No fooling around here!

are my bread and butter.

For all of my professional life I've written for a living.

I want to 

you too.

I know I've been absent from my blog lately

since I find Instagram a bit faster and easier these days.

But its not about

A couple of weeks ago I explained the basics of letter making to a local guild.

Since I made the samples and got the pictures, 

I'm sharing it here as well.

To give credit: I was inspired and instructed in letter making by

Tonya Ricucci and her 2010 book Word Play Quilts.

It's out of print, but you can buy the the ebook  here.

The letters are easy to make once you think of them as wonky log cabins.

Here I've built the beginning of a log cabin and formed the letter L.

You can see the scale of the strips and letters from the background cutting mat.

I make my letters relatively small.

These finish at 3  to 3.5 inches.

If you continue all around, you've got yourself an O

If you like a more rounded look,

sew off the corners like a snowball block

and do it again with the background fabric.

This is the basic building block for lots of lower case letters

like c and u and d and b and p and h and q and g

some letters have more angles,

and its easier to slash a square of background material

and insert the letter strips.

This keeps the edges on the straight of grain and easier to work with 

when you join them with other letters.

That little bit on the bottom of  the V gets caught in the seam allowance

Here's an upper case E

And this is what you get when you put it all together.

Sharp eyed readers may notice this is a different V than above.

I made two letter sets and experimented with layout.

I also tweeked the E to get it to the right size.

Once you're happy with the shape and size, sew them together

and add narrow strips or spacers between where necessary

to make sure letters don't run into each other.

Here are both versions with strips sewn around them.

You can see the bottom V turned out just fine.

I know there's lots of ways to make letters,

but the advantage of this one is there's no set size or pattern

and you don't have to tear paper off the back once you're done.

I've written a previous tutorial on how to make letters from strip sets.

You can find that here.

Scored gold in Quilt Olympics

I've had a record-setting summer in giving quilts.

I gave away three large quilts and one small one in the course of a week, 

and they all now live in different Canadian provinces.

Above in the 13 inch mini quilt I posted about earlier

which decorates my friend C's new professorial office in Waterloo, Ontario.

Transplant Star,

60 by 84 inches

Machine pieced and quilted

This star quilt needed a home for a long time.

I started it last summer when I was recovering from an injury

and finally got it quilted and bound by spring.

It now lives with a college friend who had a liver transplant last spring.

When I gave it to him, he said

"You didn't need to make me a quilt."

Although I didn't make it for him,

he certainly deserves a quilt after a tough recovery.

This one lives on a Saskatchewan farm.

Balancing Act

55 by 70

machine pieced and quilted.

This one was also a long time work in progress,

which started from a bunch of scraps and sewn together parts 

from Quilt Diva Julie.

After too long as a flimsy, 

I managed to get it quilted and then hand stitched the binding

on my trip west,

where my friend M. is the new proud owner.

She liked the typographic elements in it,

especially after a long career as a journalist.

The back is a numbers print from IKEA,

which I chose because it was exactly the right size for this quilt

and because it had writing on it.

An accountant friend of M's admired it for its numerical qualities.

This one is moving to Edmonton, Alberta with M. 

Floating Chevrons

55 by 65

Machine pieced by me.

Hand quilted by my friend Yvonne

I've posted this one before,

and it was the quickest out the start gate

and first to the finish line of all of these.

I pieced most of this during a retreat in January,

and then Yvonne put it in her frame for handquilting.

We showed it in two local shows

and now it lives in Toronto

with our mutual friend L.

I feel great about giving away these quilts to good homes across the country.

I know they will be used and loved.

And they've cleared out some space on my quilt rack

as well as given me the satisfaction of sharing some quilt love with friends.

That's my gold medal story.

I'm linking up with TGIFF

and Confessions of a Fabric Addict.

The reason I quilt

I had some fun with a pile of 1.5 inch squares 

which were originally intended for a much larger charm quilt. 

I love playing with little bits, but really don't enjoy the fuss of cutting little squares from scraps. 

So I used them in a quilt about why I quilt. 

It measures about 20 by 30 inches and is machine quilted. 

Since this photo, I've ripped out the loopy meandering in the white background 

and replaced it with a small all-over pebbles.

I bordered the word with a green Kona solid, and again with a Kaffe print.

I had a bit of fun with the machine quilting, putting in a needle pulling thread off a spool.

This is also the first time I've experimented with dense quilting around a letter

to make it pop.

What is the reason you quilt? To to touch fabric? 

See designs form under your fingers? To create? To buy more fabric?

This quilt is hanging in the MCC Quilt Show and Sale in Winnipeg, 

which opens today and runs through Sunday.

If you're near here, stop by.

Update: When I stopped in at the show, I overheard a young girl saying

"That quilt says touch but we're not supposed to touch the quilts."

Too funny.

I helped to hang the show yesterday and there's lots of great stuff to see,

as well as lots of goodies in the sale room, including my zippy bags made from upholstery samples.

I'm linking up with other Friday finishers at TGIFF

Confessions of a Fabric Addict

Crazy Mom Quilts

Small Friday finish

9 by 12 inches

machine pieced and quilted

I only have one small finish for this week

made of red triangle, and with the motto of a local university.

I was inspired by their banner on their website

made up of what looks to my quilter's eye

as randomly pieced triangles in various shades of red.

The only quilting on this is the words,

quilted in 28 wt. grey thread.

I stitched over the words twice.

Last week, an out-of-town blog reader contacted me

and asked if I would take her little bits and leftovers.

L's been reading my blog from start to finish

and is making some word quilts.

She gave me this stack of lovelies when she was in town.

I'm always happy for scraps from others,

but I really like two special bits:

that rusty fabric L. made by discharging colour by bleaching

and this vintage embroidery piece,

made by L's mother-in-law.

I'm thinking of something special to make with that.

I'm linking up with Sarah and Amanda.

Freshly quilted

Little bit of free motion quilting going on here.

First up are three letters of a larger word.

I'm outlining the letters and then quilting in filler designs.

I have a bigger plan, but these help me warm up 

and loosen up for my bigger quilting projects.

Such as this toddler quilt,

made from wof scraps in a variety of blues.

I'm not quite done the quilting on the larger blue sections.

Here's a back view with some of the quilting motifs.

I'm taking my inspiration from the prints on the front.

Another view of the top.

I'm linking up with Lee at Freshly Pieced.

Be-ginning a project

I'm playing around with an idea here on writing on quilts.

I've made many word quilts with pieced in letters.

Now that I've built up some skills in free motion quilting

I've decided to write on fabric in another way.

 

Here's my first word: "Be"

It may be the start of a sentence.

Stay tuned.

The back: a vintage linen map tea towel.

The whole thing measures 8.5 by 11 inches

 

I'm linking up with TNTN  and WIP Wednesday.

Keep moving!

Here's my word for the year: Move.

Move my body, move my life,

and move more fabric out of my sewing room

instead of in.

I made it as part of the word challenge over at 15 minutes play.

So I decided to take my own advice,

and move some bits and pieces out of the drawer and onto the design wall.

These are silk noile blocks that I strip pieced onto foundations.

I have a tutorial for this curved strip piecing technique under my tutorial tab here.

 

I pinned them on a purple silk background.

Remembering my mother's wool scene from last week, I tried a horizontal approach.

I think this has the beginnings of a landscape portrait.

 

Even better if it is cropped.

 

I'm linking up with TNTN WIP Wednesdays.

A sparkly and long overdue finish for Friday

Faith Seeking Understanding

free pieced letters

hand quilted and hand beaded, machine quilting

24 by 42 inches

This quote from St. Anselm of Canterbury dates back to medieval times

so I used the idea of an illuminated letter

(large, decorated first letter)

The capital F is hand beaded with seed beads,

outlined with a double line of big stitches

and then again in gold bugle beads.

I also included the English version of the Latin quote

in free motion machine quilting

Here's the back where you can see the density of hand stitching

and the machine handwriting

This quilt also incorporates a huge variety of text prints

in the background and the letters.

Fides quaerens intellectum

which translates to faith seeking understanding.

If you want a more theological understanding, leave me a comment and we'll talk.

I'm linking up to Amanda's last week of Finish Up Fridays

and Sarah's Can I get a whoop whoop?
and Sew Many Ways' Find a Friend Friday

A seasonal message

One more post with word quilts in honour of Tonya's new book.. I'm beavering away (is that just a Canadian expression?) on a big deadline, but I'm hearing about lots of people felled by the flu, so here's a message for you:

This was from the Liberated Amish challenge earlier this year. I made the deadline for the top, but now it's stalled while I decide if I will handquilt feathers in the centre medallion or go with the first plan and tie it to fleece.

This quilt made it safely home earlier this week, after hanging in my local library along with six of my other quilts for three months. I'm happy to see it again, and now it can keep my 14-year-old son warm.