oversized log cabin baby quilt

Lately, I've been playing around with the log cabin block, experimenting with scale, color placement, and improvisational piecing. This quilt is the first result of my efforts: an oversized log cabin baby quilt. I selected a simple color palette of navy, cream, and peach for the quilt, using American-made solids for the top.

Wanting to maintain the quilt's simplicity, I quilted it with a grid, using cream thread.

The back, a super soft Nani Iro double gauze, is my favorite part. It's so soft and squishy! For the binding, I used Bonnie Christine fabric left over from my circles and triangles wall quilt.

This quilt will be available at The Maker's Waypost, a new shop in Whitinsville, MA, which opens Saturday, November 28. The shop will be carrying a number of my one-of-a-kind quilts and patchwork pillows, so be sure to stop by if you're in the neighborhood!

pistachio whole-cloth quilt + an interview with kelsey boes of lovely and enough

Today, I'm so excited to reveal the second of two whole-cloth quilts I launched this week! (You can read about the first one here.) I've been collaborating with a few designers to design quilt tops for the shop, which I then have digitally printed onto fabric and turn into finished quilts. You can read more about my thoughts on whole-cloth quilts and why I've been exploring them here.

The second quilt in this collaborative series was designed by Kelsey Boes of Lovely and Enough. Kelsey is a quilter, textile designer, and PhD student. She designed the Pistachio Quilt for the shop, which features her hand-drawn motif in an elegant gray, white, and red palette. The quilt is now in the shop and will be made to order. 

Please read on to learn more about Kelsey, what store she'd love to sell her quilts in, and her process for designing this quilt. 

Caitlin: Can you tell us a bit about your background and how you came to design fabrics and quilts?

Kelsey: My love of textiles began with a pair of knitting needles from Disney World when I was eight, and has morphed and blossomed unimaginably since with encouragement from my mom. Fabric design has been the most recent adventure. Just two years ago, I stumbled upon Leslie Keating’s Hand-Printed Fabric Swap online and printed my first fabric design, Drunken Circles, with a stencil and embroidery hoop. That next summer while studying abroad, I took a textile silk-screening class for a month and fell in love. Come fall, I wheedled an independent textile design course out of my advisor and transformed it into a senior exhibition the next spring. It’s a year and a half later now, and I have never looked back.

C: Tell us a bit more about the degree you're pursuing. How do you balance your creative time with your course load?

K: I’m a nerd. I am currently pursuing a PhD in Fiber and Polymer Sciences at North Carolina State University. Learning about topics as far reaching as dirt-masking carpet fiber shapes, wrinkle release treatments, and color vision has only enhanced my interest and passion for fabric. This semester, especially, I am known to spew tidbits from my most recent lecture to anyone who will listen (or can’t escape). Balancing creative time with my course load is tricky and lately has involved umpteen sketch breaks during proposal writing and lab reports. I find a little creative break is the best way to rejuvenate me before hitting the books again (and a little book studying is the perfect way to energize me to sew!).

C: How would you describe your aesthetic? What motifs and colors do you find yourself drawn to?

K: I am a stickler for clean design, which more recently has pushed me toward grays, white, and red.

I am also obsessed with midcentury modern furniture: clean lines and eye-catching angles. If my quilts could be sold just one place, I would choose Room & Board. When I’m dreaming up a new quilt, I imagine I’m standing on the first floor of Room & Board in Chicago, and I try to picture how the quilt would look hanging above the Eames chairs and minimalist table there. If the quilt fits, it’s a winner.

C: Can you describe your workspace/sewing space in Raleigh, NC?

K: My workspace is in flux right now. Although I mostly sew in my bedroom, I feel most inspired to sketch in the gorgeous modern library at school. With rather poor light at home, photographing for the blog happens across the city, from the library to the warehouse district to a panel of beadboard tossed on the balcony. In fact, my favorite new way to snap quick pics is rolling the butcher block kitchen cart over to the window and pulling the white curtains around for extra reflected light.

I'm in my bedroom right now actually! I just assembled a new desk this weekend so that I can have my sewing machine set up at all times. I do believe that sewing productivity is dependent on having good work flow with stations for cutting, pressing, and stitching all at the ready. Now, I have two of the three! When I want to truly get in the zone, I pop up the antique wooden ironing board that is propped against my wall, and then I am set to go for hours with Netflix as company.

C: Tell us about the gorgeous Pistachio quilt you designed for Salty Oat! What was your inspiration and how did you decide on a design?

K: Thumbnail, thumbnail, thumbnail. Ms. Tank would not allow me to begin a printmaking assignment until I’d drawn at least six thumbnail sketches, her theory being that your first idea is likely not your most developed. I have carried that practice with me and draft multiple versions of a project before beginning. Sometimes I circle back around to my first strokes, but often my mind wanders, and I end up in entirely new territory. The pistachio quilt was seven of nine. Experimenting with transparency and seeking a graphic gender-neutral quilt, the design morphed a fair amount moving from paper to computer, finally landing with a red overlay and five minimal stripes.

C: Where can readers find you online? 

K: You can find me online at LovelyandEnough.com, as well as LovelyandEnough.Etsy.com, or follow me on Instagram.

Thank you so much to Kelsey for sharing a behind-the-scenes look at her creative practice! You can now find the Pistachio Quilt for sale in the Salty Oat shop. 

fairy tale whole-cloth quilt + an interview with this paper ship

Today, I'm so excited to reveal the first of two whole-cloth quilts I'll be launching this week! I've been collaborating with a few designers to design quilt tops for the shop, which I then have digitally printed onto fabric and turn into finished quilts. You can read more about my thoughts on whole-cloth quilts and why I've been exploring them here.

The first quilt in this collaborative series was designed by Joel and Ashley Selby of Saxapahaw, NC, the married duo behind This Paper Ship. Their adorable Fairy Tale quilt is now available in the shop, and will be made to order. Each quilt features a black-and-white bias stripe binding, a Carolyn Friedlander gray-and-white grid backing, and, of course, This Paper Ship's whimsical fairy tale-themed design. I hope you love this new quilt as much as I do!

Ashley and Joel so kindly took the time to answer a few questions for me while they awaited the arrival of their baby girl, who is scheduled to arrive today! I hope you'll read on to find out more about them, their work, and the inspiration for their quilt design!

Image source: This Paper Ship

Caitlin: Can you tell us a bit about your background and why you started This Paper Ship?

This Paper Ship: Going way back, we've both been obsessed with drawing for as long as we can remember. We met in a freshman drawing class and hit it off over a fabric study, kept drawing side-by-side throughout our design degrees, and graduated together. During our last year of college, we started an Etsy shop using our own illustrated wedding invitations as an example, and picked up our first client the day before our wedding. The economy was terrible around that time, which prevented us from ever getting our coveted entry-level design jobs, so we just kept plowing forward with self-directed work and paper goods! Seven years later, we're still crazy enough to continue to make a living off of drawing, and now even raise a family off of it. It's been a wild ride, but we wouldn't have it any other way.

Image source: This Paper Ship

C: How would you describe your illustration style?

TPS: In a word: whimsical! We love bright colors, simple shapes, unexpected textures, hand lettering, and fun detail you can get lost in. Our style is made up of a combination of our two hands, since every drawing is a complete collaboration from sketch to ink to final touches on screen. It's taken a long time to merge our two (often) very different approaches to drawing, but it's been worth the effort, and we learn from each other nearly every day. We both like to approach the world with a sense of childlike wonder, though, so that's often our common ground on everything.

C: What have been some of your favorite projects to work on?

TPS: Other than our self-directed work, which 99% of the time ends up in our online shop, our favorite area to work on is the children's market. We both find that drawing things for an audience of children allows us the greatest freedom to play, to use our imaginations, and to really go for broke on bright colors! Specifically, we got the chance to illustrate for a bathroom line and a sleeping bag for The Land of Nod a few years back, which was awesome. We also really enjoy doing greeting cards and have had a good working relationship with American Greetings for a few years now.

Image source: This Paper Ship

C: Can you describe your studio in Saxapahaw, NC?

TPS: Saxapahaw is a hundred-plus-year-old cotton mill and mill village about 20 minutes west of Chapel Hill. The mill shut down 20 years ago but has since been rebuilt into a small community of businesses and loft apartments, and we're blessed to live and work out of one of them. We wake every day, walk downstairs with tea and coffee in hand, and go to work at a vintage drawing table and letterpress among the old brick walls, massive steel roof beams, and original floorboards pitted from cotton spinners.

Fairy Tale Quilt Sketch. Image source: This Paper Ship

C: Tell us about the stunning Fairy Tale quilt you designed for Salty Oat! What inspired the theme and color choices?

TPS: First, we had a blast doing this—it belongs among the projects in question 3! We had decided on a loose fairy tale theme for our baby girl due October 3 (still not here as of the time of this writing), so we took the basic idea of medieval European banners and used them as the basis for the quilt pattern. In the alternating rectangles with images in them, we drew objects that were personally meaningful to us, but also worked well as general heraldic-style symbols—a ship (for This Paper Ship), the fleur-de-lis of Florence (one of her middle names, where we honeymooned), a bird (inspired from a vintage wall decoration from Ashley's grandma's house), etc. For the colors, we wanted to go bright and make the design work for both boys and girls; we were inspired by Disney's immaculate Sleeping Beauty and their vibrant treatment of color in a Middle Ages setting.

Image source: This Paper Ship

C: Where can readers purchase your work? Any upcoming events or exciting projects you'd like to share?

TPS: We currently are selling solely at our Etsy shop, but are also working on a new shop site coming soon. The next market we'll be vending at is the Saxapahaw Holiday Market in early December at the beautiful Haw River Ballroom—come on out if you can, and you just may be able to meet little miss Sadie in her holiday best! We plan to do a lot of craft markets in the new year, which we'll be announcing on social media as we book them up (@thispapership on just about everything). We're also really excited to announce that we're finalists in the Martha Stewart American Made 2015 Awards, so we would be honored to have you go vote for us! You can vote up to 6 times a day until October 19. (You can see our profile and vote here.)

Thank you so much to Joel and Ashley for taking the time to answer my questions and for designing a quilt for the shop, and congrats to them on their growing family! You can find their quilt in the shop here.

oakshott scandinavia + a bartow baby quilt

The lovely team at Sew Mama Sew recently sent me a bundle of fabrics from Oakshott Fabrics' Scandinavia collection. When they asked that I create something Scandinavian-inspired, I immediately thought of the interiors of Scandinavian homes I'd seen on Pinterest and Design*Sponge, and wanted to create something that would fit into those clean, modern spaces. When I received the stack of shot cottons, I experimented with a few different quilt blocks based on Scandinavian surface patterns---including improv curves and plus signs---but none of them seemed quite right.

While continuing to brainstorm ideas, the Bartow Quilt pattern by Carolyn Friedlander came to mind. The clean lines and simple layout of this free pattern for Robert Kaufman suggested to me that it would be right at home in a modern interior, so I set to work cutting strips from each of the pastel fabrics to create a baby quilt.

I used a combination of cream shot cotton and white cotton for the top's background, and I backed the quilt with a soft Melody Miller linen-cotton print that I picked up in Japan last year, which included many of the colors from the bundle: baby pink, lavender and mint green.

I used cream thread for the cross-hatch quilting, and I machine bound the quilt with leftover Oakshott scraps, using my newest favorite method for binding.

Many thanks to Sew Mama Sew and Oakshott Fabrics for this beautiful fabric bundle! I enjoyed working in a new-to-me color palette and taking on a fun challenge.

Be sure to check out the beautiful projects made from the same bundle of fabric by these other talented makers: 

Jessica Skultety from Quilty Habit
Jennifer Fullerton from Never Just Jennifer

Mary Kolb from Mary on Lake Pulaski
Casey York from The Studiolo
Deborah Fisher from Fish Museum and Circus

P.S. A winner was selected for the Modern Sampler Quilt pattern giveaway and announced in the last post. There's still time to grab a pattern from the Zakka Workshop store for 20% off with the code QUILTALONG, and sew your first block for the Modern Sampler Quilt Along by the end of the month!

sewing with mini charms + a new quilt

Thanks to my job at Spoonflower, I've had the good fortune to attend a number of Quilt Markets over the years. As anyone who has attended this event knows, many fabric companies give away mini charm packs (2.5" squares) of fabric to attendees to promote upcoming collection releases. I managed to snag two mini charm packs of Vanessa Christenson's fabrics in the past few years, and recently took the time to turn them into a quilt.

Inspired by this Amish Hourglass quilt, I cut each of the squares into triangles, and sewed them to the corners of solid white squares. Unlike the original inspiration, I sewed the triangles to each of the squares' corners, so that once sewn together, they created scrappy squares on point.

For the backing, I used a long-saved gray-and-mustard print from Amy Butler's Midwest Modern line, which turned out to be the perfect complement to Vanessa's prints.

Continuing with the backing's color scheme, I quilted a large grid in gray thread, and made a gray, scrappy binding from some favorite prints.

I love how the quilt incorporates so many colors and prints, yet thanks to the block's minimal design, remains simple and modern. This is definitely a block pattern that I would like to experiment with more, especially by limiting the number of triangles I add. This quilt is now available in the shop, ready for gifting.

keeping it simple

Though I finished this quilt last year (and am only getting around to blogging about it now!), I actually started it back in 2010, not long after we moved to Maryland. I made the blocks as part of the Stitch DC Mystery Quilt Along, and stashed them away until last year.

I stuck with a lime green and periwinkle color palette, using prints from Amy Butler, Heather Bailey, and Cloud9 Fabrics. Though I played around with numerous layouts and considered incorporating borders and sashing, I wound up laying out the blocks in a simple grid pattern, which I think suits it perfectly!

I selected a fun, bright Amy Butler print from my stash for the back and love how it coordinates with the front. For the binding, I used a light blue and white seersucker stripe for a pop of texture. After quilting and washing, the quilt came out so soft and squishy---perfect for snuggling.

It's so nice to finally have this quilt done! It's now for sale in the Salty Oat Etsy shop.

UPDATE 11/21/14: This quilt is now available for purchase at Cary Quilting Company, in downtown Cary, North Carolina.

All photos by Caroline Okun. 

christmas in july

Before mailing off Christmas gifts last December, I snapped a few photos, which I'm finally getting around to posting, if you'd like to see...

For my twin nephews, I made two sets of bibs from this excellent pattern, using a crab print I picked up on a trip to Nashville last fall and prints from Denyse Schmidt's Chicopee line.

I also made some simple quilted placemats, using fabric from Cloud9 Fabrics' Monsterz collection and a kitchen print gifted from a friend.

I used my favorite tutorial and a Leah Duncan print from Grey's Fabric to make some pillowcases for my parents.

And finally, I made a pair of quilt-as-you-go potholders with rounded corners, using green scraps.

Have you started planning any handmade projects for next Christmas? Any favorite tutorials you'd recommend?

P.S. I'm posting more over on Instagram these days. Come follow along!

houndstooth baby quilt

Happy New Year! Just before the end of the year, I was able to finish up a quilt I'd been working on throughout the fall. While at Quilt Market last spring, I had the pleasure of meeting Vanessa Christenson and snagging her Houndstooth Quilt pattern, which I'd been eyeing for some time.

I made the crib-size version of the pattern, using scrappy low-volume prints and solid black. The piecing took quite some time---which made me thankful that I was making the smallest version!---but I loved seeing the blocks come together to form the houndstooth pattern.

I backed it with an orange crosshatch and a light gray Heather Ross print from her Crafty Chloe line for Hancock Fabrics, and bound it with a dark gray polka dot by Lotta Jansdotter. I'm definitely leaning toward polka dot bindings for all of my future quilts!

I quilted it with my favorite straight lines in light gray thread, and tossed it in the wash to make it crinkly and ready for snuggling.

If you'd like to see a few more photos, I've added this quilt to my Etsy shop.

triangle baby quilt

Little Bits Quilting Bee is by far one of my favorite quilting books. Its pages are filled with quilts that feature a fresh, modern perspective; its author, Kathreen Ricketson, had such an amazing style. I recently finished this triangle baby quilt---my second quilt using one of the book's patterns (my Prismatic quilt was the first)---and love how it turned out.

The front features triangles cut from a reproduction print charm pack that I picked up in New Hampshire at Keepsake Quilting's annual summer tent sale, arranged in color order.

I backed it with an apple print by Alexander Henry and quilted it with straight lines that follow the angles of the triangles' sides. Inspired by my Craftsy class potholder, I rounded the corners and bound the quilt with a red-and-white bias tape. The rounded corners are probably my favorite part.

You can find the quilt for sale in my Etsy shop.