A Productive Start to the Month

Our year has started off with so much happiness. We found out we are expecting a baby boy! Our two girls are pretty ecstatic to be blessed with a baby brother. We are planning on making the theme of his nursery nautical/ fishing -- I have been pinning ideas like crazy. What a change we will have, for the last 5 years our home has been adorned with pink, princesses and tutus. I think my husband will be happy to add a bit more race cars and dinos.

Even though I've been fending off a bad cold and have lost a majority of my voice, my energy levels are high and I've been whipping through quilt tops. In less than two weeks, I've created 3 quilt tops, completed one quilt, and create a mini art quilt. This is not my normal speed and it's been fabulous to get so much done.

If you follow me on Instagram, then you are pretty familiar with the Scrappy-Trip-Along. A great quilt pattern that utilizes scraps and comes together so fast; the tutorial is here. This block can be fashioned in various ways and they all look amazing. This quilt is for a friend of mine that just adopted a sweet, baby boy from Africa. His nursery is full of bright, happy colors. I did change the layout a bit before the final piecing, it was a bit dark in the lower right in this picture.

 Last year, my guild friend Elisa hosted a hexagon challenge using FreeSpirit's Bee's Knees fabric line. I created my baby quilt using a faux applique technique. Basically you sew the fabric to fusible interfacing and iron it on the base fabric. It achieves a clean applique edge, but does not adhere the fabrics flat together and it's super fast! 

This is the improv pieced back of the quilt. I love the bright colors and bee motif. This will be Baby Boy's first quilt.

The season 4 of Project Quilting started back up this week and the first challenge was "A square in a square.. ". I was inspired to finally create a mini art piece based on our church. Every Sunday I'm fascinated by the blue, green and purple stain glass squares featured in our parish. I've titled it "Church Squares".. Small art quilts by far are more challenging for me! This one measures a modest 8.5" square.

It was a fabulous excuse to break open into my new box of Inktense pencils and experiment. So much fun! This was on a very heavy canvas fabric. I colored the squares with the pencils first. Then mixed equal portions of water with fabric medium and painted in the squares. It is magical to watch the colored pencil come alive with a bit of medium. Once it dried I went back and filled in the other areas with Lumiere metallic paint.

 

Last by not least, I've retrieved this Valentine quilt top that was shelved last year. It was a simple and sweet construction, adorned with a bit of hand embroidery. I now have it loaded on my mid-arm, Fiona, and hoping to have it completed by late this evening.

Phew.. It's been a busy two weeks!