Blogger's Quilt Festival

I am SO excited to enter this quilt in AmysCreativeSide's 2013 Spring Bloggers Quilt Festival :D

My quilt is entered into the baby quilt category #18 HERE (VOTE for me there too ;)

Each year for our local quilt show, The Peteeneet Quilt Show, there is a challenge fabric.  

The challenge fabric for this year is a darling print from Emily Herrick's fabric collection, Going Coastal.  Specifically, it was the bottle caps print. (Which is my FAVORITE!!)

I used prints from Emily's Going Coastal and Shore Thing collections to make this quilt.

Last year, I turned the bottle caps into 1.5" hexies.  ...and set them aside for a bit (like 8 months ;)

I used English paper piecing for my method of hexifying the fabric ;D

My original design for the quilt was totally different from what I ended up with :)

The bangle design was inspired by pictures I saw on Instagram of hexies made from Sarah Fielke's new book Hand Quilted With Love called Bangles.

I have been crushing on English Paper Piecing (epp), so I came up with a paper template that would get me an EPP bangle.

I have become TOTALLY obsessed with EPP.

Deciding how to quilt this sweet baby was really hard.

I finally came to the realization that the quilting would have to be a hybrid, 

a little hand quilting and a little machine quilting.

(The back)

With the nautical theme, the white fabric required small pebble quilting.

The hand pieced English paper pieced bangles and border hexies required hand quilting.

For the hand quilting, I used pearl cotton embroidery thread.

I used white for the bangles and navy for the border hexies.

Fussy cutting lent to an AWESOME hexy in the border ;D

This quilt will eventually belong to our future (someday) grandchild. ;D

You can read all about this quilts evolution HERE.

Quilt Stats

• Quilt Measurements- 35" x 33.25"
• Special Techniques used- English paper piecing, hand applique, entirely hand pieced.
• Quilted by ME! ;)  I used my home machine for the pebbles and hand quilting for the English paper piecing.

Spring 2013 Blogger's Quilt Festival over at Amy's Creative Side.  

You can check it out  HERE

Ashley's All Fenced In is REALLY finished :)

A while ago I "finished" my daughter Ashley's quilt for her birthday.  I decided that it would need some hand quilting to REALLY make it look nice ;D  ...those darn Quilting Ancestors really know how to haunt us into doing the hand quilting stuff ...thanks to Konda, I now know it's the Quilting Ancestors who argue and speak to me ;D  It took a while, just quilting a little here and there, but finally, last night, I got it done :)

Here is my beautiful Ashley with her finished quilt.

The hand quilting is VERY organic ;D ....organic means: "not perfect" or "not straight" or "not even stitches" or in my case, all three :)

I used a fun, slightly variegated, pearl cotton that I found on clearance at Hobby Lobby :)

The quilting shows up very sweetly on the minky back.

Ashley will be taking this to college with her. 

We are going to MISS her terribly!!! :( :::.......

PS- In case you were wondering what our door sign says, here is a close up.

Ashley has been dating a few new boys and we wanted them to know that they SHOULD NOT KISS Ashley, because she has COOTIES!! :D ...we aren't sure if the sign is helping or not.. :\