I just finished up those two Half-Square Triangle blocks yesterday.

Most fabrics are by French General for Moda. Some are Parson Gray’s Curious Nature collection which I just love. I couldn’t identify the others. I got them from a scrap bag at a local shop. The beige is Kona cotton in Natural.

My step-parents are finishing up their living room renovations. And I’m doing some pillows for their two red leather chairs using those blocks for the front panel.

The design was inspired by this mini-quilt by Jolene at Blue Elephant Stitches. I just love all the negative space surrounding the HST. In mine, there is not as much negative space as I initially planned. I’m a bit limited by the chairs size. We figured out that a pillow 10″ x 10″ would be the best size. I didn’t find any pillow forms in those sizes, so I’ll have to make them my-self.

I’m still unsure how I’ll finish up the pillows. I’m planning to quilt both the front and top panel. But, should I bind them or put some piping? Should I make a zipper or envelope closure? Here are the two fabrics I’m planning to use for the back panel (grey) and the binding/piping (red). Both are also from La Petite École by French General.

I finished up my quilt top for my bursting star and completed the quilting. As I was saying in my previous post, I added a border in coal. But before adding the border, I added a flange in orange to frame the star. I will also be adding a second flange when I’ll do the binding. This one in green. And I’ll use the same fabric as the border for the binding. I’ve got this idea from a quilt by Katie at Sew Katie Did. I just love such details. It’s just add a special touch to the quilt.

Because of the flange between the star block and the border, I decided to quilt them separately. For the star blocks, I decided to go with an all-over design. I got the first book from Angela Walters this summer. Don’t  you love her quilting style? I’ve started following her blog last year and I really appreciate her work. I also started following her class on Craftsy. So, I decided it was about time I try out something from the book. Since the quilt is intended for a baby boy, I went with a boxy quilting design, the Geometric Allover in the book. And for the borders, I went for Chain Squares. Here it is on my table as I was quilting it and a close-up at the quilting.

I did it on my “new” sewing table. Actually, I got the table at the end of the summer. It’s a used ergonomic table. I found it online. Someone near my place was selling it for only 100$. It’s large, about 30″ x 60″ and it’s adjustable in height. It was just what I was looking for. And it fits perfectly in my sewing room. Lately, my husband cut a hole and install some brackets to have my machine bed at the same height as the table.

It’s so great for quilting. It’s actually the second time I use it to quilt. I also used it when quilting my wonky kites quilt. That quilt is much larger (60″ x 72″). So, the table helped a lot. Next steps to organize my sewing room, my wall cabinets. But, these are going to wait a little bit longer because my husband is so busy with it’s own projects. I’m just grateful he did my table right away. And he promised he would do a wall-mounted cutting table for me!

Do you remember my half-square triangles leftover from my September blocks for do. Good Stitches? They have been on my my design wall since then. Once in a while I would stop to move them around and see what  I could do. This week I settled on a design. It’s been a while a want to do a star quilt. I’ve been feeling like trying it since I’ve started noticing them on Flickr and on the different blogs I follow. I particularly like this one by Katie from Sew Katie Did. I didn’t have enough HST to make something like this. But, I came up with this design by combining both sizes of HST.  I’m calling it the bursting star.

With the HST leftovers from the two Hug & Kisses blocks, I made the following blocks.

 I had to add 4 HST for the center of the central star, 8 white squares and 4 colored squares all the size of the smaller HST. Then, I bring all outer blocks to the same size as the central star (9″) block and assemble them to make one large block (about 25″ x 25″).

I’m planning to make a little baby quilt out of it. I want to bring it to a 36″ x 36″ by adding a large border using Kona cotton in Coal. I started cutting those today as well as the fabric for the back panel. I still have no idea how I will quilt it however. Any suggestions?

Yesterday, I worked on my blocks for do. Good Stitches. Elaine from Dashasel Sews asked us to make some hot air balloons. She is the quilter for October in the Joy circle. We used a free pattern from Quiltmaker called Up, Up and Away. It is using paper piecing. It was a lot of fun to give this technique a second try (see first time here). It went pretty smoothly. We were free to piece the balloon portion as we liked. I made 3 blocks. For the first, I free pieced some stripes from my scraps. For the second one, I added some lines to the paper piecing pattern to make a wedge shape in the center of the balloon. For the last one, I decided to only use one piece of fabric as I felt Metro Living by Robert Kaufman looks good on it’s own for a hot air balloon.

Last week was the first meeting of the Montreal Modern Quilt Guild since our summer break. It was great to see some people come back from the few meetings we had before and also to meet new faces. In June, four of us had started a scrap swap. We had to bring a sandwich Ziploc filled with scraps from our stash. We had to pick someone else’s bag, make a little quilted project during the summer and give it to the bag owner at our first fall meeting.

The main fabric in the bag that I picked was a white fabric featuring flower prints that looked like watercolor reproductions. In the bag, there was a few solid color and dot print fabrics from the same collection and some other scraps. When thinking of what I would be doing, my main concern was to feature these watercolor flowers. Also, since it was a small project I thought it was a great occasion to try something new. I decided to go for an English Paper Piecing project. It was perfect since at the time I started doing it, I was going on vacation.

I decided on a mug rug. I did my own design to have a central hexagon that would be the right size to feature  a flower and small diamonds that would fit one of the dot prints. I printed it out my template on a 8.5″ X 11″ freezer paper sheet from C. Jenkins. The template takes all the sheet space. So, my mug rug ended up being 9″ x 11.5″ (I used 1/4″ seam allowance when cutting each fabric piece). I ironed my template on a second sheet of freezer paper to have ticker paper pieces. Then I cut each piece out of the template. To cut fabric for each pieces, I ironed the paper piece on the wrong side of the fabric and cut about 1/4″ outside of it. This was great for fussy cutting  as the paper was sticking to the fabric.

Then I went on, basted each pieces and then hand-stitched them together. Rachel Hauser from Stitched in Color as a great introductory video to English Paper Piecing. You will find it in this tutorial from her if you want to know more about it. It was very helpful to me.

 

If you would like to use my template to make a project of your own, you can find it here. On the second page you’ll find the template for a complete hexagon if you would like to make a project larger than a mug rug. If you do use it I would love to see what you come up with, so please add a picture to my flickr group.

And here is what I did for the back of the mug rug. It is also featuring another piece of the main fabric.

Did you ear about Fabric Spot? It is a new Canadian online fabric store. They specialize in modern fabrics, solids and organics. They have a few designer collections. Among others, they currently have The Birds & the Bees by Tula Pink and Chicopee by Denyse Schmidt. They have a great selection of solid color fabrics (Kona solids from Robert Kaufman, Free Spirit Designer solids and Bella Solids from Moda). They also offer the organic line of solid color cottons by Robert Kaufman (Pure Organic solids) at the same price as the Konas.

For her Grand Opening, Karen, the owner, was kind enough to offer us (me and Cinzia from Deux Petites Souris) a fat quarter bundle each. I just got it in the mail this morning. I received fabrics from The Birds & the Bees collection by Tula Pink for Free Spirit. It is a bundle from the Sunset colorway. Isn’t it beautiful?

This one is definitely the one I prefer. I just love the design of the interlaced flying birds. I’m thinking of ordering some in other colorways (Apple and Storm).

Those fabrics her perfect for fall. All those pinks, oranges and browns. I just need to find the right project to feature them. Because of the mix of small size and large size prints, I was thinking of a quilt with large pieces. I would mix the prints with soft golden yellow fabrics. I already have a few Konas in yellows that would fit nicely. Maybe a quilt with large hexagons. It’s been a while I want to try out this tutorial by Jacquie Gering from Tallgrass Prairie Studio.  I just love her quilt in the tutorial. Any other suggestions?

Anyway a big thanks to myfabricspot.com! It’s great to have another Canadian store online with modern fabrics.

With September came some group changes at my son’s daycare. He went from the Ladybug group to the Frog group. He his now part of the older kids at the daycare. This means SCHOOL next year, already! Anyway, I wanted to prepare a little something for his daycare teacher. I had thought about a notebook cover with a ladybug fabric I had found for her on an online shop. The fabric isEvening Light Ladybugs on Lanterns by Tina Givens from Cloe’s Imagination collection. I just love it.

At the end of August, Rachel Hauser from Stitched in Color posted a  tutorial on how she does her lovely notebook covers. The timing was perfect! So, I made this notebook.

I mixed the ladybug fabric with a linen blend and other fabrics from my stash. Thanks Rachel for the tutorial!. I really like how it turned out.

My son had prepared with my help a ladybug paperweight. He painted a rock for this and we added some antennas using pipe cleaners. My only regret is that we forgot to sign his name and didn’t take any pictures of it. His daycare teacher was quite happy with her gifts. We also received some wonderful souvenirs of his year with her. She wrote us a letter which made me cry. She is a thoughtful and gentle person. My son really appreciates her and found it a bit hard first to no longer be in her group. But, he is quite happy with is new group and he is proud to have a book to make preschool activities.

I’m running a bit late for my blocks for do. Good Stitches. We are almost in October and I just finished up my September blocks. I had started them earlier, but then I realized I didn’t have enough Kona in white. Thanks to Pam from Mad About Patchwork, I received some in no time!

My wonky kites quilt is basted! I can’t wait to see how the quilting will go. It’s the first time I quilt such a large quilt (60″ x 72″). All my basting pins are there. I just hope it will be enough.

I will quilt some diamonds. As you can see I marked them with some 1/4″ masking tape. I will first do some straight line quilting using my walking foot to delimit the diamonds. Then, I will do some wonky spiral diamonds to match the piecing. Hope it will turn out well!