Love & Stitches quilt along

 I saw this quilt along advertised on Instagram, and loved the quilt!  It has a modern flair to it and I love the bright, happy colors. 

My friend Nedra helped me choose the fabrics from my Cotton and Steel collection.  I've been dying for a quilt pattern to use my pretty fabrics.  The hearts are really big on the pattern, and there is curved sewing around the hearts.  I've never done curved quilting, but I sure have in garment construction.

The first week is choosing fabrics, and the second week will be cutting out the pattern pieces.

Follow @megancollins_a if you're interested in quilting along.

There is a giveaway every week :)

An update on my total hip replacement surgery, it went really well!  I barely feel any pain, such a contrast to before surgery.  I have my two week checkup with the surgeon on Thursday and will begin taking Ibrance again, the chemotherapy pill.  I'm really looking forward to walking and skipping and exercising and dancing again :)

Awesome Ocean finished!

 I worked really hard on this quilt, knowing that there would be times that I had to put it away, and let life take over.  After all, we can't quilt 24/7, right?  Well, maybe we can!

I quilted the quilt very densely, using a vertical line with my walking foot.  The lines were free motion and I would purposely go into the previous line a little bit to give the quilting a "movement" look.

My favorite sections are the pinks and oranges, 

and the teals and greens.

You can see a little bit of the teal minky on the back.

Even with all the dense quilting, the minky still feels really soft.

I made a label with an extra block that I had.

I know that Lucy will love this quilt!!!

I had my hip surgery and am not feeling as much pain as I was before, which is great!  I'll be using a walker for a couple of weeks and can twist my body or bend down.  I'm at the mercy of my caretakers, lol! My husband is doing an excellent job of taking care of me, and so are my kids :)

Sewcialites quilt along

Who else is sewing along with the Sewcialites quilt along, sponsored by the Fat Quarter Shop?

They will release a block every Friday until June 25.  There are 18 designers, each of them have created two blocks.  This is my color page, not sure what color I'll make the border half square triangles yet.

 

These are the Bonnie and Camille fabrics I've selected.  Most of these are from older fabric lines, I don't think I've ever made a quilt with just their fabrics before!  

Kimberly Jolly will show us how to create the block on her You Tube video every Friday morning.  I don't ever watch it live, I just watch it when I can.  I learned a few extra tips about pressing your blocks when I watched her tutorial this time.

When I trim my half square triangles, I find it quicker and easier to just trim them with scissors.

I proceeded to match up each half square triangle to their matching square and realized that they didn't match in size.  I don't always trim my blocks but I did this time!

I have a lot of Omnigrid rulers that I bought at JoAnn's with a coupon but am slowly buying some creative grid rulers which I like so much better!

Now they match perfectly!

My points are pretty good if I don't say so myself :)

When I make my quarter square triangles, I love these half inch rulers.  I use my Frixion pen and trace a line on each side of the ruler which I sew using a chain stitch. The Frixion ink disapears when you iron it.

Speaking of irons, this Reliable iron is my absolute favorite!  It's a little hard on the pocket book but well worth the investment.

I keep my Alpha Bitties in this cute metal tin.

I have six sets of the Alpha Bitties and there's still room for more.

Here's my 9 1/2" finished block, it's called Harmony and is designed by Lissa Alexander.

I think it will be fun making a block every week and seeing everyone's designs.  It will be like a virtual quilting bee.

Inatagram Farm Girl Vintage retreat quilt

I went to the most incredibly fun quilt retreat in the summer of 2016

and made some forever friends.

It was a group of Instagram friends, and we were taught by Lori Holt.

This is the quilt that Lori designed for our retreat, 

and I'm thrilled to say that I machine quilted it!

Yay, another quilt out of my closet and into another closet, lol!

Everyone gave gifts at the retreat, and Beth had made these and had them embroidered with everyone's Instagram name.

I used mine as my quilt label on the back.

As you can see, I backed the quilt with a small red gingham.

 

I think I have about six more quilts waiting to be quilted.

On a personal note, I'm having a total hip replacement next Monday, September 28.  It is so needed!!!

I may not be able to post for a few weeks, unless I'm able to get more projects completed this week.

Have a great week and thanks for following :)

Awesome Ocean

 I finished my Awesome Ocean quilt top, yay!

These are the cute little clown fish. I like the rick rack one :)

These are the little angel fish.

I like the subtlety of the white bubbles on the Kona oyster.

My friend made this quilt and she said that she logged 

more than a 100 hours!!!

As I was sewing the fish and the rows together, my pants were constantly covered in little threads 

because of all the pieces in each block.

Ta-da!

I was worried that the colors wouldn't blend and look hombre with each other, but I think they do.

I had a fat eighth bundle of Elizabeth Hartman's "Reef" fabric which was about 8 pieces 

that I got in a Sew Sampler box from the Fat Quarter Shop online.

Elizabeth Hartman's patterns are amazing, she tells you exactly how to place each block so that the colors will mesh.

I changed a few of the blocks because I thought they looked better.

Not the blocks themselves, but the colors.

I wanted to get a beautiful, soft minky for the back.

I kept looking at the blues, but there isn't a huge range of colors.

I decided on teal, hope it won't be too dark.

I'm going to machine quilt it myself, with a vertical seaweed looking design that I will figure out how to do!

I hope you enjoyed my "Awesome Ocean" journey.

Which block is your favorite?

Have you seen Elizabeth Hartman's new dinosaur pattern?

It's so cute!!!!

Moda Be My Neighbor

 I finished machine quilting and binding my quilt, yay!!!

It's called "Be My Neighbor" and is a free pattern by Moda from 2016.

This quilt has a great story!

I have a group of Instagram friends, there are 8 of us.

They live in Tasmania, Wyoming, Oklahoma, Utah, and Idaho.

We used to make each other gifts for Christmas and birthdays.

After a couple of years, that got to be too much to handle.

Lynette found this pattern with 16 blocks and thought it would be a great idea to make the blocks for gifts for our birthdays.

Each name was drawn and randomly assigned two blocks.

Mine were the sailboat at the bottom and the house with the bird and mailbox at the top.

When it was Cathy's birthday in Tasmania, everyone made her their two blocks and she was able to make a quilt.

We felt like we were neighbors even though we were miles apart.

The other cool thing was that we had to use Fig Tree fabric and the same background fabric.

That way, all the blocks would match.

It's really such a pretty quilt, I'm in love with it!

I posted about my quilt in 2018, here.

I'm thrilled with my machine quilting!

I used a meandering feather, 

although I'm not sure that it looks like a feather.

Either way, I'm thrilled with the outcome.

The quilting is very dense and there aren't any ripples.

I used a lot of thread!

Another thing that makes this quilt so special to me, is the back.

I had an Alexander Henry piece that was large enough to use.

Don't the people looks like they're having a great time visiting, 

just like neighbors do?

I love how colorful it is too.

It looks much more colorful in person :)

The label is from a "Sweetwater" label group that I joined,

 it's called tagged and comes at the end of every month.

Kimberly Jolly mentioned it on one of her YouTube videos.

It's always  different and my name's always printed on it.

I added some Fig Tree fabric to frame the label and sewed it on.

I think I might have to change the date to 2018-2020,

I'll do some further investigation.

Every quilt has a story, this one is about friendship.

That's my story and I'm sticking to it!

Thanks for following along :)

Awesome Ocean, Tony the Turtle

 This week, I finished all of my sea turtles.  All eight of them are named Tony!  I thought it would take forever, with his patchwork shell but I finished each one in about 30 minutes.  That doesn't include cutting though.

Again, I love choosing the colors and the prints :)

I still haven't gotten around to building a design wall, so I haven't laid all my sea creatures out in the order that they go in the quilt.

I only have two more fish to sew (eight of each color scheme), and then I'll start putting my little animal blocks together.  

I'm working on a secret project for the Fat Quarter Shop which I will post about next week.  It's a free pattern that they will be offering, so stay tuned!