City Sampler Final Photo

Tah-dah, here it is, my now-completed City Sampler. It was much too big for my design wall and my work room as you can see. Get ready for a whole lot of pictures so you can see some of the details.

I made the 100 blocks in Tula Pink's 100 Modern Quilt Blocks book way back in 2016 out of Tula Pink fabrics and my own hand-dyed cotton fabrics. 

I designed the outer border and am quite pleased with how it turned out.

It took a lot of figuring, and sketching, but it was worth it to make the quilt big enough for our bed.

The rest is all gray(s) but of course not just one because of...reasons. 

Turns out keeping track of solids is Very Hard because there's no printed selvedge. 

We live--we learn, right? 

And here's what the back looks like. I love love love that snake.

The blocks sat around finished for quite a while, and then I went to a CQFA retreat in January 2020  (four years!) where I sewed the grey sashing to one side of a lot of the blocks but not all of them. 

Then they sat around a little longer (four years!) before I went to a BAMQ retreat in 2024 and I sewed the rest of the sashing onto the blocks, and then sewed most of the blocks into rows. 

The rest of the assembly and then the making of the backing took a while too. The backing got started in  July 2025. 

Then later that month, I finished the backing, the binding and eventually I turned it over for the fabulous quilting is by the wonderful long-armer Colleen Granger. 

Then this week, I finally sewed down the binding and today was the pinning up and photographing. What a long, drawn-out process this was! In the end, this might be the quilt I'm most pleased with that I've ever made. Don't tell my DH, but it's going to be the anniversary gift this year. And as I said yesterday, a project to take off of my 2026 UFO Finishes Challenge list.

Village Bound

Back into the pre-made binding bag, time to get the Village/Japanese Houses quilt bound.

There she is, my Binding Baby is out and about again after spending all that time in the Bag O' Binding.

It went on very easily, mostly because I decided not to worry about exactly matching up the transition from blue to grey with the background.

I stopped to take pictures, reminding myself about why I made this quilt in the first place--All These Great Japanese Fabrics.

So many of these fabrics really make me smile.

Of course I had some "help" from my studio assistant

Look! She's empty once again, hurrah.

I got so excited about this quilt being bound and so close to completion that I pinned it up on the design wall. From here it looks done.

But closer up, I think the houses need some quilting.

Especially the ones that are lined up right next to each other. So, I can't count this as a finish quite yet and I have to work out what to do. I could stitch around the door and window. Or along the bottom of each roof, or both I guess. Maybe I'll do something with an embroidery stitch, like one of those circles to make a "door-knob" on the door.

Village Sky Quilted

 

I've now finished all the free motion background quilting on the Village quilt (aka Japanese Houses). Woohoo! The whole sky is now filled with cloudy foggy swirls.

There's no quilting in the houses at all, so I'm going to have to look at it overall to see if those spaces are too big to be unanchored. But now I can attach the binding while I decide.

First 2024 Finish

For my first finish of the year, Made It Work is completed. This was a quick picture I snapped before heading to the BAM Sew Day yesterday. It's not pinned at the bottom so it's a bit wavy. I tried to turn it in to Peggy who is our Community Giving Coordinator, but after looking at it, she insisted I show it at this month's meeting for Show and Tell. So that will be happening later this month. I think I'll give it a wash and dry before then, just to make sure it's more pet hair free and also to see what it looks like when it shrinks up.

One detail of one of the blocks that I was given to work with. As I worked on this over several Sew Days and at home, I chose some additional fabrics to make it "big enough" mostly from the free fabric table. I only used some of my own stash for a small amount of the backing and to make the binding.

And here's a reminder picture of what was in the Make It Work baggie that I picked up last year. Please gnore the Temperature Quilt pieces on the left. I started out with a real mixture of more clear colors and some brown-ish ones too, so that got carried through to the final arrangement.

I'm very glad to have something finished in the first few days of the year. It may not be actual momentum, but it feels like it is.

Faux Goose Chased

Another finish, the Faux Goose Chase quilt is now done. The black print binding was made and wound up on the Binding Baby spool and ready to go.

And there it is! I'm really pleased with how it turned out. 

Now to wash it and hope the orange dye bleed in a couple spots comes out. Color Catchers let's go!
 

Courthouse Nears Completion

 The Courthouse Steps quilt is now quilted, I'm not actually responsible for construction of an actual courthouse. All that's left to do is trimming, making and sewing on a binding and a label. I haven't decided where this one will end up. 

I don't like it enough to hang it up. It's a good baby quilt size I think, so maybe I'll donate it somewhere. 

I did the quilting without marking any lines, and I'm pretty pleased with how it turned out. The piecing was pretty accurate except in a few spots because the blocks are paper pieced. The light green thread that I quilted it with did a pretty good job of mostly disappearing without reading as a colored line. 

Happy National Quilt Day

 I didn't realize, but today is the official National Quilt Day.

Suggestions to celebrate are to hang your quilts up outdoors and to then post a picture of it. Unfortunately it's a hopefully (fingers and toes crossed extra double) rainy day today so here's an old picture another time I hung a quilt up to dry outside.

Everything Is Blue

On to the third and final Prism Play quilt, this time I had to choose between three color cards. I settled on Aqua Blue because I had the most fabrics to choose from. Here's the start of the quilt and the fabric pull I was working with. I ended up pulling out that very dark green one that very much was not in the correct color range. It happened to be one of those shot cottons, so under one light it was absolutely spot on, but under another light or at another angle, it came off very differently. More like: why is this obviously green fabric in here?

I again encountered the colored head of my pin exactly matching the fabric. Like playing "chicken" except with a sewing machine instead of a car. Slightly less dangerous.

This song was of course running through my head as I was stitching on this one:
 

Two Down, One to Go

 

All done with quilting two out of the three Prism Play quilts for the SAQA exhibit. These are such an odd size, 15" wide x45"high. This is the green one before quilting.

The blue one that I'm working on goes in-between the green and orange pieces:

Here they are with their corresponding color cards.

These aren't cut down to size quite yet, the edges are just pinned. I'm really pleased with how the quilting turned out. Because of the odd size it's going to be a real challenge to light these well enough for photography to enter the show.

Into The Green

 

Now that I'm done with orange, I'm onto the green. I had two color cards to choose from this time. Yellow-green and Chartreuse. Can you tell which one I chose? 

Of course, yes you've guessed right, Chartreuse. I actually pulled fabric for both and went with the one that would look the best with the orange piece. These three color quilts are intended to hang as a triptych in my mind. At least at this point and assuming that none of them sell.

Welcome February

 

We're into February already...2022 is just speeding along and I'm feeling like I'm rushing to catch up to the calendar.

This monthly marker is a combination of two photos as per my usual, edited in SnapSeed. I really like how these two combined and interacted when layered.

The first picture is the work I produced in the David Owens Hastings workshop.

The second is of the leaf miner I photographed at Quail Hollow Ranch.

And then there's the 1SE video compilation for the month. This is my One Second Everyday for January,

So What the heck did I actually do in January?

I started One Prism Play Quilt - Orange

I started the Dotsy table runner

I started, finished, and sent the quilt for SAT22 - Doors Unopened

I hiked 3x: Quail Hollow x 2 and the Alviso Bay trail.

I designed one quilt in EQ8

I made two Hold Tite folios

I finished and sent in the mini quilt for the Curated Quilts Red issue 

I took a workshop from David Owens Hastings

I virtually attended the SDA conference

I added nearly daily to my Visual Journal

I blogged here 30/31 days

Which is a whole lot more than nothing, so I'm glad that I wrote it out here for myself. I think I'll do this next month too.

Safe At Home

 One of my local quilt shops (LQS) is Modern Handmade in Scotts Valley. Right after the Shelter In Place (SIP) was declared they started an 8 week row quilt pattern. The quilt is named Safe At Home and it is still available for download.

I loved the name of the quilt, the idea of a weekly row by row and the initial quilt block design and hot vibrant colors. And then I didn't start it and I didn't start it for various reasons.
But now I have actually gotten to a point where I can begin. Hooray!
So...here is my fabric pull and I'm off to start cutting. I may just stick with batiks, but I've pulled some prints too, we shall see.

Blue Squares Start

 I started in on my Finish-a-Long list by working on sewing together the Kaffe Fassett quilt
 I'm calling it Blue Squares (it's Red Squares in his book, Heritage Quilts) This is how it started, I only had one row sewn together but most of the other pieces cut out and sorted and labelled. (Wow, unusually organized for me!)

When I first cut this out at a CQFA retreat in 2017, I didn't have the central image fabric on hand. As I'm not following the fabric formulation exactly from the book, I did consider using something else entirely, but then I found it in the right color way. I like it a lot, the formality of the still life in the unusual colors is just great, very Kaffe, right?

The border fabric I'm using is an Amy Butler print, and after putting that on the central square, I had to try out fabrics for the larger second interior border. I had the basket swirls fabric in two color ways and one other to try. Time to "Make Visual Decisions Visually".

 

Here's the lighter color way of the basket swirls. I thought it was too light compared to the majority of everything else. I didn't want that much contrast at the center of everything.

 Then I tried this fuchsia/blue large polkadot, it's the right colors...mostly, but it doesn't go with the stripes and solids well enough. It fights too much.

With it filled in more with the smaller squares, I really don't like that fabric as the large border, it jumps out as too different to the rest. I'm going with the first one, the darker basket swirls.
Now back to sewing all these squares together.