Stuff I've Been Working On

One of my quilt guilds hosted a swap for members.  We traded quilts last week.  Here's what I made.  My partner likes tractors and Lori Holt's Farm Girl Vintage.  I had to resize the tractor to make it fit.  That was an interesting challenge!  My math was way off on my first attempt.  I finally figured out I could scan in the block diagrams from the book, drag them up to the size I wanted in Word, and then print them off and use them as templates.  I also found out that I can stretch mini quilts on my long arm frame and quilt them on the long arm!  That was pretty exciting!

Here is the quilt I got back.  I love it!  My pictures just do not do it justice at all.  This swap was pretty fun because I actually knew who my quilt was for.  The actual swapping was so fun too.  We just had one person volunteer to give theirs first, and then the recipient gave theirs, and so on.  Lots of oo-ing and ah-ing.  We're planning another one for this summer.


I've also been working on my rainbow swap.  This one is really tough for me.  It's paper pieced, which I do not really enjoy, but felt my partner would like.  I had a horrible time getting the wedges to line up correctly.  I finally got to the point of accepting its imperfections because I just couldn't take it apart any more.  I added a thin border of the background fabric as well.  I'm planning to quilt this one this week.  I'm just not sure how to; that's something I really struggle with, quilting designs.


I've been slowly trying to learn English Paper Piecing (EPP).  I have a large chunk of it to do in order to finish my Queen Bee quilt top.  I decided to start with something smaller and have been using the Fat Quarter Shop's tutorial they posted on Instagram a while back.  Here's my progress so far (half done).  I'm pretty pleased with it so far.


No comments