Running in Circles with Gardenvale

Curved piecing has been a bit of an obsession for me lately. Blame it on finding a little template for little Drunkard’s Path blocks while I was at Sew Expo. I also just happened to have a charm pack of Gardenvale from Moda at last Quilt Market. I figured they should meet.

I sewed all the pieces together, in totally random fashion, as leaders and enders, so it hardly felt like I’d done any actual sewing at all. Then all the sudden the blocks were all sewn together. I gave them all a quick press and squared them up a tad smaller than the template (a scant 3-7/8″), then arranged and re-arranged some more until I got something I was okay with.

We just got the collection in at the shop, which was the perfect impetus to actually finish it up (so we could use it as a display). I  did a little unevenly spaced straight line quilting on the front.

Then made a super simple envelope pillow back and voila a new pillow for the sofa! I love it even more than I thought I would.

I tend to stay within the neutral palette for quilts, home decor and clothing, rarely feel confident enough to start prints.  I love the scrappy look, but dear god, it scares me to death to mix fabrics (I know, it’s weird). That’s what makes Gardenvale a favorite for me. It doesn’t look like a collection. It’s crazy mixed-up colors and prints and scale and I would never in a million years feel like I could mix three different circles with two different florals and stripes.  But Jen Kingwell did and it’s gorgeous.

If you’re familiar with her patterns, you know this is totally her style and I find it entrancing (though, the quilts can slightly overwhelm me if I stare too long). There’s a skill to this mixing and matching that I will never have. And that’s okay, she’s doing it for me now.

Check out #gardenvale and #gardenvalefabric on IG for lots of other projects that people are making, especially the PJ pants by @tinkerfrog. They might just be the  favorite. Next to my pillow, of course.

Sewing for LUKE

This is what has been filling my off-hours lately. I have 400 log cabin blocks to make: 200 of one variation, 200 of the other. I started with all those red squares and have been adding row after row of thin white, then thick black (per LUKE‘s instruction).  It’s awfully fun to see them come together.

20150418-092836-34116448.jpgIt can be a little fidgety though sometimes. LUKE uses discarded garments for the pieces, so there’s always a wide variety of fabrics types and sometimes they don’t play well together. I’ve already melted through a couple of polyester pieces. Some ravel a lot. Others stretch badly. So this requires pressing, measuring and trimming after each row. My current living space (less than 600 sq. ft) isn’t super conducive for this set-up, but it is what it is.

20150418-092836-34116894.jpgI’ve got one more row to do on this first batch of 200. They are stacking up quite nicely if I do say so myself. I’ve got a little Fabric Depot work and some  PMQG chores, but then I’ll get back to these later this weekend and maybe by Monday I can start the next 200.

20150418-092836-34116146.jpgYou can follow along with this series of log cabin quilts that LUKE is having made by searching the hashtags #sewingforLUKE and #LCoDJ on Instagram or read about it here.

Thank Goodness for Scrap Sixteenths

What did you spend your long Thanksgiving weekend doing? I spent the bulk of three days cutting down my scraps in to useable and saleable pieces: fat sixteenths. I really love this size for its ability to be used for crafts or patchwork or just little accents on projects and have been wanting to make my scrap stash a little more useful.

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With the recent need to move into a new place, though, it means I need to sell them more than keep them. Suddenly I have deposits to pay, a refrigerator to stock and furniture to buy and on the same old paycheck I’ve been getting. What’s a girl with a ridiculous amount of fabric supposed to do? Sell it, of course!

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There are a dozen or so up on the Etsy site now, with plenty more to come, along with coffee cozy kits that are a little slower to get up (I ran out of parts for the covered button–oops!).

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The little cuties are 9- by 11-inches and are only $3 each. Check ’em out and spread the word, if you wouldn’t mind.

xo, t!