If you are reading this post, either you are a regular reader of my blog or you come from the Blogger’s Quilt Festival. Thanks for stopping by and I hope you’ll enjoy what you’ll see. Also, thanks to Amy from Amy’s Creative Side for organizing this event and to her sponsors for all the lovely prizes. This is a great way to get to know more quilters and be inspired.

It’s the first time I participate in the festival. We are allowed to submit two quilts. For my second one, I decided to add my Bursting Star quilt to the Home Machine Quilted Quilts category. I did this quilt with half-square triangles leftover from other projects. If you want to know a little more about this quilt, read these posts: here, here and here.

I decided to submit a quilt in the quilting category because this is a part of quilt making I’m enjoying more and more. And it is something I want to continue to improve. I submitted this quilt because it is the quilting I did that I’m the most satisfied with up to now.

Below are some pictures I took while I was quilting it. I did a boxy allover design combined with some chain squares for the borders.

Here is a little close-up of the quilting after the quilt was washed.

I used some a bamboo/cotton blend batting and it felt so soft. I hope the little baby who got it feels that too!

It’s the first time I participate in the festival. As a first quilt, I decided to add my Windmill quilt to the Quilt Photographers category. I did this quilt for the Madrona Road Challenge organized by The Modern Quilt Guild. If you want to know a little more about this quilt, read these posts: here and here.

Below is a picture of it after piecing the top. It is one of my favorite pictures I took in the past year. And it is the reason I decided to submit this quilt in the Quilters Photography category. It was taken from the back. I just love the sunlight that we see coming through. It really shows how the quilt was pieced.

Finally, here is a little close-up showing the quilting lines.

For me, taking a photography is part of the creative process in making a quilt or other sewing projects. It is the part I get to share it with you! And I really enjoy taking the time to make a setup for featuring it. I have a good reflex camera, but besides that I don’t have a lot of equipment. Until now, I took most of my photos at my place. In the future, I definitely want to go out more to find some locations that would offer great setup for taking quilts photography.

I have published a few patterns in the past. Most of them in Stitch, from Interweave. But I just got published in a quilt magazine. It makes me quite happy since I’m loving quilt making more and more. I particularly enjoy designing them. This time I designed a playmat quilt that just has been published in Modern Quilts Unlimited. In the third issue of this new modern quilting magazine, Spring 2013.

I just got my copy of it and I really enjoyed reading an article by Jacquie Guering from Tallgrass Prairie Studio and article on Victoria Findlay Wolfe. It’s great to have a pattern featured in the same magazine. Both are inspiring quilt makers!

About the design of my quilt, the idea was to make it look like tumble blocks babies play with. Blocks with different colors on each of their faces. The quilt consists of 3 diamonds that are joined to represent a cube in 3D. Each diamonds are assembled in a courthouse step fashion alternating between solid color fabric and a coordinating print. I wanted to accentuate the three-dimensionality this way.

If you have a copy of the magazine, I hope you’ll enjoy the pattern. And if you make a quilt based on it, I would love to see it. If you are on Flickr, you could add a photo of it to The Charming Needle pool.

This weekend I did a bit of sewing for the people of Boston. Did you here about the To Boston With Love an Quilts for Boston initiatives?

A few members from the Montreal Modern Quilt Guild offered to help out the Vancouver MQG branch to make some flags. I made two of them. One following this tutorial and a second based on this tutorial. Both are paper pieced.

All the flags are collected by Amy from During Quiet Time and they will be displayed in the city of Boston later on (details to be announced next week).

I also made a block for the quilts that will be made by the Boston MQG.

I wanted something that could represent a marathon, abstractly I mean. I realize that it looks more like a race with the colored parallelogram in the different corridor.

It’s great to be able to show support to people of Boston after the atrocity that happened at the marathon. We have them in our hearts, particularly the ones who had to face some lost. A big thanks to the people who put those initiatives to life, to the ones who will be setting up the flags and to the ones who will be assembling the quilts.

I’m not a big fan of chocolate for Easter, so I decided to sew something for my little ones instead. Anyway, I knew they would be getting plenty from their grand-parents. I made one of the first thing they asked for when they saw my new book Little Things to Sew from Liesl Gibson: the Bear Carrier.

I also made a third one in purple for my niece. I’m sure it will be the one which will get the more use. She is two. I’m sure she will be carrying her baby dolls all around with it. The instructions in the book were really clear. It took a bit of time because I decided to make 3 of them. But, I’m glad I did it all at once. I started on  theThursday before Easter and by Sunday, they were ready. Except I had to make adjustements on them to position the velcro before they could actually play with it. All 3 of them were happy to get this little gift.

We had quite a lot of fun taking pictures of the bear carrier. My boys wanted to make a photo shoot with the tripod and everything.

After taking pictures of the actual bear carrier, I think we played around about an hour taking pictures of the three of us putting the timer on the camera and running to take the picture. It was quite fun!

I shared the top panel of this quilt when we returned from the Holidays . The design is mine and you can read a bit about it in this post. I’ve finish the quilting and the binding lately.

For the quilting, I wanted to put to practice some notions I learned from Angela Walters‘ books and Craftsy class. I played with contrast: straight vs. curvy lines, also in the density of quilting. The straight line quilting in the crossing bars is less heavily quilted. For the negative space, I initially planned to do some bubble quilting. But after making a small sample, I realized how much thread it would require, and how time too… So, I did some dense loop quilting. This was a good compromise. I was also afraid that the bubble quilting would stiffen the quilt too much and I wanted to keep it soft for a little baby. So, overall it was a good solution. I also wanted to repeat the quilting used for the crossing bars in the negative space. So, I did two other crossing bars (narrower ones) in the left upper quadrant of the quilt.

In the next photos, you can see that in the patchwork I did some arcs on each edge. I followed the great trick in this blog post on how to quilt it continuously.

It can be seen more clearly from the back:

I’m more comfortable doing free motion quilting. It seems each time I do straight-line quilting with my walking foot, I can’t avoid the fabric shifting. In this case, it was in the sage bars. It is pretty obvious I would say. I did rip out part of it to redo it. But, it didn’t change much. After quilting this quilt, I spoke about it with my friend Cinzia from Deux Petites Souris, who is quite good with straight line quilting. She gave a few tips. I did do a few tests since then. It seems that decreasing thread tension and quilting in the same directions helps out. Still, I think I might try using basting glue next time instead of pins. I’m not a big fan of putting glue on my quilt, even though it will be washed away after. I have avoid it until now, but I think I’ll give it a try next time I have a project for which I want to do straight-line quilting.

I kept the back really simple. I used a raindrop print that I had in my stash and coordinated well. And I used some leftovers from the Kona in Sage and Pond used on the front. The print is Tidbits by Kari Ramsay of Fresh Cut Quilts for Henry Glass & Co.

My Crossing Road quilt is now available in my Etsy shop and waiting for a new home!

I got my Refection mini-quilt back from a quilt exhibition. It was the first time I had a quilt displayed in a show. And it was a special one, the first one organized by The Modern Quilt Guild: QuiltCon. I hesitated on submitting a quilt. But, members of our guild (Montreal branch of the MQG) encouraged me to do so. I’m really glad I did. It was great to be part of QuiltCon is some way. And overall, I received some really great comments from the judges. It is great to know that one of my quilts was displayed next so many amazing and unique quilts. Soon, The Modern Quilt Guild will put pictures of all quilts in the exhibitions on their website. Check it out! In the meantime, you can find the top three winners of the quilt show here, on The Modern Quilt Guild blog. Christa from Christa Quilts! also wrote 3 posts on all the winners of QuiltCon (part 1,part 2 and part 3).

Jennifer, one of our guild members, was there and was kind enough to take some pictures of my quilt. Thanks Jen!

She also took some pictures of the charity quilts that were made with blocks from the QuiltCon Challenge. Here is mine in one of the quilts:

My reflection mini-quilt has come back in a freshly painted room. I’m happy to see it back. I was missing the view I have from it from our ground-floor! Jen said that people at the exhibition found it pretty funny to ear the story behind it, about me choosing the colors to match the bathroom. She will probably laugh when she’ll read this.

   

My step-mother has been looking for a wallet to carry her coins and cards for a while. I have been looking for a pattern/tutorial to make her one. She has got quite a stack of cards, about an inch thick. I really love this one, which I first saw in leather. However, I though a zipper would be more useful for a coin pocket. Then I saw this one by Siam Square. I think it is perfect for her needs. But, I didn’t find any pattern/tutorial. I have been thinking of figuring things out until I saw this pattern by Michelle Patterns. It is a zip pocket pouch which comes in 3 sizes. It was in sale about two weeks ago for Michelle’s 5$ Friday. When I saw this post, I bought it right away and made one in the next week. It came with a bonus pattern for a phone pouch. It is an additional size with a flap of a different shape.

I made the small size combined with the shape of the flap on the phone pouch and this is what I came up with:

It was the first time I was using one of the Michelle Patterns. I thought the instructions were easy follow with clear pictures and the pouch construction was clever.

My step-mother was quite happy to receive it this card/coin wallet. And I think I might do another one for me to put my business cards and the ones of our guild (Montreal Modern Quilt Guild).

Lately, I finished up a project that was on my WIP list for more than a year.

My sister had requested a cover for her boyfriend’s electronic piano. They wanted something in black, white, grey and red. She had sent this picture for inspiration (sorry I can’t give credit to anyone for this poster).

It was about the time I started Rachel Hauser’s online curve class (from Stitched in Color). So, I thought this would be a great idea for the improv curve piecing project. At the end of the curve class, I had finish assembling the top panel (see this post).  I quilted it with the lining last summer (see this post). But then it was left hanging in my sewing room for a year. It was the birthday of my sister’s boyfriend a few weeks ago. It was just the motivation I needed to finish this project. I didn’t have much left: the side panels, assembling and binding. In a day, it was done. It makes me wonder why I waited so long.

The cover is not actually quilted because I didn’t use batting. But, I did topstitch the top panel with the lining. I used a home decor weight cotton for the lining. So, I though it would be stiff enough. And I wanted a flatter look. But if I was to do it again, I would either use batting or some interfacing. Looking at it a year later, I really like the variegated thread that I used and the wavy lines. Beside the piecing of the crossing curves, it adds some interest to the remaining of the piano cover. And the red binding adds that little pop of color.The lining is a designer fabric that was given to me by aunt. She had bought some to cover some chairs and had a lot left. Lucky me! I thought it went quite well with the top panel. Don’t you love those curves?

My sister’s boyfriend was quite happy to receive the piano cover. She was too. It seems that their cats like to sleep on the piano. So now at least, there will be less hair between the piano keys. However, they quickly realized that black wasn’t such a good idea with cats! BTW, thanks to my sister for the great pictures of the cover on the actual piano!