Design Wall Monday

The borders on the the quilt ready to be layered. I tried so hard not to have the same two fabrics side by side but in sewing the blocks together I turned a couple around and there are 2 pairs side by side. One is obvious the second pair I noticed when I was taking the picture but is not so easy to spot in the photo because it is a different section of the same stripe. click how to 30 degree angle What's on your design wall? Have a look see at  Judy's  PatchworkTimes. --Ann--

Summer Sailboats

sold on etsy

gift to great nephew

Two quilts I no longer have but sailboats always speak to me of summer. The top quilt I used the whole fat quarter for the sailboat blocks the second I cut the sailboat to pattern size Buggy Barn for the ocean wave borders. Both are free motion quilted. Wishing for a cooling breeze. --Ann--

Y seam tutorial spool block

 Mitered corners, Y seam, spool block          I just love spool blocks

 I cut 2 inch wide strips for this spool and a 2 inch center square. Using leftovers from previous project.  Use the Companion Angle (CA) designed by Darlene Zimmerman to cut the spool ends and background  pieces.

Cutting both strips at once here







For a 2 inch center square line up the strip with the top dotted line on the CA and cut, flip over and cut another.

 The five pieces of the block   the short edge of the spool ends and background pieces are a tiny bit shorter than the center square but it works better that way.

 Mark a 1/4 inch seam for each corner. I made a template from template plastic with a 1/4 inch square cut out. other angles don't mean anything for this block                    Center the square on the background fabric

 and sew from dot to  dot
1/4 inch mark to 1/4 inch mark  sewing second piece to the center square

 sew background, sew spool fabric, sew background then spool fabric  1,2,3,4      
sewing the last piece to the center square

 It looks like a spool sorta but it will background fabrics across from each other and spool ends across from each other so far so good even though they are getting in each other space right now.  ha ha

 Fold square in half diagonally from the corner of the square, match edges carefully. Very important to match edges and fold in half and finger crease.

 Sew from stitching line 1/4 inch seam

 first seam so good so far whew............ wipe brow and on to the next.

 Fold center square exactly in half again match up diagonal edges and sew from the seam to the edge.  We are on a roll here repeat with the last 2 corners you will be an expert by the 4th corner.

Drum roll please                        there should be an X in the center of the spool

 back side pretty messy but its the back side

 Press 
 I like to press the background over the spool fabric so the spool stands out a little and the square flat.

front side
trim all the dog ears and sew a bunch more.

Happy sewing spools,
Ann

Blogger's Quilt Festival Spring 2012

 Pink and green, pink and yellow two of my favorite color combinations.   A couple moves ago I was part of a small group of quilters; we met every week for conversation, coffee and stitching. We worked on our own projects but we also did some round robin quilts and sometimes chose a pattern and we each made our own inturpertaion of that quilt. This quilt is from Kim Diehl's book Simple Blessings we each made our own quilt with our choice of fabrics. Kim's directions use half square triangles for the spools. I used the Y seam because it isn't that difficult come back again for a tutorial next week.  There are 100 spools I used more than 50 fabrics, there are pairs of some spools but not all.  When I am old and feeble and curled up in this quilt I will play brain games and try to match all the spools.  I puzzled for a long time over how to machine quilt this and a couple years ago I took a machine quilting class and asked the instructor, a professional quilter, she said I really should hand quilt it in each of the spools. So I am hand quilting. Last winter I hand quilted every Tuesday night during NCIS and White Collar but some nights there was just too much action to get much quilting done,  it is amazing how much I can do during a commercial break. I only have 18 spools left to do but then I wonder if I should quilt the background fabric and I have all those geese to stitch inside. I will probably do a chain design or a rope in the borders.
Linking up to  http://amyscreativeside.com/2012/05/18/bloggers-quilt-festival-spring-2012/
Happy Quilting,  Ann