Hey, girl,

I can always tell the difference between you Echino quilts. And they are all to die for.*


So, yes, another Echino quilt. That, of course, I am madly in love with.



Every single print in this quilt is just perfect!

The way it folds ...


The way it drapes ...


Just perfect!


One tiny detail, though. Can you focus a little on the pink square with the car?


The right lower corner? See that? That's the side mirror from the car below. Could one guess how many times I thought that's a thread and tried to pick it up? It's ok, I can tell you: a loooot of times!



*of course you must know what I'm talking about.

I'm the Grinch

Well, I said it. I am so not in the mood for Christmas, or anything related. But I did sew. A lot. So here are some of this month's stuff.

The one that I couldn't get a decent photo of, and the one that started the pink madness in my house :)



The crosses came out very quickly, the 5" squares helped a lot. Also, like never before :)), I actually decided what to use before starting cutting, so every cross is made from 3 pieces [2 squares and one rectangle]. Pieceing was so easy!



Not sure I love it with the gray border so much, I think the next one will have no border at all. [next quilt with crosses]


Then the princess baby quilt, made at the same time with baby blue and baby smile.




I tried to get out of the pink obsession with some all-time-favorite Echino, but right after it was finished, along with some custom quilts, I kept thinking about the pink.

So I made the scrappy one.



So soft and thin [backed it with some no name thin and soft fabric], it's one of my favorites and the first one to leave.



But no, this was not enough :)). Again, I put all the larger scraps left with some gray, and made another pinkish one :)




Somewhere along the way I also made three sweet pillows but only made pictures of two of them. A heavily quilted wonky star,


and two of them with the sweetest mini charm pack ever :)


I wanted so much to see for myself Aneela's fabrics but funding really stopped me from getting anything larger. It was just perfect!



But, incredible as it may seem :)), I got over the pink phase. Oh, yeah! Well, kind of :))



Pink and green is different, right? :)))

How some quilts work

There are times when I know exactly what I want to do. Pretty much most of the times. But there are, of course, times, when I have no idea what so ever. It happens that I have a little time i should use and no idea at all, or just love a fabric so much I just don't know what to do with it.

When I received the heilroom stash, after a lot of staring, I decided to cut some 2" strips to play with. Those 'eyes' bothered me so much that I just left it like this and moved on.

But after the cross quilt and the baby princess, I couldn't stop thinking about these colours.

 So I took all the scraps out and started using every single tiny bit. I came up with 4 almost squares. Lined them up, added more scraps, and took the difficult decision: 1 quilt instead of 4 pillows.

With the new walking foot things went really well, no pulling, no stretching with only 7 basting pins. 

[I'm really sorry for the weird colours, me and the camera we're not 100% back together :)]

I hope it's safe to say I'm done with pink for a while. I finished almost all my pink fabrics so I should be safe :). However, crazy scrappy piecing gave me more ideas so there's another one on the way :). Not pink, I swear :)

Done

The tree small quilts. Really really simple, 5" squares, only if I had the fabric in charm packs :)



Plus, the heilroom quilt and the Echino one got themselves new names. Not bad at all for the third try with free motion, I might say.

[read: I love how it turned out! :)]

I think I might have found that mojo I lost some time ago :)), 'cause I also made a huge pillow and a really really scrappy quilt, but I still need to take decent pictures.

P.S. Any ideas about writing names other than applique, embrodery or free motion would be very much appreciated.

The mom and the accuquilt

When I first started buying designer's quilting cotton I thought they were soooo expensive. Ok, I still do, but at least I got over the shock phase :). So when I made the supermom quilt, although I really loved it and felt it was my quilt, I decided to list it in my shop because it seemed just too expensive for me.

50 + quilts later, this one not only did not sell [it had the longest life in my shop and I'm sure the crappy pics helped a lot :))))] but matched my 3 sisters pillows perfectly. So, you know what, I'm sure I deserve it :)

Plus, the backing is just perfect for a more quiet look.

On the other hand, I just received the Go!Baby from Accuquilt and started playing with it. Oh.my.God! Cutting is so incredibly simple, it just makes the fabric waste totally worthy. I will tell you more about it and probably forget a link to my romanian blog post when the giveaway will happen there ;), but just needed to say it is awesome. And I didn't expect it to be that awesome :)

So I cut it

I'm not extremly proud of myself for the result, but I am proud I stopped staring. I know, I know, it's part of the process. Still....

The good part is that these fabrics look incredible in pictures. And that I finally managed to take nice closeups with my DSLR.

Another great part is that my too boyish boy decided to actually look at something I made and got a nice pic. Yeah, he's got long hair, but he shows no interest what so ever for anything I make. I tried closes, bags, monsters, stuffed creepy stuff... nothing. So a pic with him and a quilt became priceless here.

The not so good part is that I did not figure out how to take nice pics with the whole quilt and  I didn't do anything original. I managed to cut it and it turned out ok but... that's pretty much it.

And I couldn't get myself to quilt it zig-zag. It has 100 x 140 cm [~ 40" x 55"] and well... no thank you :).

But I did take out some Ikea angels that is only available in winter, hoping they'll make it this year too. Keep your fingers crossed or I'll be very very sorry for using it :))

Now if only I could find the blue embroidery thread that was used, sometime last week, in making some monters traps...

Little prince

[I'm sorry I wasn't around lately, you know... life happens while you're busy... yada yada :) ]

Two days ago I received a custom order. A very nice lady asked for a quilt with an elephant theme, saying she liked these two quilts I made in the past.

The first day I moved half of the furniture in our new house.
The second day I moved the second half :) and cleaned.
This morning, at 4 am (cough! I use to wake up at 9 or 10), I started.

Elizabeth Hartman + Melody Miller + Denyse Schmidt + Pink Chalk Fabrics + about 3 minutes to take a pic = The little prince.

I am in love with this quilt and I feel so sorry I didn't get a chance to make better pictures. And the backing flannel is just perfect, I only wish I would find it again to make it a permanent stash.

I did not use the steps from Elizabeth because I had no fusible interface so I just pinned really well the elephant and went slow. Twice. I also made two stiches before starteing the edges, two vertical ones following the patchwork lines, just to keep it more secured. It worked great.

I got a chance to use some free motion quilting, but not too much, because I don't feel to confident in my FM skills yet.

The other circles are a sort of buttonhole, some regular programm from my Brother, I just immagined that if a quilt can be tied, it should be enough to have just a few spots where all the layers are caught toghether.

Oh, it also has a floppy ear with a hidden letter :)

And the shot cottons

Did I say they are really really thin? I did.

And the shift a lot. And pull. And are a pain to quilt.

Are they worthy? Sorry, not for me.

I bought about 5 colours. Yes, there's an awsome purple ( I like purple) and a great orange, but the rest... Let's just say I wouldn't buy them anymore. Not even the ones I liked.

I remember I once saw a quilt made by Rita at RPQ, with small squares, very colourful and with lots of purple shot cottons. This women in terrific! I had the most horrible time working with these fabrics and I'm sure my squares weren't as small as hers.

And don't get me started on the grey ones. Have you ever seen a homeless with incredibly dirty clothes? The ones that used to be black in anotherlife? That's my gray shot cotton.

Now, I'm sure that there are people that love these colors. And textures. Actually I read a lot of great things about them before purchasing. We are all different and it's perfectly fine. But for my few readers that have similar tastes... I won't do it again :) Ah, maybe for a really thin hot summer blouse, 10 years from now... :)

And what an amazing choice for the back! The stripes I said I won't use. Even the pictures are all wrong.

The fabrics reallt go very well toghether. And the quilt is really nice, I like it a lot.

But the amount of work? So not worthy :(

What exactly was I thinking?

I received a bunch of shot cottons. First thought was:

Wow, these are really thin.

I should never use these in a quilt. Maybe for backing with large pieces but small pieces? Never!

Than I thought about starting a quilt.

I should really go with a lot of white, spring is coming, I love white, it will surely go very well.

I found quite a few fabrics on sale and bought 1-2 yards of each, thinking about backing. When they arrived...

Oh my, these stripes don't go too easy on backing when you make straight line quilting. I must keep them for other projects.

Two days later I was starting a quilt.

Oh, look how many not so white fabrics I have in my stash. I should really use them.

So not! Of course, I hated it and started no.2.

Oh, these orange red, purple and yellow solids look so great, I should make a quilt. Of course the shot cottons are perfect too.

So not too! Small squares? I must have been drunk. I don't really drink though...

Oh, these stripes are a perfect mach for the back of this quilt.

Excuse me?

Ok, so here's the not so white quilt. With larger pieces than I usualy do, wanted to try something else and I think I like it.

Backed with an incredible Amy Butler flannel, I wish I had discovered it earlier. I so need another 2, maybe 3, ok make it 10 yards of this :D

6 months

[Post full of pictures of old quilts. Just so you know :)]

Checking my card the other days, I discovered that today me and my sewing machine celebrate half an year togheter :). I sewed a lot before, I even had a couple of shy attempts to quilt (on my mom's industrial machines that I hate), but I can say I feel I became a quilter only when I bought Alice. Yeah, I'm lame, I have a name for her.

Anyway, I started looking though my pics and realised that I made a looot of quilts and I still love each and every one.

I started with pastel quilts, only because I had virtualy no stash. Well, I have a room full of fabrics, but none for quilting. And the pastels felt the safest to start with.

I had quite a few very simple quilts with lots of white.

Than more white, but I discovered the heavyer quilting

As you can see, I loove white in quilts but I am glad I tried something else too.

Even if sometimes I just make the same thing in different colours

I really enjoyed making bright red, orange and blue quilts, even though I would never ever wear such colours. Than again, I don't have to wear them, right?

And also strong couloured quilts

Somehow I always come back to white :))

And I am glad I tried the pillows too. But even happier I didn't become addicted or something :)))

But the quilts I love most are the ones I made that doesn't resemble with anything else I've seen.

And you know what? Looking at all these pictures after quite some time beeing busy with the moving and related stuff, I realised not onlyI love quilting but I also miss it a lot. So yeah, I'll be back. Terminator style :)))