My Sewing and Quilting Adventures

Ann Fahl's work is very inspiring. such beautiful and vibrant thread work. Her quilts look so real. One of my favorite doodles on paper for years have been the Hibuscus flower which I had as a little girl in my garden. There are couple of them in my garden now too. Here is my design inspired by my doodling and Ann Fahl's march tutorial. The table runner I started around Christmas time but never finished it. Its never too late to finish a quilt. So, for the star I choose Leah Day's Star Flower FMQ and for the Christmas tree itself I used Leah Day's Flame Stitch FMQ . The thrid is design what I came up with inspired by this table runner itslef. It repeats a pattern of Star & Christmas tree just like the quilt itself. I really like this effect. Thank you Leah for your designs. And Thank you Ann Fahl for inspiring us and your great tutorial. Here are my designs for my notebook. This flower is my favorite and I'm not sure for how many years I have be...

This is was the task to quilt the outline of the design on the Wholecloth. First it does seem like a easy task but it does take time and patience to travel stitch on the design. I'm not even sure how good or bad I'm with it. Would like to see your comments on how I'm doing good or bad, I want to hear both. So that I will have space to learn and grow. Thanks to Leah for the insight into the color of thread to be used. Since, I choose a light color fabric(pale pink Kona solid)  I didn't want to go with a dark color thread. So, I choose to use matching color thread for quilting. I do like the way it turned out.  I didn't want to break the thread too often so from the sqaures to the other hearts and feather I continue without breaking thread and filled out the hearts with micro-stippling. I still left out the inner hearts and the surrounding area since I wanted to see how Leah would tackle the micro-stippling. Can't wait for this Wednesday. Here is the picture ...

This week was a good break from big quilts. For the wholecloth quilt I choose Kona Solid pale pink cotton fabric, since I did not have any light box and wanted the marking process to be easy. I taped my pattern to the cutting mat and then taped my fabric too. The Frixion pen was actually helpful and quick to mark. But looks like lot of different reviews about these. Here is a picture of my quilt all marked: Wholecloth Quilt marked Homemade Starch: I didn't get a chance to go to Joann fabrics to get some starch. So, decided to make it myself. In India, we wear lot of cotton material due to the hot weather where I grew up. So, we starch our clothes for a nice stiffness. I boiled some rice with lot of water and then filtered it out. Added some more water to dilute the starch and soaked the per-washed fabric.  Right away, ironed the fabric it and nice and stiff but not too stiff. I still need to play with the stiffness. Will have to see how my project turns out after quilti...

Here is the sneak peak of the quilt I finished for Week 8 of Quilt along. All bound and ready to be used Quilt back So, this week looks like the task is to maneuver your quilt in your sewing work space efficiently. So, I thought this would be the perfect time to share my workroom. I'm literally a closet quilter. Why I have this arrangement? I share the space with my kids, they use it as their playroom and its also my sewing room. So, I tuck all my sewing machine and other stuff which I don't want them to get into, to the closet. If the baby wakes up in the middle of my quilting. I can just close my closet and run to him :-). For now, no complains I love this arrangement. My studio(actually my closet LOL)  This week I got very ambitious and started piecing a queen size quilt with saw-tooth-star block. I'm not in love with my center block though. It took me a long time to make up my mind about the type of block I wanted to try. I have been using the flying-ge...

This week's task was very interesting. Even though I didn't get into quilting too long ago. I already have many UFO's. To the matter of fact my very first pieced quilt was never finished. I had used a charm pack to piece the quilt with 6 rows and 6 columns. The past weekend I added an additional row and two borders. The first one is 2.5" width and 2nd one is 5.5inch width. Here is the picture of the quilt top all finished. Pieced Quilt Top This is the black fabric I going was originally going to use for my backing. But I didn't have enough fabric to do so. I guess when I bought these fabrics I didn't have any idea about how much fabric would be required for the backing, borders etc. Any way I might plan to make another quilt just like this. Or use this black fabric as the center for a different quilt. I love the flowers and have been tempted to just quilt around them and make them pop on my Quilt top. I will definitely do a post on this if I do an...