Saturday, October 16, 2010

A Make-Over - Edited

I have been wanting to give this little blog a virtual make-over for about a month now.  I have played around with backgrounds and so forth but knew It was just not what I was hoping for.  I love to organize and had so many ideas in mind of how I wanted to better organize my blog but no idea of how to do it.  So after surfing around and tinkering more than I would like to admit, I finally figured out (kind-of) Templates, Pages, Widgets, and some new Gadgets.  Yippee Skippee!!  There are still a few kinks I have to work out and some more things I would like to add but it is a giant step in the direction I wanted to go!!  So here is the new and improved Happy Quilting.  I hope you enjoy!

*** Apparently another tweak I needed to work out was the comments.  I think I have it fixed now.  Thanks Shannon for the heads up.  If it still doesn't let you comment please email me so I can try to fix it again :)
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Friday, October 15, 2010

Anticipating Some Appliqué Fun!

I finished the top of my Project Modern Challenge today.  I took it outside to try and give you a good idea of the colors but unfortunately, it was pretty "lumpy".   Sorry, the squirrels burrowing holes is really doing numbers on our lawn.  Anyhow,  Can you see the "Press Your Luck" inspiration I mentioned in the previous post.  I love how it gives off the optical illusion that the blocks are "flickering".    



So now, it is time for some appliqué and I am so excited because I finally am going to have some play time with my birthday toy.  Oh ya, no more cutting out letters and shapes by hand, the Slice will do it for me and it will look perfect!  I can't wait to get cutting!!

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Tuesday, October 12, 2010

Project Modern

So a while ago I decided that I wanted to participate in Project Modern put on by the Modern Quilt Guild. (see the button on the side bar if you are interested). It consists of 4 challenges throughout the next year.  Challenge 1 is the Inspiration Challenge.  Basically the guidelines were to make a quilt based on the inspiration of your choice.  So ya, pretty broad.  I started to keep this in the back of my mind waiting for something to inspire me that I could turn into a quilt.  Okay, so fast forward to 2 weeks.  

My children were having a conversation with me about what kind of shows I watched as a child.  After I told them about several they said they wanted to see them.  So we all crowded around the computer for a little YouTube action.  Somehow we got to Press Your Luck.  Do you remember this?? This was my favorite game show as a kid.  I loved it!  I brought up some videos to show the kids.  They loved it too.  Something about all the flashing lights and of course the Whammies.  My 3 year old could not get enough of them  He laughed and laughed and kept asking me to play them again.

And then it hit me, Wham!!!  That's my inspiration.   


And then at almost the same moment of realizing I had inspiration I realized I already had the perfect fabric for this inspiration in my stash!!  Can you see how great this will be for making all of those "flickering" boxes.  And of course, there will be some whammies appliquéd.



I whipped up a design and set out to cutting this morning.  I was a little nervous as I only had a yard of each fabric and it was going to be close.  These are my leftovers after cutting the pieces for the top.  I don't even think there is enough left for a scrappy binding.  Stay tuned to see this Project Modern challenge comes together.


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Monday, October 11, 2010

Quilting Struggles but I Finished!

Okay, so I have never had so many troubles quilting a quilt.  I don't know what the deal was.  My thread just get breaking, constantly!!  It drove me nuts and so I decided to work on the quilt with the swirls, and that worked perfect.  So I thought, maybe my adjusting the tension had helped and started back on this again and AGGGHHH!  The thread started breaking again.  I just didn't get it.  But I perceived.  In the end, I decided that it must have just been a bad spool of thread.  Does that happen??  Has anyone else had this.  It was frustrating to no end.

But I kept plugging away, rethreading like crazy and seeing the light at the end of the tunnel. And then wham, it was done.  My Chubby Stars in Fall.  Thanks again Tracey for this amazing quilt-a-long.  This pattern was amazing.  So inventive and I just love the little 1" squares.

So here are some pictures with some of my thoughts about this quilt.

I love the scrappy binding!  Can you believe those chain squares are only 1 inch.   They are so cute and petite.

I pieced the back as well.  Don't you just love the way the leaves pop out in circles on the back.  That was an added bonus that I didn't plan but was really happy with.

I love the way the leaves turned out.  I am not so happy with the way the points of the stars turned out.  It looks like it would be so easy to just draw and arched triangle in a triangle but it was a little harder than I thought, it didn't help that my thread broke at least 3 times per blocks.  Ah well, at least the washing and drying helped to hide it a bit.

I really wanted the chain to kind of stand out so I decided to try pebbling on just the brown hoping that would create the desired effect.  It did, and I have to say, I love the look of it.  However, I haven't decided if I really like pebbling.   I think I will try again sometime when I am not having thread issues and then make a final decision if I like doing it or not.  But the fact that I love the look will probably have some sway on my decision :)
And here it is ready to go.  I have placed this in my Etsy shop.  All in all, I am pretty excited about the way this quilt turned out.

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Thursday, October 7, 2010

A New Free Motion Design

So I am really going all out on the free motion lately.  Here is my newest design attempt.  I think I am going to call it swirly.  Oh, and yes, that is a sneak peak of a little "baking" project for November.  Yup, you are going to have to wait a while to see it in full :)


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