THE QUILTER'S PLANNER SAMPLER QUILT ✂️

For Christmas this year my husband gifted  me with The 2020 Quilter's Planner in my Christmas stocking.  

This blog has always been my way of journaling my quilts but then last year I spotted the Quilter's Planner on Instagram and thought I'd give it a try and so I put it on my Christmas list. I really thought I was just getting a planner to journal in, but boy was I wrong! The Quilter's Planner is so much more than just a planner.  It comes with its very own community, fun challenges sponsored by people in the quilting industry, a magazine filled to the brim with quilt patterns and a block of the month Sampler Quilt by Karen Lewis of Karen Lewis Textiles. 

 

Some of my Instagram posts for the Quilter's Planner Photo Challenges

You can join the Quilter's Planner online community of quilters either on Instagram or Facebook.  Any time you become part of a community you grow as an individual and you improve in your craft.  Everyone in this community graciously shares their tips, tricks and techniques along with their successes and failures.  Trust me, you can learn a lot more from your failures then you can from your successes! These online platforms weren't an option years ago and I think we grow exponentially because of them.  You also meet some of the nicest people who will bend over backwards to help you.  


I participated in the photo challenges on Instagram.  They were fun and easy to do.  But I have so many quilts on my "to do" list for the year that I wasn't going to participate in the Block of the Month quilt challenge. Then I changed my mind and thought I'd just make a few blocks and turn them into a quilted drawstring bag instead of a quilt.  But once I got going I was absolutely hooked.  

Planning out my quilt in the Quilter's Planner

I had just finished making a quilt using fabric from Giucy Giuce and I had a bunch of that amazing fabric left over so that's where I pulled my fabrics from.  I also had scrap batting and backing and so I did not have to get anything for this quilt. I did not follow the quilt layout exactly as it was shown.  I just have this thing where I like to put my own spin on things. I made nine blocks instead of twelve and picked the nine I liked best.

The pattern by Karen Lewis is easy to follow and the blocks are easy to make.  Once I was done with January's I immediately made February's and then March's.  What can I say?  I'm just not the sort of person who has UFO's laying around. (That's quilt speak for unfinished objects.) My personality is such that I have to see a thing through or it weighs on my mind.  I just don't deal well with mind clutter, so, instead of doing this quilt one block each month I sat down and finished it in one go.  

Once the quilt was assembled I put it on my longarm.  Quilting on my longarm is my favOrite part of quilting.  A pieced quilt top is colorful but it's also flat.  Once you quilt it you add a completely different layer to it and it changes into something else entirely.  I love rolling a quilt off of my longarm and seeing it for the first time. There is always this amazing transformation. For this quilt I used stitch in the ditch quilting, straight line quilting and some white Glide thread.  I also used two battings ... one Quilter's Dream wool and one Quilter's Dream Poly/Cotton.

I had fun making this quilt and I've had so much fun being a part of the Quilter's Planner community!  AND I totally love to journal about my quilts as I make them.  I use washi tape and stickers and fine tipped markers and colored pencils and decorate my pages as I journal my plans for each quilt, keep track of my progress as I go along and watch as I reach my goals!  If you're a quilter I highly recommend purchasing the Quilter's Planner.  Just visit their website ... quiltersplanner.com 

And remember to pick up a needle and thread and stitch some love into your world❣️

SCRAPPY SAWTOOTH CATS QUILT 😸 😸 😸

The SCRAPPY SAWTOOTH CATS QUILT is my version of a quilt designed by Janet Miller called SAWTOOTH CATS.  I made this quilt as a Christmas gift for my son and daughter-in-law's three rescue kitties ... Teek, Tribble and Gin❣️ 

There is much that I liked about this quilt pattern and much that I would rather see changed ... SO ... I changed it.  You can see a picture of the original pattern beneath.  I didn't make the cats upside down or facing one another; instead, I made them all going in one direction in one row and then in the other direction in the next row and so on.  I also did not have their tails hanging outside of the quilt block.  Instead, I made the quilt blocks bigger and appliquéd the tails inside of the block.  I also chose vibrant colors and not the browns and beiges shown on the pattern. I put in colorful sashings and decided against the sawtooth border.  I just sorta made it my own, but that's what's fun about quilting ... you can do that.  

Original Sawtooth Cats Pattern

I know that my son frequently washes the quilts that I make him so I pre-washed all the batik fabrics before sewing the quilt top to make sure that the colors wouldn't bleed later on when washed.  Batiks are hand dyed using wax and a series of dyes.  Using Synthrapol to pre-wash them will help to remove any excess dye or wax from the surface of the fabric.  First, I sorted the colors into small loads of red/purple, orange/yellow and green/blue.  Then, using hot water, I added a little more than a teaspoon of Synthrapol to each load. I used a quick wash cycle and then pressed them while damp to square them back into shape again.  I also pre-washed the backing and squared that back up again while damp.  I had six yards of that for the backing and binding so that wasn't quite so easy to do.


Once everything was pre-washed and ready to go I cut out my fabric and then started to piece the quilt top together. The back of the cats and their tails are paper pieced.  I love doing paper piecing.  It's a great way of getting small pieces sewn precisely together.  The only difficulty is that there is a lot of seams involved with all those tiny pieces and when it came time to appliqué the tails on it was hard to turn the seams under nicely with all that bulk.  I sewed them first to double sided fusing and then fused them onto the fabric to get them ready to be appliquéd on.  

Paper Piecing the Kitty

This quilt is a perfect way to use up some of your fabric stash.  That's what makes this quilt a scrappy version of the Sawtooth Cats Pattern. Just tossing in any ol' fabric doesn't make for a visually pleasant quilt though.  You have to have a "deliberate randomness" to your layout in order for the quilt to pop.  I also don't have much of a fabric stash so I ordered some fat quarters in bright colors to supplement what I did have on hand. 

 

The little cat faces are embroidered on.  Once embroidered I went over them with black thread to anchor them a bit more.  I didn't want the embroidery to get pulled off by the real kitties once the quilt was gifted.

They were having a batik fabric sale at Hancock's of Paducah online and so I scooped up some batik cat fabric in blue for the backing. Sometimes, the backing can be the most expensive part of the quilt. Four to five yards of fabric at  twelve dollars a yard is a lot.  So, when I saw this $12.00 a yard batik cat fabric on sale for $5.99 a yard I grabbed it.  It's so cute! I also wanted to add some additional color to the quilt top and so instead of using the light colored sashings that the pattern calls for I used this blue kitty batik fabric that I had purchased for the backing.  And although it's hard to see the white background fabric in the blocks has tiny cat paws on it.

I did the embroidery and appliqué on all twenty blocks while watching a series called "Mr. Robot" on Amazon for free.  I watched all three seasons while stitching.  When that was done I assembled the quilt top using colorful squares between all the sashings. 

When it came time to bind the quilt I found out that season four of "Mr. Robot" was out so I got to finish watching the entire show from beginning to end.  

Binding rolled onto the Binding Baby

Before putting the quilt top on the longarm I spent some time marking it.  I did all the markings for the quilting in the sashings and all of the markings for the crosshatching for the quilting in the blocks.  

Then it was time to load it onto the longarm ... my favorite part of quilting!  

I used Quilter's Dream white polyester batting for this quilt.  I did this because of the white background fabric.  Regular batting is somewhat beige or yellow in color and can make white fabric look dingy, but the Quilter's Dream white works perfectly.  

I used Glide thread in the color, "Sky", for the sashings.  For the Glide thread I used a BERNINA 90/14 Jeans needle.  I kept my tension at normal which is 4.0 and my bobbin tension at 200 on the TOWA gauge. For all the stitch in the ditch work on the kitties I used Aurifil Monofilament and So Fine in the bobbin.  For that combination I used a Superior Threads Titanium 80/12 Top Stitch needle and reduced my top tension to 1.75 and my bobbin tension to 180.  Then for the cross hatching in the blocks I kept the So Fine in the top and bobbin. 

I also made a drawstring bag to use to gift the quilt with and to store it in.  I used the leftover backing material to make it with.

I hope the kitties love their quilt!  

Getting a little help from Tribble Kitty!

Remember to pick up a needle and thread and quilt some love into your world❤️

IT'S DECLASSIFIED 👽👽👽

This is a very special quilt that I made for my brother from a pattern that made the cover of QUILTY magazine in their Jan/Feb 2019 edition. The pattern, called THAT'S NO MOON was designed by Megan Collins.

And for those of you who aren't STAR WARS fans  (Wait! Is there even such a thing???),  here is the famous quote that this pattern is based on ...

I always thought that this pattern would be the perfect fit for a quilt for my brother's 60'th birthday because I wanted to make him an aLiEn quilt.  His birthday was last May but we never acknowledge each other's birthday on the correct date.  It's just a weird brother/sister thing that we do. So, instead, I thought I'd present him with his quilt at Christmastime when we drove up to Chicagoland through the snow, slush, muck and blizzards to celebrate his daughter's wedding.  She's my niece ... Emmy Lou Who ❤️  But why an aLiEn quilt?  Do you REALLY wanna go there? 

Well, you did ask ... 
You see when my son was a toddler he woke up one afternoon from his nap to announce that Uncle Deano (my brother) had gone to live on another planet.  He said the Uncle Deano who had visited us was actually an aLiEn. Oh no, my brother was a changeling! (Which kinda explains a lot!) And from this one small pronouncement a family tradition was born.  

My brother, Deano, the aLiEn 👽

Ever since that day we gift my brother and his family and all of our family and friends with aLiEnS.  Once on a family reunion everyone arrived to find aLiEnS hiding in their sheets, shoes, ice cream, soda ... you name it ... there was an aLiEn hiding in it. The fun part was that my brother got blamed for this.  I actually know exactly how all those little aLiEnS arrived that summer (wink, wink), but my lips are forever sealed.  

My  nephew collecting aLiEnS at our family reunion!

I also started designing aLiEnS and selling them on Zazzle.  For some reason my biggest market for aLiEnS is in England. I'm not entirely sure why that is. You can find my aLiEnS in my online store Bits Of Whimsy and my quilt goodies at Whimsy Quilts.

My aLiEnS

Okay, so now that I've established that my family's a little weird (but then whose isn't?) let's get back to my quilt ...

Now that I had the pattern picked out, I was on the lookout for the perfect material for my brother's quilt.  Of course, I wanted aLiEn fabric but not just any ol' run of the mill aLiEn fabric.  I wanted something absolutely special.   Then one day GIUCY GUICE❣️walked into my life by way of Instagram! 

Giucy Giuce

Giuseppe Ribaudo (AKA Giucy Giuce) is a fabric designer for Andover Fabrics.  He is also a pattern designer and quilting instructor.  His fabric lines, Declassified, Quantum, Redux and Spectrastatic are out of this world!  One night on his Instagram story I followed along as Giucy spotted some weirdly unbelievable "lights" up in the sky outside his home. He documented what he saw and from that experience his Declassified line of fabric was born.  And that's how I found the PERFECT fabric for my aLiEn quilt.  

Here is a photo of Redacted in Onyx from the Declassified fabric line. It's  filled with redacted files from aLiEn sightings.  Tell me, is that the perfect fabric or what?!?! I couldn't resist using this for my backing! At first, I was going to mix it up with some other fabrics but this is just SO perfect that I left it as the entire backing.

A quote from Giucy Giuce ... "Redacted is hands down my favorite design from DECLASSIFIED. This print is what changed this collection from being a group about aliens to a group about a conspiracy. I had imagined the design originally as journal entries, accounts of alien encounters. Then I thought it would be cool to bring illustrations into it so it turned into testimonials/interviews conducted by the government.  Then I remembered the government doesn't want us knowing anything about aliens.  That's when I redacted everything.  And that's when not only this design, but the entire collection, took a very dramatic turn."

The only drawback to finding this perfect fabric collection was that it wasn't actually out yet.  I had to preorder it and wait until November for it to arrive. It was a long wait but finally one day there it was sitting on my door step. I was so excited that I literally ripped it open, ran upstairs to my sewing closet (yes, I sew in a closet) and then got down to business. 

For my background I chose Redacted in Onyx, Ciper in Achronic, Redacted in Achronic and Glyph in Onyx.  (The fabric names are so cool that I have to tell you each of them.)

For my "moons" I used nine fabrics. Schematic in Turqoise, Schematic in Peridot, Polaris in Jade, Hyperbolic in Quasar, DNA in Copper Metallic, Circuitry in Blue Morpho, Petri in Nonno, Cipher in Radioactive and Interconnection in Nonno.

For my sashings and borders I used Crop Circles in Carrera.  

And for my quilt bag I used the Quantum Panels in Moonstone and Millet.

I knew that I wanted my quilt to be "out there".  You know, quirky with a side of "otherness" but my first attempt was so chaotic that it gave me a headache to even look at it.  I had used all of the different fabric colors from the collection in each of the "moons" and it was all just too much against the chaos of the black and white background that I had chosen. So, then I decided to just make a black background ... you know, something nice and tame. The thing is though, I didn't really want a pretty quilt.  I actually wanted a quirky, crazy aLiEn quilt. Soooo, I went back to the black and white background and ...

instead of using every gorgeous fabric in the line I decided to select just those fabrics in "shades of aLiEn" and use those colors throughout. That tempered the overall look a little bit but still left a lot of the chaos in. After all, it is an aLiEn quilt 👽 

At the last moment I decided to add a border to my quilt using the amazing Crop Circles fabric. While I was waiting for my additional fabric to arrive I decided to make a quilt bag out of the two panels that had come with my Quantum fabric bundle earlier in the year.  I stitched the panels together along with a border and made them into a lined drawstring bag with squared corners.  I'll throw a cedar block and some washing instructions in there and use this to gift the quilt with. 

All that was left to do was to design the perfect card to go with my quilt. I made an aLiEn Birthday/Christmas card for my brother.  I used Christmas aLiEnS and some Declassified fabric.  It turned out cute 👽  

The card reads: Celebrating your sixtieth year on our planet!

Finally, my extra fabric arrived, I sewed those gorgeous borders on and then loaded it onto my longarm.  

Quilting on the longarm is my favOrite part of the quilting process❣️ It goes without saying that I didn't want to do too much in the way of quilting with this quilt top. Instead, I wanted the quilting to just support the design of all that crazy cool fabric and not over power it.  

I used Quilter's Dream Wool Batting for this quilt.  Wool batting is a delight to work with and it gives the quilt that extra loft that makes the quilting stand out.  I used Auriful Monofilament thread in the top and Micro Quilter 7008, which is a gray, in the bobbin. I set my top tension to 1.25 and my TOWA tension for the bobbin to 180.  I used a stitch length of 9.  And for my needle I used a Superior Titanium Topstitch 90-14.  For the 100 weight thread that I used you're supposed to use a smaller needle but for some reason those 90-14's just work great on my machine. 

Once the quilt was done it was time to sew the binding on. And, yes, I know a darker color would have contained the chaos of the quilt better. But again, I wanted an aLiEn quilt so I chose the Cipher fabric in Radioactive for my binding.  It gave the quilt front an eerie frame and it absolutely made the black backing pop!  Then I took one of my own aLiEn designs and "spoonflowered" it.  I cut it out and appliquéd it onto the bottom corner of the backing as my way of signing the quilt.

I signed my quilt 👽

It's always so hard to photograph quilts. They always look so much better in person. But here's a shot taken in good lighting followed by one taken in dim lighting to show you some of the quilting.

I have one thing left on my bucket list and that's to go heli-diving in the alps.  (That's skydiving from a helicopter.)  You can read all about my skydiving adventures in a previous blog ... LET'S GO SKYDIVING!  Now I'm thinking that I might just add another adventure to my list.  I think it would be absolutely crazy cool to hang out with Giucy Giuce for an evening. He seems like he'd fit right into our family and, who knows, maybe we'd even see some "interesting" lights up in the sky. After all, there's always aLiEnS popping up wherever I go 👽 👽 👽

Remember, aLiEnS are everywhere and they're watching us!

Here are just a few of my aLiEn designs ...

Remember, to pick up a needle and thread and stitch some love into your universe 👽 

Cocoa Bear enjoying the new quilt❣️