ISLAND BATIK AMBASSADOR AUGUST CHALLENGE PART 3

The Great Outdoors Blog hop

The great outdoors are what inspired the this hop’s theme. Throughout the month of August, our Ambassadors will be featuring Island Batik’s newest fabrics, appearing on shop shelves SOON! See something you like? Ask for it at your local quilt shop, or request it if you don’t yet see it. We have the most delicious collections to share with you!

Today is my day and as usual I was down to the wire. I put the binding on the quilt at 9:00 last night. I don't think I have ever put on a binding on as quick a time as I did this one. ****Be sure to read all the way to the end so you learn how you can be eligible to win a fat quarter batik bundle and my Cutting Corners template set and a strip pack from Island Batik.****

Before I reveal the quilt I want to show how I made the second part of the block. The patches that attaches to the flower have triangles on the ends of them. They are made with squares. You can draw a line on the backs of the squares and sew on the drawn line or you can do what I do and use my "Cutting Corners" template set.

Place the square on the right end of the smaller rectangle strip. Make sure that the edges are perfectly lined up.

Using the triangle in the set, line up the edge of the triangle on the left edge of the square with the top of the triangle even with the top of the square. The diagonal line should go through the bottom right corner.

Using your rotary cutter, trim off the corner and sew with a 1/4" seam.

You will repeat the process with the longer strip except place the strip vertically with the square at the top of the strip. 

                                    

You will end up with a left and right strip.

You piece the rest of the block like a log cabin.

                                             

I was working on this quilt during a quilt retreat called "Summer Breeze" so I asked the group what should I call the quilt and they said call it "Summer Breeze" after the retreat! I pieced many of the blocks at the retreat so I laid down the pieces to see what they would look like. ( I was still missing 4 blocks.)

I then thought, what would it look like with white sashing strips? I definitely liked this version better.

After I got home, I finished the blocks and put it on my design wall. I couldn't decide on whether I wanted to put on a border or not so I cut some strips to see what it would look like with a border. I also added four orange corner stones where the flowers came together.

Without borders

With borders

I decided to go ahead with the small border. Here it is on my quilting machine. I decided to quilt the background with small circles to match the border print (which is actually bubbles).

So.......here is the finished quilt! It is 57" square with an 8" block.

A close-up of the quilting

I really had fun making this one. I decided to make a pattern of it so I am offering a special discount if you preorder the pattern. (It will take me a couple weeks to write it.) The pattern will come with enough freezer paper sheets to make the 24 blocks. So for a limited time you can get the pattern for $12 (regular price will be $15 with the foundation papers). I will make the pattern available in pdf form after it is written. It will be $12 regular price.

You can preorder the pattern here: Summer Breeze Pattern.

I used 25 fabrics from the collection. 5 groups of 5 fabrics. It was my surprise bundle in my box from them. You can see the whole collection here:
Ocean Odyssey by Island Batik. 

ISLAND BATIK GIVEAWAY

Island Batik is giving away three strip packs in their Rafflecopter, just follow this link.

a Rafflecopter giveaway

GATEWAY QUILTS GIVEAWAY

I will be having a drawing for a fat eighth bundle of the collection and my Cutting Corners template set. Just leave a comment to be in the drawing. I will draw a name a week from today (August 27). Be sure to leave your email so that I can contact you if you win. US only due to shipping charges.

As always: Do what you love and love what you do. Feel free to share my blog with your quilting friends. Thank you for reading. Toby

Be sure to check out the other blog posts especially Karen Overton's who also used Ocean Odyssey in her quilt.

Monday, August 6 - All A Flutter - Yellow Cat Quilt Designs, Creative Blonde

Tuesday, August 7 - Birds N’ Bees - Ark Angel Creations, Patterns By Jen

Wednesday, August 8 - Canterbury Manor - Sally Manke, Powered By Quilting

Thursday, August 9 - Eclectic Garden - Desert Bloom Quilting, Sew Karen-ly Created

Friday, August 10 - Vintage Morris - MooseStash Quilting, Devoted Quilter

Monday, August 13 - Safari - Sew Incredibly Crazy, SweetGrass Designs

Tuesday, August 14 - Spring Blossoms - Mary Mack Made Mine, If These Threads Could Talk

Wednesday, August 15 - Victoria and Albert - Bejeweled Quilts, Clever Chameleon

Thursday, August 16 - Wild Things - Freemotion By The River, Kauffman Designs

Friday, August 17 - Petting Zoo - Den Syende Himmel, Sarah Goer Quilts

Monday, August 20 - Ocean Odyssey - Gateway Quilts, The Quilt Rambler

Tuesday, August 21 - British Rose - Busy Hands Quilts, Mania for Quilts

Wednesday, August 22 - Dear William - The Inquiring Quilter, mmm! Quilts, Living Water Quilter

Thursday, August 23 - Dragonfly Dreams - Inchworm Fabrics, BeaQuilter

Friday, August 24 - Fur-ocious Friends - Quilting Affection Designs, Dizzy Quilter

Monday, August 27 - Globetrotter - Pamela Quilts, Curliecue Creations

Tuesday, August 28 - Jungle Cruise - Vicki's Crafts and Quilting, Little Bunny Quilts

Wednesday, August 29 - Lavendula - Carole Lyles Shaw, Masterpiece Quilting

Thursday, August 30 - London Calling - Quilt in a Not-Shell, Lizard Creek Quilting

Friday, August 31 - Spirit Rhythm - Steph Jacobson, Whispers of Yore

Monday, September 3 - Sweet Tweets - Kathleen McMusing, Adventurous Applique and Quilting

Tuesday, September 4 - Whatnot - heARTS Creations, Slice of Pi Quilts

ISLAND BATIK AMBASSADOR APRIL CHALLENGE Part 1

This month's challenge is to make a new quilt from an old block. Since I consider myself a traditional quilter I use traditional blocks all the time for my patterns. I thought about using one of my patterns, but then I realized that since this is a challenge, I should do something different.

I want to congratulate the winners of my last blog. The first name I pulled was Anita Skjellanger. I found out that she lives in Norway!

Since shipping is so expensive to send this overseas I offered her one

of my patterns instead and pulled another name. The second winner

is Peggy True. She won my Binding Minder and 4 fat eighths from 

Batiks.

I want everyone to see how my brain works when I am designing a quilt so there will be several blogs related to this challenge. Plus, I am working on other quilts at the same time (nothing unusual) so these posts will be intermittent through the month of April.

I have always liked the house block. There are many versions of the block, especially in EQ8. Some easy, some more complicated.  I ended up using this one that was in the block library. It is called The Old Homestead. Electric Quilt has a fantastic product. I use it to design all of my quilts. They now have a mini version if you do not want to purchase the full EQ8 version. 

With EQ8 (or any version) it is very simple to make changes to the blocks so I did some revisions and ended up with this square block. (I always seem to want to make revisions to blocks to make them more my own!)

I liked this version but of course I had to make one more change. Instead of a square block I wanted to make it a rectangle, so I changed it from a 9" block to a 8" x 6" block.

Now the challenge was to find which fabrics I wanted to work with from the ones that Island Batik sent me. I thought about doing bright summer colors, but this block makes me think of being in the woods, so I decided to go with more "woodsy" colors and ended up with these fabrics. They are part of the Autumn's Grace collection. They have wonderful textures, some look like wood.

The next challenge was to see if there was enough fabric (they were fat eighths) to make each block. I always tell my students that you should make a test block before tackling your good fabrics. That way you can make any corrections ahead of time.

I thought the best way to make this block is to paper piece it so I printed out the paper pieced sections from EQ8 and measured all of the sections to see what size pieces to cut out. I don't like a lot of waste in my fabric (especially since I only had a fat eighth). I wrote down all of the sizes on my foundation paper. These were the pre-cut sizes.

I then added 1" (the 1/2" seam plus an extra 1/2") to each measurement and wrote them down on a sheet of paper as to how many I needed to cut out. That way if they were the same width I could cut out a strip and cut multiple pieces from the strip. Tip: Always cut out the longest strips first, then use the remainder for cutting out smaller strips. It makes the best use of the fabric.

The next step was to cut out the pieces. The foundation sections were tinted so I knew which patches were for the dark fabric and which were for the light fabric. I didn't want to cut into the actual fabrics I chose, so I picked a different fat eighth.. I also labeled each piece with the corresponding section and measurement. I go lucky! I was able to get all of the pieces I needed from that fat eighth with just a tiny bit left over. Good thing I didn't do a bigger block.

 

The biggest challenge with paper piecing is sewing on triangles. It doesn't work well when you use a square or rectangle so the best thing to do is cut out a triangle that matches the one on the paper plus your 1" extra. I realized I hadn't done that so my rectangles I cut for the triangle patches had to be re-cut into oversized triangles.

I then made the four sections. I use a freezer paper method of paper piecing so I don't have to tear off paper when I am done and can reuse the paper. I will show how I to do this in the next blog. Some of the seams I had to trim to 1/8" (the thin section of light fabric). Here are the four sections trimmed after sewing.

At this point the freezer paper is still on the fabric so I will take it off. Then I can see if some of my final seams need to be pressed in a different direction to make it go together easier. (Another good reason to use freezer paper.)

Now you know how my brain works. Sometimes I don't really know how it works! Be sure to come back for the next installment.

Check out the Island Batik Facebook page for more great quilters' challenges.

As always: Do what you love and love what you do. Thanks for reading a feel free to share.

Clever Curves: Piecing Techniques - $19.99
from: Craftsy

ISLAND BATIK MINI LOVE CHALLENGE

This post may contain affiliate links. The products in this blog were given to me by Island Batik.

FIRST I WANT TO ANNOUNCE THE WINNER OF MY GALENTINE'S DRAWING. ALL I KNOW IS HER ACCOUNT NAME; JRQUILTS. SHE DID NOT LEAVE AN EMAIL TO REACH HER. PLEASE CONTACT ME WITH YOUR U.S. ADDRESS. IF I DO NOT HEAR FROM HER, I WILL DRAW ANOTHER NAME.

The second project this month as an Island Batik Ambassador is a challenge to create a mini quilt called "Mini Love". 

I started making minis in 1997 when I became frustrated because I couldn't always finish my larger quilts and they took too long (and were difficult) to quilt on my domestic sewing machine. 

When I started working in a quilt shop part time in 1995, I discovered "Miniature Quilts" magazine (which is no longer in print). I saw that they had a yearly contest called "Quilts from the Heart". I had created a miniature quilt from a large quilt that I had designed for my son's band moms' group, to raffle at the craft fair at his high school. I submitted that quilt to the contest. The band had had a dinner silent raffle and that quilt was in the raffle with the understanding that if it was accepted to the contest I would have to send it to the magazine. Well, not only was it accepted, it ended up on the cover of the magazine! (It is the red, white and blue quilt on the left bottom.) I wish I could say that I still have that quilt but the woman who won it at the dinner raffle wouldn't sell it back to me!

Having the quilt on the cover of the magazine spurred me on to making more minis and submitting them to the magazine's contest. I got more published and even won some prizes for my quilts. All of these quilts are under 24". Most have blocks that are 4" or smaller. This quilt is called Blueberry Pie.

This pineapple quilt I used my own hand dyed fabrics. I called this quilt Pineapple Sherbet.

 

This quilt won an innovative quilting prize. I couched a heavy thread using a zig zag stitch with a variegated thread. It's name is Pennsylvania Star Explosion.

This won a machine quilting award and ended up being on the cover of my St. Louis Stars book. It is called Stars Over St. Louis.

After having many quilts featured in the magazine, I was contacted by the editors to write a feature article about my miniatures. It appeared in the December/January 2004 issue.

I also wrote an article for Quilter's World magazine which was featured in the August 2004 issue.

I designed this quilt specifically for that article called Singing the Blues.

I then developed a lecture that I give for quilt guilds to show off all of the miniature quilts that I have made. It is a hands-on lecture. Since the quilts are small, they get passed around to the guild members to look at close up during the lecture. They really enjoy that.

One quilt, that I made from a group of fabrics I won in one of the contests, I entered into a local show and it won a first place ribbon in the miniature division. I think it won because I made the binding match each of the outside blocks in the quilt. This is a popular class that I teach. It is called Glorified Nine-Patch with a Twist. It is a 4" block and I carry templates on my website for them. Glorified Nine Patch. It is also used in a class that I teach on Craftsy called "Clever Curves" using the 6" size templates. This link will give you 33% off of the cost of any class on the Craftsy website (but it would be nice if you used it on my class)! Craftsy class special. It will apply the discount to your cart. Expiration Date: 03/31/2018
Details: Save 33% off the full retail price of any Craftsy class. Not valid for classes from our partner, The Great Courses. Limit one item per customer and cannot be combined with other coupons. Expires March 31, 2018 at 11:59PM Mountain Time. 

So now on to the Mini Love challenge. I went through a lot of different ideas to make for this challenge. I realized that I didn't have a whole lot of time to make a lot of little pieces so I decided to just make a small quilt (11" square) with half square triangles. The weather outside has been so dreary that I wanted to make something that reminded me of spring, so I originally picked out these fabrics. The one print had so many beautiful colors it reminded me of spring flowers.

I pieced the half-square triangles (1-1/2" finished), cut out the rest of the pieces and laid them out and pieced them.

After finishing the block, I thought it just wasn't bright enough and there was not enough contrast between the background and the triangle patches so I picked out another group of fabrics. (I will finish this one later.)

Here is what that block looks like.

I liked this one much better and the yellow made me think of a bright sunlight. Since I had made two different blocks, I experimented with pressing the half-square triangle seams differently. The first one I press the seams to the side and the second one I press them open. I felt that the one that I press open laid a lot flatter.

 

I added the outside triangles and borders and here is the finished quilt. I quilted in the ditch on my regular sewing machine and then put it on my longarm and quilted the rest of it. 

Let me give you a tip about binding miniature quilts. Because they are small, a double fold French binding can be a bit bulky. The best binding to use on miniatures is to cut strips that are 1-1/8" wide. You do not fold this binding in half. You sew only one edge to the quilt front, mitering the corners as you go. After attaching, you fold the outside edge of the binding towards the back of the quilt to touch the quilt top edge and then fold it again to the back and hand sew it down. It creates a perfect 1/4" binding. I used Aurifil thread for piecing and quilting and Hobbs Theramore batting.

I will be having another drawing with this blog. Leave a comment to be eligible to win some fat eighths from Island Batiks and my Cutting Corners template which I used to make most of the triangles in the quilt. The winner will be drawn on March 1. For US addresses only. Remember, I have no way of getting in touch with you if you don't leave me your email. So you either need to check back with my blog after March 1 or send me your email through the comment or using my contact form.

As always; Do what you love and love what you do. Thanks for reading and please share with your quilting friends.

You can follow other Island Batik Ambassador's blogs and see their projects.

Alison at Little Bunny Quilts
Amy at Sew Incredibly Crazy
Anita at Quilt in a not-Shell
Anna at Ark Angel Creations
Anne at Sweetgrass Designs
Barbara at Bejeweled Quilts
Bea at BeaQuilter
Carole at Carole Lyles Shaw
Connie at Freemotion by the River
Connie at Kauffman Designs
Dione at Clever Chameleon
Geraldine at Living Water Quilter
Jackie at If These Threads Could Talk
Janet at Whispers of Yore
Jeanette at Inchworm Fabrics
Jen at Patterns by Jen
Jennifer at Curlicue Creations
Jennifer at Dizzy Quilter
Jennifer at Inquiring Quilter
Jessica at Desert Bloom Quilting
Joan at Moosestash Quilting
Joyce at heARTs Creations
Karen at Sew Karen-ly Created
Karen at The Quilt Rambler
Kathleen at Kathleen McMusing
Laura at Slice of Pi Quilts
Leanne at Devoted Quilter
Mania at Mania for Quilts
Maryellen at Mary Mack Made Mine
Michelle at Creative Blonde
Myra at Busy Hands Quilts
Nancy at Masterpiece Quilting
Pamela at PamelaQuilts
Sally at Sally Manke
Sandra at MMM Quilts
Sarah at Sarah Goer Quilts
Sharon at Yellow Cat Quilt Designs
Sherry at Powered by Quilting  
Stephanie at Steph Jacobson
Suzy at Adventurous Applique and Quilting
Teri at Lizard Creek Quilts
Tina at Quilting Affection Designs