Ooo, it was like Christmas this week!!!

Well it started with receiving my quilt labels in the mail the other day, and they turned out fantastic! They read, "Quilt made by Mary "Bunny" Martin-jarofspools.blogspot.com."

They have six different colors, in Fuchsia, Teal, Purple, Orange sherbert, Grey and Lime. Here is a pic with them attached and printed on a yard of fabric. The colors are so vibrant, and they were printed so fabulously. Again, it was Spoonflower that printed them and the cost was $18 plus shipping. So easy!

I opted to cut them out with scissors as opposed to the rotary cutter and ruler method. You can either put them on with fusing, or sew them down on the edges. I may even have enough of a border to sew on some fabric along the edge and just applique them on at some point. The original tutorial by Jaybird suggested to leave a 1/4" margin around each one to have room to fold them under, but I had a difficult time as it was just getting them designed at all! Thanks to one of my budding Marketing students at the college, Annie, she helped me get my design into print.

 I cannot imagine that I will actually get to use all of these; that would be a lot of quilts! I will probably have to order more labels due to changing my blog address or something before getting through them all. Hopefully, I will have one quilt done soon so I can put one on. The blank space allows for me to write in the title of the quilt and when it was made. The first one will go on my Valori Wells Quilt that I hope to have done this weekend. ; )

My second gift this week, was my beautiful Echino-Extra Wide-Madrigal-Oxblood fabric! This has to be some of the most gorgeous fabric I have ever seen, and when I saw it on Judith's Needles and Lemons blog who was using it for the back of a quilt, I just knew I had to have it!

So here it is in all 6 yards of glory! I plan on making this the whole quilt top and embellishing it with Perle 8 cotton in different colors, some beads, and sequins. I plan on outlining the flowers and highlighting the print all together. Then I will use the thickest batting and tie it. I can't wait to start on it.

Isn't it just dreamy?! It will take quite some time to decorate it, but it just seems to be calling for some nice hand embroidery and a little sparkle. The fuchsia buds on the vine will be in a matching floss done with French Knots, and the birds will have some sequins along the back. Not sure how much of the big blue flowers I will do, but it will work itself out I'm sure. I will keep you all posted with the progress.

And if that wasn't enough...I also received by Perle 8 cotton for the Single girl quilt! It is a wonderful steel blue color, #932 I believe, and it will be used in the pattern given by Denise Schmidt for the quilt. I was going to go with a dark grey, but I thought, hey what the heck--it doesn't have to match! I decided to pick up the blues in the yellow circles as opposed to going with the obvious grey or yellow options.

I love that they gave it to me in the box. It was like opening up a box of chocolates (I refrained from licking them), but it was so hard not to. So many projects, so many presents, and a whole weekend to do them. Woo-hoo!!

Still here...

Well, I am still here but have been VERY busy with school, work and quilting (story of my life). I am diligently working on my Single Girl and thanks to the P.I.G.S. night out at Sew Obsessed in Henderson, I got a good chunk done (well, in between alot of laughs, pizza and root beer). Hopefully I will have my Single Girl quilt top done this week to post for all to see, but I have to say, these curves were tough to piece and even harder to butt up next to each other! Yikes, Denise Schmidt!

So what could I possibly add to this long laundry list of things I am juggling now; quilt labels! Thanks to Jaybird Quilt's tutorial on how to get fabric quilting labels printed by the yard, I have decided this is the way to go! Here is a sample of what I have come up with, please let me know what you think. They will be printed in orange, purple, lime, and fuchsia just because I LOVE jewel tones. Jaybird suggests using a service called Spoonflower for printing as it is only about $18 a yard, but for those of you that want to try your hand at fabric design, that is really what they do!

So here is the draft version of the label:

It's hard to tell, but this will be a rectangle about 2.5" by 4.0" that I can fuse onto my quilt or stitch around the side. The middle part will be left blank to allow me to write in the title of the quilt, the date and whether it was machine or hand quilted/pieced. I am so excited. I have only labeled one quilt and so many tutorials tell you that it is so worth the time and effort to add a label (it's about time). Thank you to Jaybird for all the advice and the great tutorial and when they arrive I will update with a pic!

The Newest Family Member

This is our new kitty we picked up on Friday. Her name is Griffin (a.k.a Kitty Griffin) after the comedian Kathy Griffin who we love. She is supposedly Siamese but I think she is a blend of Siamese and Ragdoll. She is a complete love and she already sleeps with us! I am sure in due time there will be pictures of her on quilts; if I can ever get one finished.

Top Left: Her sleeping on the way home, Top Right: Her trying to attack my IPhone camera, Bottom Left: Kitty Burrito, Bottom Right: Her Glamour Shots pose.

Single Girl Part Tres...

Well, here we are again with curves and curves and more curves. this quilt has more curves than I do! So I finished the first two of many blocks and they came out pretty alright! I had a few tiny puckers but nothing major and for my first quilt with curved pieces, I am really not going to make a fuss about it. Thankfully my sewing of clothing came in handy and I tried to remember all the tricks for sewing curved pieces of fabric together, but there is ALOT of pinning and massaging going on. It take a long time to prepare the piece(s) for sewing but once they are together the sewing takes a mere seconds to do. Kind of like Disneyland; you wait in line for hours and the ride is only a few minutes long. Here is a pic of the first block:

I am bound and determined to work on this more today, but between schoolwork, work-work, and my grading papers, not sure how much I will get done. I will keep posting as I go though; for those that are following along.

It's a Mod, Mod, World...

So at the last meeting of the Las Vegas Modern Quilt Guild, we were blessed with a tutorial by Cola on how to do the Mod Mosaic Pillows that she had made. While her efforts were great in helping us get started, I had a bit of a creative meltdown from the beginning. I am so used to following a pattern or sticking to exact measurements, that I found it difficult just to 'let go' and do something without a plan per se. Cola helped me gather some fabics, since I had not come prepared with scraps for the project, and here are the selections we came up with.

Some of them are from Michael Miller's Sweet Meadow collection and I believe the others are from Poppy Parade. It started out pretty alright, but I have decided to leave it for now until I at least finish a few more sections of my Single Girl Quilt. Here is what I have so far, and I am really working hard on just 'going with the flow' and not being too concerned about being meticulous with my cutting and measuring.

For further ideas you can check out the Mod Mosaic on Flickr. My husband is just wondering when I will actually FINISH one project. Back to sewing.

South Pacific Single Girl

Well I haven't even finished the first one, and I am already planning the next one. I have decided on my next Single Girl to be themed South Pacific, sort of tropical, vintage, and colorful. Here are my fabrics that I have been collecting...not sure if I will add more or not.

I am planning on an off-white background to match the background of some of the fabrics. Since I am quilting my first quilt in a dark gray Perle 8 cotton, this one will be in a salmon color Perle 8. I can't wait to get started on it. This is nuts, since I haven't even finished the first one. Oh well, I could have worse addictions.

Single Girl Part Deux...

Well, I am making progress. Slowly, but making progress. I have all my A-H quarters sewn and only saw a few pieces not lined up so well. I have to say that the posts I have read are very helpful, but have also made me very nervous to make this quilt. Once person even said that you have to measure just perfectly or the whole thing will be off. Great. I have decided that it will be what it will be.

I bought some pieces of dark gray poster board from JoAnn's to see how the circle would look against my not yet purchase Kona Charcoal fabric. So far so good. Now, I did cut two of the pieces upside down, so I had to re-cut them, but otherwise, it went pretty well. After once again consulting all posts for the Single Girl Quilt Along on Ginger Monkey's blog, I cut, and cut, and cut out all my templates. I have already started planning another single girl with what I am calling some South Pacific themed fabric and an off white background. This time I will actually trace the templates as shown on the blog, and also make copies of the templates rather than transferring them to plastic sheets. I feel that I made some errors in transferring them over. We will see.

Oh so many templates. Each one has twelve pieces to make twelve rings. In the meantime I ordered my Kona fabric for the front, back and binding. However, they only had 5.8 yards so now I am short for the back. With the suggestion of my stepdaughter, I may make the back from a fabric that is soft and/or fuzzy. We will see what I can find.

Here is my yummy charcoal fabric. It is even richer than I thought it would be (as you can see by the faded gray color of my background paper that I thought would match perfectly). The only pieces that I am not too sure about are the gray with ferns fabric, but I'm not changing it now!
So one of the posts explained that you cannot line up the pieces like at the top and the bottom like you would normally, but rather where they intersect. What? After much deliberation with myself, I decided to go old school and draw a 1/4" seam allowance on the back of the pieces (which later reduced itself to x's in each corner) and then put two pins through each corner where they intersect like you would for hand piecing. Granted I am sure there is an easier and/or fastest way to do this, but this is all I came up with.

After lining them up, I pinned a couple more in for good measure and sewed away.

After all 12 of these quarters were done, I will move onto the next quarter. I might get his done by summer if I'm lucky. Like I said, so far they are coming out alright, but I am concerned about matching them up with their charcoal cousins later on and it still coming out in the shape of a square. I might call on you experts that I know to help me "make it work" if needed. I will say that I have learned not only what worked, but what I will not do the next time on my South Pacific quilt. For the quilting, Denyse Schmidt includes a pattern to follow, which I will, but I have decided to do it with size 8 perle cotton. I can't wait! Keep posted to view the progress. I think I might also count how many cups of coffee it takes to make this quilt as well.