Category Archives: basket quilts

two for valentine’s day

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Candy Hearts Baskets is the latest installment in my basket series. I had originally planned it to be in red, pink and white fabrics only for Valentine’s Day, but looking through my whites I came across the charming little print you see in all three blocks (click on the photo for a closer view). Before you know it, a citrus-colored Valentine’s quilt! This one is calorie-free.

Next is my Valentine’s cookie quilt (definitely not calorie-free). Made of chocolate and vanilla sugar cookies, it features embellished heart blocks. It’s easy to make one of your own: just mix up different shades of pink dough from the vanilla, you don’t even have to completely blend it in for a “hand-dyed” look.

Cut the rolled out dough into squares and use a small heart-shaped cookie cutter to cut a heart out of the center of each one. Fill the holes with a contrasting heart “appliqué” (actually, it’s probably more like piecing, but I like to think of them as appliqués.) cut from a different colored square and decorate some of them with sparkly sugar and colored sprinkles, and bake.

After they’ve cooled, arrange them on a tray. If you stack them up several cookies high, then when people take them from the top layer, you still have an intact “quilt”. I stacked them up randomly for an ever-changing quilt.

If you are really ambitious, you could use the cookie cutter as an appliqué pattern and make one out of fabric to go with the cookies.

happy quilting!

adventures of a quilting diva

it was there all along

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Here is the completed top for the January basket quilt, A Tisket, A Tasket, A Rick Rack Basket. Look for the free instruction sheet on the Citrus Belt Quilters Block of the Month page. The block instructions are already posted, and the quilt top instructions should be up in a week or 10 days.

Purchasing fabric for the borders of this quilt was one of the main items on my (very short) Road 2 Ca shopping list. Out of all the wonderful vendors there, I could not find a single fabric that would work. Turns out I had the perfect one, a navy blue Kona cotton, in my stash all along. It’s my favorite fabric shop, and it’s open 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Although they haven’t received any new stock since IQF Houston, they got a nice shipment from Road this weekend. (No, I’m not planning on opening an online fabric store. You can’t shop in my stash.)

Tomorrow I’m taking the Bella Bella workshop from Norah McMeeking. We’re doing the St. Mark’s Wallhanging. So, if you’ll excuse me, I have some fabric shopping to do. ;-)

happy quilting!

adventures of a quilting diva

if it seems wrong …

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Tonight while piecing my January basket quilt top I pinned two rows together. They looked rather strange, but I figured it was because the blocks were on point and I don’t usually set the blocks that way, so I kept on sewing. This is how they turned out:
Needless to say I had a session with my seam ripper. Here is how the rows should have looked:
The moral of the story is: if it seems wrong, it probably is.

happy quilting!

adventures of a quilting diva

rick rack baskets

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Here’s the beginning of my latest basket quilt. These are 6-inch blocks and use rick rack for the basket handles. They’re quick, easy, and oh-so-fun to make! I will have the free pattern on the Citrus Belt Quilters website in early January. If you can’t wait until January to make a basket quilt, I have four other basket quilt patterns (including pieced, appliqué, and crazy-patch paper-pieced lap quilts and table toppers) on the Block of the Month page. One of these just might be perfect for a last-minute quilted gift.

In case I don’t post again until after the holidays, have a very merry Christmas and a quilty new year.

adventures of a quilting diva

quilting in roswell

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In my studio, aka Roswell, I try out interesting techniques and practice new skills. I usually either master the skill and leave my practice piece behind, or I discover that said technique is not nearly as appealing (for me) to do as it is to look at it. Either way, I now have a sizable (and growing) collection of UFOs. I have learned to live with that. If I gain a new skill (hand quilting, redwork, etc.) I want to use in my latest inspiration, it’s served its purpose. Same thing if it turns out I don’t enjoy the technique quite as much as I thought I would.

Take for example the fabric “grass skirt” hanging from my pin cushion at right. I recently borrowed a book on woven quilts from the library and decided to give it a try. (I’m not sure why I did, usually looking at the eye candy is enough for me.) It was interesting to tear the fabric into strips, although not exhilarating as many have described it. Tearing the black print did bad things to the fabric though, as the threads got pulled out of place and you could see little white pin pricks where the thread came out from underneath the thread above it. I briefly considered coloring in all the little dots with a pigment pen, that is until I came to my senses. I have satisfied my curiosity where woven quilts are concerned.

At the last Moonlighters meeting, Jessica Cook gave an interesting talk on UFOs (unfinished fabric objects) and OPPs (other people’s projects). It was great to see the way she could take other quilters’ orphan blocks and unfinished projects and complete them, sometimes in the intended way and sometimes in her own way. One tip she had along the lines of “just do it” helps reduce anxiety about less than perfect free-motion machine quilting:

When quilting around shapes such as leaves and flowers, if you happen to go around twice, it looks like a mistake; if you go around three times, it’s embroidery!

At any rate here are four 6-inch blocks that I made some years back when I was teaching myself piecing. The plan was to make a sampler quilt in pink and green. I can’t remember why I stopped at only four blocks, but I still like them at any rate.

My plan was to wow you with a complete list of all the UFOs in my studio, but I changed my mind. If I make a list, I would have to search for them all, because I could not stand having an incomplete list, and a list would probably induce guilt for not finishing them. As it stands, it’s comforting to know that they’re out there, and whenever my mind is mush, but my hands want something to stitch, I can pull a UFO from the shelf and get straight to work.

BTW the full size pattern and instructions for Crazy for Baskets are all now available on the Citrus Belt Quilters’ website.

happy quilting!

adventures of a quilting diva

quick quilts

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I’ve discovered the secret to making quilts quickly: Just don’t sleep (or at least not too much anyway). But you’d better finish them in a few days, because you wouldn’t want to sew through your fingers or anything like that from lack of sleep. I’m going to make this post quick as well because it’s time for me to catch up on my ZZZZZs.
Last week I attended an excellent CBQ workshop with Patricia Beaver on redwork. I was particularly thrilled because I’ve never done this type of embroidery before and I’d always had the impression that there was some sort of trick to it, kind of like doing French knots. This is my class practice piece (it’s from a BHG pattern found in their Two Color Quilts book). I turned it into a little wall hanging … quilted, bound, and everything by the next morning. My head is positively spinning with ideas I want to explore. Patricia Beaver gave an inspiring trunk show the next morning with a mixture of vintage quilts and ones she made as well. Above is an interesting vintage cross stitch quilt (bed-size). Wow! That is a lot of X’s. From a distance you can see how closely it resembles appliqué. Finally is my October baskets quilt top which I made over the long weekend. Now I’m ahead of schedule for several weeks, since I don’t have to show this top until the meeting at the end of September. I could even quilt and bind it by then if I wanted to, but I’ve got other deadlines to focus on.

Patricia Beaver introduced me to crayon quilts as well, which are tons of fun and very addicting. I’ve been working on a crayon and embroidery quilt project and have one block completed. My daughter Annika made a few crayon blocks as well. If you want to try your hand at crayon quilts, Prang 100% soybean crayons are the ones to look for. I would give you Patricia’s website, but it’s not live yet. She has a lot of really neat vintage patterns, supplies, several different trunk shows, as well as embroidery and crayon quilt workshops.

happy quilting! And thanks as well for all the advice on quilting those large quilt tops. It really is a whole different world from quilting miniatures and small wall hangings, with a completely different set of considerations.

adventures of a quilting diva

crazy for baskets

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Here’s my latest design in the basket series, Crazy for Baskets. It’s approximately 58×65 inches. I don’t know how I’m ever going to quilt it. That might not be a big deal to most of you, but I’m used to 12 inch mini quilts that fit quite neatly in the sewing machine. Just this morning I worked on quilting a piece that was about 8×10 inches. For those of you who machine quilt on a regular machine, can you recommend the best way to manage it? Rolling? Folding? Smashing?

Check back later this week. I’m going to post the pattern for the block and the instructions for the quilt on the CBQ website. This is a really fun, easygoing introduction to paper foundation piecing, and if a piece or two of fabric comes up short, no need to tear out all those tiny stitches, just add another piece.

happy quilting!

adventures of a quilting diva