Sew Some Love Houses

Today I have two brand new things to share: this quilt, and a new link up from Kat & Cat Quilts. The link up is called "Sew Some Love" and is for sharing any project we are sewing for charity. I'm excited to be part of the first link party and to see what other crafty folks are creating to give away.

Over the holidays, my niece Lauren asked me if I would donate a quilt to a fund raiser that her sorority is having in March 2017. All the proceeds will benefit CASA (Court Appointed Special Advocates for Children), which provides legal advocacy for abused children near Walla Walla, WA. 

I've been eyeing the Hillside Houses pattern on Pretty Little Quilts and thought it would make a nice donation to a charity called CASA. Using only fabric that I already had in my stash, I pieced this quilt in blues, greens, and browns, with two bright red houses. All the roofs are solid gray, and the colors get lighter toward the top of the hill, as if the sun is rising on a bright, new day.

After Kat announced the new link up, I decided to name this quilt Sew Some Love Houses. Here are a few photos of it draped around our house, which is currently a boat in the swamps of Louisiana.

For the backing, I used a piece of basketball fabric that was *almost* but *not quite* big enough. Not enough basketballs? Fatten it up with butterflies, I always say. The basketball fabric is a really nice quality Robert Kaufman print that has been languishing in my stash for quite a while. Lauren's college is buried under snow right now, and I figured anyplace that wintry is probably full of basketball fans.

Here are a few of my favorite houses/blocks. Red bricks with curvy shingled roof.

Wood grain fabric and wood grain quilting.

Fun sky fabric. Partly cloudy with a chance of basketballs.

Faux Greek key roof pattern.

I made flanged binding out of a medium gray with a red inner stripe. I thought it kind of tied back to the two red houses in the middle. It's also a fancy-looking but very forgiving, all-machine-sewn binding technique.

This quilt wasn't my favorite thing to make, I must admit. I liked each combination of dark and light shade for individual houses, but wasn't thrilled with the overall look. It is so much bigger than most of my quilts (60"x75") that I couldn't step far enough back to see the overall effect, and I've been working on it a lot at night when the lighting was lousy. But things started to turn around when I decided to use the basketballs on the back and then started the quilting. It was slow going, but the addition of all that texture made me happy! And when Kat announced her link up, it reminded me that charity quilting is all about sharing the love.

I'll wash Sew Some Love Houses next week when we have access to more fresh water. The crinkling should be epic on this one after a spin through the washer and dryer. Then it will wing its way to Walla Walla, where hopefully someone will buy it in support of CASA's good works.

I'm also linking up to Free Motion Mavericks this week, since this was my biggest FMQ project to date, and with Can I Get a Whoop Whoop? because I'm happy it's finished!

More triangles and incoming stash

t

I made a few more of the Y-seam pieced triangles. These are a bit bigger, about 7" tall, and were cut from 2.75" strips. Strips about a yard long yield two triangles.

This is the original fabric, a very traditional style border. There are really only three distinct "stripes": the cream with brown, the lighter blue with diamonds, and the darker blue with floral. There's a similarity to the resulting triangles that I think would be a bit bland if I cut any more of them. The previous set of triangles from the brightly colored fabric were more interesting to me. I think this technique will work best with lots of colors and a variety of stripe widths.

In other quilty news, we had our mail forwarded last week and received a big box full of small, squishy, happy packages. It's been over a month since our last delivery and I guess I must have been subconsciously ordered myself lots of Christmas gifts. I also received a pinwheel quilt pattern from Val's Quilting Studio; thanks, Val!

A fat quarter bundle of gorgeous emerald greens, plus some nice tonal yardage. That pale yellow butterfly fabric will make a good background. And of course, bright stripes are always useful.

A big batch of neutral fabrics: pale gray flowers/snowflakes/thingies, darker gray giraffe spots, black and white stripes and spots, plus two 6-yard pieces of marbled black and navy blue. Someone was having a sale right after the holidays, if I remember correctly.

I also picked up a couple of nice panel fabrics. 

Italian food theme. Yum!

Lurid, crazy-eyed kitties.

Celestial faces by Dan Miller. I love his designs.

A FQ bundle of Laurel Burch fishes and swirls in her signature bright colors. This is from the older "Ocean Songs" line so I only paid $6.50 for ten FQs. Sa-weet!

A nice cream and yellow rooster background, bigger bright chickens, and backyard songbirds. I've sort of been on a chicken fabric kick lately and have enough for a good sized quilt now. Wild bird prints always appeal to me, too, the more realistic the better. Chickens can be funky, though.

And finally, the gal on eBay who makes men's ties out of science fabric had another big batch of scraps for sale, so I scooped them up. The project I started with the last batch is still in progress and will be one of the next things I work on. 

That's after I finish my Hillside Houses lap quilt. I'm in the middle of the FMQ, and here's a single house sneak preview. The lighter fabric is printed with a wood grain, so I stitched a wood grain in the darker shadowed side of this house. There are 18 houses, each with two different fabrics for the house sides plus a gray roof. I decided to do different FMQ designs in each of those 54 sections, but ran out of ideas and motivation at around a dozen. Eh, that's plenty.

Scrappy play

I've been working on a couple of scrappy projects lately. One is the Hillside Houses Quilt Along from Pretty Little Quilts. Except, you know, it ended in 2015 so I'm a little late to the game and not really quilting "along." More like "quilting after." I've sewn up the entire top and it's ginormous for me: 60"x75". That makes it really hard to even take a photo since it's windy and cold outside and there's no place inside where I can spread it out and also get far enough away to take a pic. So. No further documentation on that for now. Stay tuned!

I made three blocks for the January/February block drive for Covered in Love. These are faded quarter log cabins. Kat asked for cool colors, and the blocks use 3.5" scraps. I have tons and tons of cool scraps, but I usually cut mine to 2.5" and 1.5" strips, so I was only able to squeak out three blocks. I hope the green one is cool enough...my lightest pieces for the cabin center are fairly yellow.

Another idea that's been percolating in my head is a triangle quilt made from striped fabric. I've seen quite a few interesting square HST blocks made with stripes, but not too many 60 degree triangles, probably because it requires sewing the dreaded Y-seams. There's so much online fear and loathing of Y-seams that I haven't tried to tackle them, but the time seems ripe. I found this Kaye Woods video tutorial, watched it twice, and took the plunge. It was actually kind of fun! 

The two triangles in the photo are about 5" tall, and made from the same piece of striped fabric. I didn't like the fabric, so it was great for experimenting. However, I love how the triangles turned out, but I ran out of this OOP fabric, darn it! Oh well, time to experiment with a few other stripes in my stash.

Lots of quilting folks are playing along with the Rainbow Scrap Challenge over at So Scrappy. Angela announces the color around the first of each month and everyone sews their own projects using that color. I'm not participating, but it's fun to read about. January's color is purple. Between digging through my scraps for cool colors for Kat, and seeing so much purple on other blogs, I caught the purple bug. (It's so much nicer than the sniffly, sneezy, miserable bug I caught over Christmas!)

Ever since Claudia posted photos of her Chunky Churndash quilt on Instagram, I've been wanting to make a scrappy one myself. It's a Quiltville free pattern, and uses lots of 2.5" and 1.5" pieces. These are my first few blocks, all from my purple scraps. The winter lighting is odd and makes them look quite blue in this photo, but they are most definitely purple. Eventually there will also be hourglass blocks, which make these little pieces look like they are on point. I'll probably do primarily cool color blocks rather than a rainbow.

We are currently in Madisonville, LA (Hi, Linda! I responded to your comment about living in Mandeville, but you're a no-reply commenter so I'm not sure if you saw it.) There's a really good pizza joint here and last night I saw this little painting of abstract sailboats on the wall of the restaurant. I thought this would make a fun quilt. I guess I have rainbows on the brain right now! What caught my eye was how the ripply "reflections" were so simply portrayed by streaking white through the colors. That would be fairly easy to do with fabric, too.