Sewing with Summerfest

A couple of weeks ago, I had the chance to help April Rosenthal with some of her Quilt Market Prep.  Her newest line, Summerfest (Moda), had it’s debut at Fall Market last weekend.

 

From the moment I first saw it, I was in love.  It’s bright, fun and has a great mix of pretty florals and geometric prints. 







  This fun plus quilt is one of her new patterns - called "Flirty" (coming soon!) and was a quick one to put together.  I’ve had a peek at her other upcoming patterns as well, and there’s some really great ones. 
 


You can watch for April's new patterns here in her shop, and Summerfest will be in stores next April.  Doesn’t that seem SO far away?  That’s just too long to wait!

A Mini Finish

My mini quilt wall is growing!  Last week I added two new ones – one called "Petunia" that I will release next week as a new pattern, and this one made with the new Gooseberry Fabric (by Vanessa Goertzen for Moda).  Back in September The Fat Quarter Shop did an English Paper Piecing (EPP) Sew Along on Instagram and I joined in.  You can read more about the sew along here.



Most of the hand sewing (making the diamonds and stitching them together) was done while watching tv/movies in the evenings.  I’m the kind of girl that always has to have a project to work on while I watch tv.  I’d say for me, the trickiest bit of this mini was hand appliqueing the star to the background.  But once I figured it out, it went pretty quickly!



You can still buy the EPP Sew Along Kit here (theirs uses the Meadowbloom fabric) or you can just purchase the 2” 6 Point Star paper pieces here and use fun scraps from your stash!

Sue Daley has helpful youtube tutorials about how to sew the diamonds together here.  It’s really helpful to watch these if you’re a beginner (or semi-beginner like me) because she shows how to glue baste the fabric to the paper pieces and how the pieces fit together.

Chatterbox WIP

So I have a crazy goal.  I want to get all of my current WIP (Works In Progress) done by the end of the year.  That’s a whopping 24 quilts.  Sounds a leeetle bit crazy, right?  Well, to be honest, most of the quilts are done and just waiting to be quilted.  So it’s not as impossible as it may sound. 



This quilt is one of the few that are still in the construction phase.  Aaaand it’s a recent addition to my WIP list.  The pattern is called Chatterbox (from Vanessa Goertzen / Lella Boutique) and it was just begging to be made into a Christmas quilt!  I already had a jelly roll of Holly’s Tree Farm (Moda) which was perfect.



So as of today, I have all but two blocks done.  They’re pressed and stacked and ready to be arranged into a quilt top.  While I’ve sewed these over the past two days, I’ve been catching up on a new series on PBS called Home Fires.  Have you seen it?  I’ve watched the first two episodes and I love it so far! 



So off I go to whip up those last two quilt blocks!  You can find the Chatterbox pattern here.  Oh, and Vanessa is doing a fun giveaway – it’s not too late to enter and you can read all about it here on her blog. 

A Day at Home

Hi friends!  Sorry I’ve been MIA for a bit.  I’ve been knee-deep in several projects, one of which I’m sharing with you today!  Last week was shop hop time for our local quilt shop and I was asked to make a project that uses a 9” block.  Now that the shop hop is over, I can share my project with you!



The theme for the shop hop was “A Day at Home” so I created these little houses – they’re designed to use precuts (either layer cake squares or jelly roll strips). 

For the display quilt I used the Farmhouse line by Fig Tree Quilts, which I am absolutely in.love.with. 

The finished quilt measures about 54” x 66” and I used the black and white dots from the line as the binding.  This quilt has to hang as a display in the shop for awhile, but I cannot wait to get it back - I have the perfect spot for it!