New Camera and new projects!

My husband did a little research for me and after reviewing my camera needs he found a camera for me and I went and bought it today. So far two thumbs up-- it is easy to use and takes a nice picture. It is a Nikon S8100 10x wide 12.1 mega pixel Coolpix, if you are interested. Hopefully it bounces but, if it doesn't I did get the 3 year warranty package!
On to new projects:

I have been working on this quilt for a couple of weeks now. 

All the fabrics are from Ginny Beyer's collections except the jadite green one. 

It is a pattern called Fab-tastic by Marlous Designs. 

My only criticism is that I decided to make mine a twin size version, which the pattern gives the specifications for, but it was a pretty skimpy twin size.  I added another row of squares to mine. Fortunately the fabric requirements were a little inflated so I was able to make 4 more blocks with no additional fabric purchases.

It is mostly strip pieced so it went together pretty quickly. I did have to slow down to add the piping but I am glad I did because it really makes the quilt for me.  I used Susan Cleveland's Piping Hot  Binding Tool for the piping and it sure makes it easy!

Now for the quilting... I have been chomping at the bit to try the curved cross hatching quilting. I am an avid reader of the Green Fairy Quilts blog. She uses this technique often (as well as many other awesome techniques) in her quilts it just looked really cool to me. I decided to try it on this quilt. All the floating black paisley squares have 3/4" curved cross hatching in them made using these:

These are from Lakeside Quilt Company. 

Each square of cross hatching took 18 minutes and there are 24 squares. 

So just those alone took 8 hours, but I LOVE how they came out and I can't wait to try it on some other quilts.  I am now waiting for some purple thread to arrive so I can finish the rest of each block.

I took a class with Karla Alexander in February and she encouraged me to play with the Creative Grids rulers and design some quilts. I have this ruler called Straight Out of Line and it is designed by Karla.

I have been playing with it on paper (because EQ is still somewhat a challenge for me)

And finally decided to play with it on some fabric, here is a preview of my quilt.

More on that later when we will do the big reveal!

broken camera

I have been happily busy sewing and quilting a graduation quilt for someone special this last week and sadly my camera also took a tumble ( well its last tumble....)and blinked no more, so I am unable to post any in-progress pictures! 
Very frustrating because I am pretty jazzed about how it is coming out so far! 
I will remedy that camera problem tomorrow hopefully and get some pics posted.
Meanwhile surf the blogosphere ladies and gents-- Spring market was last week and everyone is bursting with new lines, patterns and inspiration! Anyone have a good blog to share???

Check it out!

Please check the article on the Quilters Crossing Blog which is all about my conversation with Patty Sloniger. 

Patty has won two contests for fabric design on the Spoonflower website and was just signed on as Michael Miller's newest designer!

We had a great time chatting over coffee about fabric, designing and making things.

Blogosphere silence

All week I have been doing my daily blog surfing on my favorite blogs and have come away irritated. No new posts have been posted, then it occurred to me that they are all getting ready for Spring market in Salt Lake City, Utah.  New fabric will be debuted and they are all busy readying their booths for "the Show". Then I thought, well they all have that excuse but, what is mine? 
Here is mine:
First I went to Dallas with my daughter for an irish dance competition, feis ( pronounced fesh).  She did well, she got 6th place out of 18 and she was proud.  We had a good time though it was only an overnight.
We watched  "The King's Speech" with Collin Firth in it while we were at the hotel. What a great movie. Really inspiring to watch this biography of Queen Elizabeth's father struggle and overcome his speech impediment. Good messages and well done I thought.
I had a very pleasant mother's day with these two and my husband, who is neither part frog nor part panda but IS a darn good cook.

 I was treated to a french toast breakfast and fish fry for dinner.  I also received a Kindle which I have enjoyed very much. I spent the day sewing, quilting and eating, very relaxing and restoring.  I am reading Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen on my new Kindle. It is out as a movie and as usual I have waited until the movie is out to get on the bandwagon and read the book. It is very good so far and an enjoyable read. I read that the book has a happy ending which I am glad about- I hate a sad ending in a book.

I am also working on a quilt project I can't reveal yet but I will post pictures when I can reveal it! Hope everyone is well.

Lately

 I have had a lot of customers quilts to complete thus, I have not diligently blogged.  This little quilt has absolutely beautiful hand embroidery on it. The customer wanted a tight stipple in the background to really spotlight her embroidery.  The background was almost a linen perhaps? We were trying to figure it out.  It was lovely fabric though...The sashing just has some simple repeating lines framing each piece. Her work was really excellent and I endeavored to have the quilting compliment that as much as I possibly could. 

 It came out beautifully and she was very pleased as well.

Really her stitching was beautiful!

I have also been playing with these fabrics....

 Not my typical choices but a friend of mine had a baby girl in April and I wanted to make her a quilt.  Obviously it is not complete yet but I have hope for it.  I have really loved this fabric line at the shop so I just gave in and decided to play with it. I will post more pics when I get it more together.

I love to play with stripes in a pinwheel block. 

Oh my gosh it has been 2 weeks!

It has been a busy couple of weeks and I have been doing a lot of sewing too. I was hired to make an baby quilt with a Texas A&M theme.  First thing I had to learn was what the official school colors were! I am not from Texas so don't yell at me! I thought it was maroon and gray but my friend Teresa informed me that gray was just thrown in occasionally and that they were really maroon and white.
The customer wanted something traditional so I flipped through my Amish quilt books and found a block I had always liked which is called a variety of things "Bachelor's Puzzle"," Snail's Trail" etc...
I have made this block in miniature and donated it to the Ami Simms Alzeheimer's Quilt Auction a few years ago but those were 3 inch blocks finished which made me a little insane. The whole quilt was 9"x12".

I decided NOT to make the block THAT small again this time though. Since it was a baby's quilt I decided an 8" block would be cute and wouldn't make me nuts.

Here is the resulting Texas A&M quilt for baby JR:

It measures 48"x48".

I quilted it on my new longarm which I have limited skill using thus far but, I played to my strengths and it came out great.

I have also been working on a ticker tape quilt. Another blog I read is doing a quilt-along called Bottled Rainbows.  I decided to try the technique and see if I liked it.

It was a 100% hit for me and is a great stash buster.  It is a quilt as you go technique that you do block by block. Here is my first block all in baby blues:

More will definitely follow as this was a super cool technique and I liked the result. It reminds me of my favorite video game TETRIS that I played as a teen. I won't go into detail about how to do the technique as the Stitched in Color blog outlines it beautifully and I highly reccommend you click over to her blog and check it out!
I also think there is a lot of design potenitial so I am going to play with some designs and do them ticker tape style to see how they look.