January Monthly Mini

I have a small collection of repro fabrics that belonged to Carolyn Vallelunga, a talented artist from our guild. Carolyn made beautiful, unique "things" such as stuffed birds, one of a kind needle cases, and pins. You may have seen some of these things in past posts, as I have a nice little collection of them. Carolyn passed away from breast cancer four years ago.

I've been hoarding these bits of fabric all this time, with the intent of making a small quilt in her honor. I finally got around to at least making a mini, and it is my offering for January.

(I decided I'd try to get some better pictures, as the first one I posted was truly horrible!) 

These show much better detail, so you can get an idea of the array of wonderful fabrics I pulled from.  Photographing in natural light - outdoors - was key.

My inspiration came from Kathleen Tracey's book, Small and Scrappy.

Kathleen's quilt looks neat and crisp. Mine is pretty blendy. But that's ok. I love it.

The back is a soft brushed cotton. Its half machine and half hand quilted, keeping overall softness to the quilt. Its lovely to hold and handle, perfect for a little girl to wrap around her dolly.

Too bad I don't know any little girls who play with dollies. Myy little quilt will live tucked into my doll cradle for now.

Please visit Wendy's blog, The Constant Quilter, to see the other mini-quilts for this month!

love,
Sandy

Berzirkistan

 

I thought I was finished with this a couple months ago, but later I decided the shape wasn't right. Too long. Or, not wide enough, depending on your point of view. So a couple days ago I went to work and added a vertical row down the left side. I think its good now.

random scraps, tiny to large

The basket contains what's left over of some of the scraps I was working from. Totally disorganized catch-all, so a real pain to pick through and try to find "just the right scrap". Most of the time I settled for whatever fit. I have other smaller containers with labels such as "triangles" also totally random, or "random tiny bits" which is insane, I know. But if you look closely  at the quilt, you'll see lots of those bits were used, in fact a few entire blocks  consist of them. Another box is labelled "playtime scraps" which are where I got the tiny (and not so tiny) centers for some of the blocks.

I usually quilt my own quilts using a walking foot, but I'd really like an all-over fairly small stipple on this, which is definitely not in my skill set. On the other hand, I really hate having to spend the $$ on a quilt I consider kinda junky. Anyway, I'll look into it, and hopefully I can get a decent deal somewhere.

small-ish scraps, halfway organizzed

I want to continue trying to work through all these scraps, but I don't think I want to make another random scrap quilt like Berserkistan. I've been thinking of other ideas, one of them being scrappy pineapple blocks.  My friend Pam gave me a marked paper foundation for paper piecing a six inch block, which I might have to give a try. Paper piecing kinda drives me nuts, though. Meantime, I got curious about the pineapple trim ruler. That sounded much more my style. I just so happened I find one a couple weekends ago at Family Threads in San Juan Bautista, where I was attending a quilt retreat. They had a good deal on it, too - $20 plus a 15% discount for being a "retreater".

It took a couple of minutes to figure it out, but I eventually got in the swing of it and started a few blocks.

But wait a minute. These aren't shaping up to look  like pineapple blocks.

This is a pineapple block.














Mine look more like Square in a Square blocks. Hmm. I thought I was following the instructions, but obviously I went wrong somewhere.

Oh well...  (to be continued)


love,
Sandy