Hands2Help Quilt Finish

It's been a mostly rainy and windy day, perfect for hanging out in the sewing room.  I finished my Hands2Help charity quilt this afternoon.

This one will go to Quilts of Compassion.  

I used the Dancing Pinwheels tutorial found at Little Miss Shabby, with some modifications for size (described here) to accommodate the use of charm squares.

The variety of fabrics came from Stephanie at Venus de Hilo.  I've long admired the colorful fabrics she uses in her quilts, so when she did some destashing last year, I scooped up an awesome "Woodland" charm pack she had put together.  

Such fun fabrics makes it just a little hard to let go.  ;)

Quilted in an overall meander.  Backed in a green and purple print and bound in a purple dot fabric.

I'm squeaking in under the wire for this week's Whoop-Whoop linky, and counting this as an April finish for A Stitch in Time.

Hubcap Diamond Star Halo

Well, you're built like a car

You've got a hubcap diamond star halo

You're built like a car, oh yeah...

That song lyric was the inspiration for this quilt.  More specifically, it happened like this, as I related in my original post when I started this quilt way back in February 2012:

See, it all started as my husband and I were driving one day when the '70s classic T. Rex song, "Bang a Gong" came on the radio.  There are some strange lyrics in that song.  I wondered what the "teeth of the Hydra" or a "cloak full of eagles" had to do with anything, but more importantly, what a "hubcap diamond star halo" would look like.  My imagination went into overdrive.

"I want to make a quilt and call it Hubcap Diamond Star Halo," I told Norm while the song played on.  Talk about working backwards.  The name came first.

I knew it would have to have elements of '70s psycha-funka-delic style, and I probably just made that word up.  I was envisioning those bold, bright colors like Peter Max and H.R. Pufnstuf cartoons, and glam rocker and T. Rex front man himself, the late Marc Bolan.

You can read the rest of that post and see the video I made of the creation process.  Frustrating as it seemed at the time, in retrospect it was really pretty fun.

I finished the flimsy days later.  Days, people.  And then a couple years went by.  Years!  To quote the final line of "Bang a Gong," which Marc Bolan apparently borrowed from Chuck Berry:

Well, meanwhile, I'm still thinking....

Yep, thinking for like two years about how to quilt it (while doing a good job not thinking about it as well, as in not focusing on getting it done). Taking a fresh look at it earlier this year, I decided I had learned a couple things in the interim and was ready to tackle this particular UFO.  And so I did.

Well, you're windy and wild

You've got the blues in your shoes and your stockings 

You're windy and wild, oh yeah...

I ended up quilting the gentle arcs in the triangular prints with a walking foot.  Then I free motion quilted swirls and pebbles (mostly swirls) in the white space.

The fabric is from a fat quarter stack/quilt kit I found a few years ago at the thrift store, new in the box, marketed by Jo-Ann Fabric at some point in the not-too-distant past.  The binding is Alexander Henry's Heath, from a scrap I'd been hoarding saving.  It measures 36 x 36 inches.

The back is funky purple, pink, and orange, oh my!

And with that, I say Bang a Gong!

(Edited to add:  I did a post about how to make this quilt, which you can find HERE.)

Hemispheres Quilted

The Hemispheres Quilt-Along wall hanging is now completely done.  Another one checked off the to-be-finished list!

I used a walking foot to quilt it, following the arc of the curves and using a chaco liner to mark the curves where I didn't have the ditch to follow.

I wanted the top thread color to match the azure fabric but was limited by what was locally available on short notice.  The big box store had a turquoise Coats and Clark 40-wt. trilobal polyester embroidery thread, so I thought I'd give it a shot, with Aurifil in the bobbin.  I am happy with the result.  The CC didn't shred or lint and had a nice sheen.

The fabrics in the top are Robert Kaufman Quilter's Linen in azure, charcoal, and snow.  I love the bit of dimension you can see up close, yet it still reads as a solid from a couple feet away.

While I was at the store, I spied what looked to be an interesting fabric for the backing, so I grabbed a couple yards of that as well.
 

Some of you may recall that this JCP skirt was my inspiration. I found it while online shopping and pinned it on Pinterest, commenting that it'd make a cool quilt.

Not long afterwards, I heard about the Hemispheres Quilt-Along and saw the quilt pattern.  It was serendipity!

So there you have it for this week's finish.  Linking to:

Ship Shape Finished

The second quilt finished this past weekend is Ship Shape.  Right around a year ago I started this quilt from my stash of thrifted men's shirts.  I had been inspired by a photo in Country Living magazine years earlier, which I had ripped out and saved in a binder. 

I found the free block pattern, Sail Boat Block 2, at Quilter's Cache website.  I modified the cutting instructions so each block would turn out 9-1/2 inches square.  That meant cutting the small HST blocks at 3-7/8 inches and the larger at 6-7/8 inches.

The blocks were then set 7 across x 8 down.  I liked the no-border look of the inspiration piece, so I just bound my quilt in a red and black print from JoAnn.  There is one pale red pinstripe shirt used in the quilt, and the binding brings that out while providing a nice accent for the rest of the shirt fabrics.

Ship Shape was shipped off to Melissa at Sew Shabby Quilting for an all over panto called Van Gogh, which I thought looked like swirling ocean waves as much as Starry Night.  Love the effect!

Melissa did a fantastic job, and fast!  I'm sure my backing was a challenge  (and I'm sure that is an understatement).  I was using up a piece of blue and white older fabric in the backing, as well as a strip of large shirt fabric blocks.  The backing was just barely big enough, were I to have quilted it on my domestic machine.  When I decided to send the flimsy out for quilting, I added muslin strips on all sides of the backing so it would be able to be loaded on a longarm.

I knew it was going to be close, but until I trimmed the quilt after it came home and saw that on a couple sides I was shaving off only about an eighth inch of the actual backing, I didn't realize just how close.  I'm sorry, Melissa, for any gray hairs I caused!  I won't do that again, I promise.

Ship Shape was sleep tested last night, and I'm happy to say it passed with flying colors.  If you've got a shirt stash you're wondering what to make of, I highly recommend giving this simple but stunning quilt a try.  I think it'd make a great Quilt of Valor too!

One of Two

One thing this frigid and snowy winter is good for:  Making me not want to leave my house.*  I have been hunkering down, holing up, and hermiting away, trying not to think about the elements while working my way down the list of UFOs.

And so there were two more finishes this weekend.  First is the bright baby quilt made from leftover drunkard's path and monkey wrench/churn dash blocks.

I quilted this in a loop-de-loop with Aurifil thread.  I intended to just do a regular meander but my hands had a mind of their own and started doing barrel rolls right out the gate, so I just went along for the ride.  Whee!

Edited to Add:  I've been asked what the turquoise and pink floral border fabric is above.  It is Gypsy Girl by Lily Ashbury for Moda.

Okay, so here's the back.  I love polka dots.  And polka, for that matter.  Which I am not seeing represented on the Grammy awards** this evening.

It's getting late, so I'll be back tomorrow with the second finish.

*Monday's high—I repeat: high—is to be -5 F., low of -19, with a wind chill advisory of -35 to -50 F. by Tuesday with (of course) blowing and drifting snow.  Winter blows.

**Forget rolling out the barrel.  If I were playing a drinking game for every time LL Cool J licked his lips while hosting the Grammys, I would be unconscious right now.  I think he'd be forgiven, though, because everything else about him is pretty fine.

Key to My Heart Finished

Happy to get another one finished this week, the Key to My Heart quilt.

Such soft, snuggly goodness!  Jelly roll and backing fabric is Oasis by Three Sisters.  The Key to My Heart pattern is by Sweet Jane.  Quilted in an overall meander with Aurifil in the top and bobbin. 

It's a nice size for a crib quilt, or a lap quilt for people smaller than we here in the land of the giants.  (Although not as gigantic as the perspective of this photo might imply.  I'm standing on a cedar chest for this shot with the camera held above my head...in case anyone was wondering.)

I'll probably hang onto this quilt until the next baby girl comes along via friends or relatives.

Meanwhile, the next one is on deck. 

I basted this top together last night during American Idol. 

I'm enjoying the dynamic between new judge Harry Connick, Jr., Jennifer Lopez, and Keith Urban.  They seem to have a lot of fun together and make me laugh.  It doesn't hurt that they're all nice on the eyes either. 

I'm glad there aren't as many time-wasting awful auditions to suffer through too.  Seems they've whittled it down to decent stuff worth watching.  The past few years, I've skipped this part of the show and just tuned in for the actual competition.

I haven't talked much about thrifting adventures lately because there has been a lack of them.  Last Sunday, however, I stopped at the local Goodwill and found something useful for the sewing room, one of those suction-cup grab handles.  It was brand new, so nothing gross about buying it second-hand.  At $1.99, I could hardly go wrong.

I attached it to a wide ruler and tested it out on trimming this quilt.  Works great!

Linking to:

Ironwork Quilt

I went back through my posts to determine what I'd already written about the Ironwork Quilt-Along quilt I started in 2012, and it turns out not much.  Not sure how that happened, except around the time I started that quilt, Norm had a work accident and my attention was diverted elsewhere.  Best guess as to why it fell through the cracks.

Anyway, all's well that ends well.  Norm recovered in a few months, and almost two years later, I finally finished the Ironwork quilt!

The flimsy was done in 2012, probably not too long after I started it.  Then it was put on the rack to properly age.  In other words, I hadn't a clue how to quilt it, so there it sat.  Fast forward to now and I finally felt ready to tackle the finish. It seemed to me that it needed a lot of ditch quilting around the rust-brown parts first, so I started there.

For quilting inspiration, I was thinking about what might naturally occur around an iron gate, and ivy came to mind.  My heart-shaped leaves don't exactly look like ivy, but close enough for rock and roll, as they say.

Plan A had actually been a more controlled, larger, leaf-shaped design, done sort of on the order of feathers, i.e., around a central stem.  However, that didn't pan out in practice.  Hence Plan B was adopted, and meandering heart-shaped leaves it was.

I used a variegated Sulky top thread and Aurifil in the bobbin.  Fabrics are Quilter's Candy Solids from Connecting Threads.

You can find the QAL posts for the Ironwork quilt at Piecemeal Quilts, HERE.

Thanks, Sandi, for the inspiration, beautiful quilt pattern, and great instructions.  I really enjoyed making this!

Linking to: