Design Wall Monday

I've been planning this quilt in my head for almost a year, after seeing some Red Cross quilts in a book of antiques and then seeing more of them at a quilt show.  Once I finally plugged in the iron and sewing machine it only took an hour to get half of the piecing done.

Sometimes an hour at the sewing machine is ridiculously hard to come by.

This post is linked to  Patchwork Times. 

Vintage Vignettes

I've got a ridiculously long list of embroidered quilts I want to make and that list keeps getting longer. If I make some of the little ones that'll make room on the list for more big projects, right?

Mom and I saw a shop sample of the Vintage Vignettes wall quilt and both fell in love with it. It's got everything -- cute redwork and pieced pinwheels and a prairie point border (although I can't guarantee that I won't get skittish and skip the prairie points!)

Compared to the blocks I spent last year stitching, these seven little squares shouldn't take long at all to get done.

Another Little Finish

I've mentioned how I feel about red and white quilts, right? 

This one was a quick little project to take my mind off of things. It measures about 10 1/2" square and uses the same snowball and nine patch combination as Full Blown Quilt Lust, except this time they're not set on point and there's a border of half snowball blocks.  

For more finishes, check out  Sew Much Ado, Finish it Up Friday, Can I get a Whoop Whoop?,  , and Freedom Fridays, Wonderful at Home, and Inspired Friday.

Little Bits of Red & White

Yesterday I plugged in my sewing machine and iron, set the kitchen timer for an hour, and pulled out some red and white fabric I'd cut before life got quite so interesting.

It took closer to an hour and a half to get this little top together, but I'm not complaining. I only expected to get some of the blocks pieced.

And just to make sure you realize how little these blocks are --

They're the same snowball and nine-patch blocks I used for the other itty-bitty quilts, this time in a straight setting, with half snowball blocks for the border.

This post is linked to Design Wall Monday at Patchwork Times.

Red and White!

More red and white quilts to drool over? Woohoo! SewCalGal is hosting a red and white quilt challenge and the first linky party is for quilts made prior to 2014.

I've got some of those!

This is Extra Scrappy Pinwheels. When I wrote the tutorial, I planned to keep this little quilt for myself, then I read a call for baby quilts over at I Dew Quilting and I sent it off to Diane -- and started cutting pieces to make another one for myself. The two quilts are almost twins, except for their borders.

I've made quite a few red and white baby quilts over the past few years. This is an earlier version of Benny.

And this is an earlier version of Colleena. 

 For the past year, I've been gathering red prints for a quilt. It won't be red and white, but once I get the top made, I'll know how much of the red I can use for other projects. And those will be red and white!  

I bought my first fabric of the year

I bought some fabric this week, but it was a planned purchase for a quilt that I can't make with what's already in my stash.  I've made a red quilt that used up yards and yards of red scraps, including the pieced back.  I've made a bunch of red and white baby quilts. 

There's not enough red left in my stash to make a quilt like Blueberry Moon's Keep Calm quilt. Mine will be different -- it'll say Keep Calm and Carry On. And the background will be pieced from 2 1/2" squares, because that's what I do....

I really can't tell you how badly I want to make that quilt!

Mom let me ransack her stash for  red fabric. She's going to cut 5" off of each of these for me, enough for 32 squares of each fabric. I think I'm going to need 900 total.

 

 

I've been to the fabric store and found nothing that would work, so when I saw the new Connecting Threads catalog with Rhapsody of Reds, I ordered half yard cuts of everything that looks like it'll fit. It looks like they've already sold out of my favorite print from the collection, but I'll happily take what I can get.

Weekly Stash Report

Fabric Used this Week: 5.75 yards
Fabric Used year to Date: 9.25 yards
Added this Week: 10 yards
Added Year to Date: 10 yards
Net Added for 2012: .75 yards


Yarn Used this Week: 0 yards
Yarn Used year to Date: 0 yards
Yarn Added this Week: 0 yards
Yarn Added Year to Date: 0 yards
Net Added for 2013: 0 yards

To see more weekly stash reports, click over to Patchwork Times.

red and white

This is the quilt I thought I added to the Red and White Quilt Show -- sorry I don't seem to have any pictures of it actually quilted.



The disappearing four patch was the first quilt that came to mind, the one I went looking for a picture of. It didn't hit me until the middle of the night several days later that I'd found and blogged about the wrong little red and white quilt.

Not that it makes any difference, but I'd love to know what was going on in my head that day. How do you look at one quilt and write accurately about it and still be convinced it's a completely different quilt?

There's an absolutely fantastic set of photos from Infinite Variety: Three Centuries of Red and White Quilts on Flickr. I would love to see those quilts in real life, but I'm sure I'm better able to appreciate them as quilts by looking one at a time on my computer screen over a span of days. (And that iPad app is one of the few things that makes me envy the quilters with more technology than I've got!)

Imagine what a quilter could do with a few yards of red and white yardage or some red and white sheets....

Red and White Quilt Show!

Okay, this is worth a second post for the day. Repro Quilt Lover is having an online red and white quilt show. Do you have a red and white quilt of your own to blog about? She's giving away the neatest set of red and white quilt fridge magnets to one of the participants, so if you have something red and white, you really should add it.

I love old two color quilts, enough that my birthday quilt for myself last year was a reproduction of one. Too bad "38" is blue and white, or I could enter it!



But Red Sparks definitely qualifies.



My red quilt probably has too much blue in it to count, and it definitely doesn't have that sharp, wonderful red/white contrast that I love so much.



How about this one? Does it count? It shares a lot of the same fabrics as that first quilt, but I don't think it's got that snappy white/red contrast either.

Red and white quilts make my heart go pitty pat. I was thinking of using a red sheet that's buried out in the sewing room to try out my drunkard's path die, but wasn't sure if I wanted a solid red/white quilt.

This may be making up my mind for me!