Winter Berries Quilt from fabric I adored...

I have a real love for trees...especially trees that have lost their leaves and look so bare.  If they have berries on them that's even better.  I love bare trees and branches in artwork, home decor, fabric...just about in anything.  I was shopping a few months ago and I saw some fabric that I fell in love with.  I looked at it several times over the next few visits to that shop and I finally broke down and bought a few yards of it.  I brought it home and showed my husband and he immediately declared, "Of course, you love it. It is a bunch of dead trees."  He doesn't quite have the same fascination as me. (Wink).  Anyway, I didn't want to make anything fancy out of it. I just wanted to be able to see the branches every time I looked at it, so I decided to just make a simple snowball quilt.  I later found a fabric that matches it with birds on tree branches.  Birds are okay, just not as cool as trees, but I decided to get it for the backing.  So here's a few pictures of what I decided to call "Winter Berries".  I washed it to make it nice and quilty feeling and now it's my favorite quilt to snuggle under.

This one shows the quilting in the sashing and the individual squares.  I decided to use a leaf pattern in the squares, but also added a diamond to coordinate with the diamond pattern in the sashing.

Here's the leaf pattern in the border.  I don't know if you can see it well enough, but the brown fabric looks kind of like tree bark.

You can see the winter birds on the backing.  Cute, but not as impressive as the branches with berries. (Smile)

Block 2 of Pat Sloan's 2015 Vacation Time Mystery Quilt

Ok, so I'm running a little behind for last month. I just finished February's Block of the Month for the Pal Sloan 2015 Vacation Time Mystery Quilt.  She has already posted the instructions for block 3. Anyway, here's my Block 2.  Can't wait to see the finished quilt!!

House Warming Quilt for a Friend Finished

I finally finished the quilt I was working on for my friend.  It's a house warming gift for her. Did I mentioned she loves dragonflies? Oh, yeah, I did.  Well, I decided to quilt it with a dragonfly motif.  The thread has a nice sheen to it and the color is a little lighter than the brown fabric, so it stands out nicely on the quilt.  I think it turned out great!

Here's what the quilting looks like.

The backing is a green dot flannel.  That should make it really cozy for her.  I hope she likes it!

Working on a quilt for a friend

I'm working on a quilt for a friend for a housewarming gift. She's been living in a rental apartment and just recently purchased a house.  I had some 2 1/2" strips that I bought a long time ago.  I thought it was a full jelly roll, but realized later that it only had 25 strips in the roll.  Most quilts require more than that, so I haven't used them.

As I was looking through my stash, I found them and noticed that a few of the strips had tiny, little dragonflies on them. My friend is obsessed with dragonflies.  How perfect is that!!  So another friend wanted to go in on the fabric for the quilt and gift, so we purchased a dark brown background fabric and a really cute brown fabric with little dragonflies on it for the binding.  I love how striking the colors are with the dark brown background. It is outstanding, if I have to say so myself!!  Here's a few of the blocks that I've finished so far.  Don't you agree?  I can't wait to finish it.

Stacked Border

Okay. This is the last post for today. I promise, and mostly because I don't have any other projects that I could possibly finish today. This is the second border we were supposed to do for the Border of the Month for the Zion Piecemakers Quilt Guild. It's called a Stacked border in The Border Workbook.  I've also heard it called a piano-key border. Very simple and very fast. It took all of about 30 minutes from cutting to finishing.

I've never been much for purple fabric but someone gave me a bunch of it and I thought I better use it up.  Hope you all are making some headway on your projects today, too. Have a great day!!

Self-Binding Baby Blanket

Wow!  I can't believe how much I'm getting done today.  I have so much energy and I'm actually channeling it into finishing things.  This is a self-binding baby blanket that I made for a friend that is having a baby soon, like this week, maybe. I tried out a decorative flower stitch around the border.  It didn't quite show up as much as I hoped it would, but it still looks nice.

 Here's a closeup on the decorative stitching.

This is a picture of the whole blanket.  I like the little bird fabric.

Easy Braid Border

Just finished the Easy Braid border from The Border Workbook by Janet Kime.  I used some green scraps that I've had for quite a while. The sewing was really easy and went quickly. The hard part was trimming it down to size when finished.  It was to be trimmed 1 3/4 inches from the center line.  Finding the center line was the difficult part. It took me a few minutes to figure it out, but once I did it was easy to trim.  Here's a picture of the finished product. I made the border about 45 inches long. The finished size is 3 1/2 inches wide.