aiming for a twin-sized quilt. For this one, a friend suggested I go smaller, and I agreed, considering this was going to be a wall quilt. Much smaller. I ended up going with 2.5″ strips and was pleased.
I knew I’d cut a lot, and after rolling it all up and making the strips, I ended up with enough strips to make SIX wall quilts. So I decided I would make two of the Luke quilts and two of the Rey and BB8 quilts.
They were arranged and sewn together. Next step was to cut out the silhouette. I opted to use gold crepe back satin for the suns to give them extra luster and make them stand out against the orange fabric. I even ended up running some gold thread over the suns as well.
I liked the way the final results look. Happy with this one. The final step was to add a hanging sleeve.
When we moved into our new house, I noticed at once that the nice, big living area lent itself to a nice, big echo. And I thought to myself that, alas, I would simply HAVE to make a wall quilt for our new home. Such a burden…right?
I did realize that if I was hanging it up in the main area that it would need to be something that I wouldn’t mind seeing everyday and that I was particularly proud of. Well, that can only be one pattern of course – the mariner’s compass!
Like many of my quilts I make, I tried to make this one out of fabric I already had on hand. Luckily for me, I had bought some blue and gold themed fabric at the same quilt store where I’d gone to look at mid-arm quilting machines. I don’t often buy fabric without a project already in mind, but this was too pretty to pass up. And it was the last of the bundles as far as I could see. The only fabric I bought after that was the fabric for the borders.
I like to use the Mariner’s Compass Stars guide by Carol Doak. Paper piecing can be difficult when you start out, but I’d already made a king-size quilt for my husband using this same pattern. So I’d had practice aplenty.
I’ll admit that this pattern, a paper-pieced mariner’s compass, is just about the one pattern I refuse to do on commission. If you aren’t familiar with it, then let me explain. For paper piecing you actually sew the fabric onto paper, and then you tear the paper off after each wedge is done. To make one block you need to make eight wedges! So yes, it’s very time-consuming. But boy the results are stunning!
By the way, the Quest Quilts image I use on a lot of things is another Doak star.
I am eye-balling a possible ready-made quilt at some point using one of these star patterns, but I haven’t fully decided yet. Stay tuned folks!
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