Going Fractal With AGF Stitched

Welcome to the Fractal Blog Hop hosted by the Fat Quarter Shop and sponsored by Art Gallery Fabrics! The Fat Quarter Shop provided the free Fractal Quilt pattern and a great video tutorial and Art Gallery Fabrics provided the eye candy. Oh, and the Fat Quarter Shop has a Fractal Quilt Kit too!

For my version of the quilt, I picked out fabrics from Frances Newcombe's Utopia line, from Katarina Roccella's Indelible line (Spirodraft Carbon), and from Katarina's Recollection line (Cuneiform Script Cast). It's not a great photo, but I love, love, love how these fabrics play together!

The Fractal Quilt Pattern uses Y seams. Yeah, I know what you are thinking because that's what I thought. Y seams? Usually, it's a no thank you, but the pattern looked so fun that I had to give it a try. Conquer my fear of Y seams, I must!

The pattern uses the Creative Grids Kites Plus template ruler. It was the first time I'd used that template ruler shape for making Y seams and I have to say that I was pretty impressed. The Creative Grids template has a little hole in the ruler where you can mark your 1/4" seam. 

It worked beautifully. Look that that Y seam! :D

And that join! 

The centres aren't all that perfect, but most of them are. Woo hoo! Happy dance!

Despite my vow to 'stick to the pattern', I took a little detour. I decided to do three by three colour wheels and used more of the Spirodraft Carbon for the background. I think the Spirodraft is perfect for the background. 

I also decided not to add pieces to square up the corners of the quilt. I think that will be a first for me.

And there's my little helper trying to hold it up to show the full top. The top finished at 73" by 54" - a great large throw quilt.

Since I changed up the layout of the front, I wanted to use the 'leftovers' for the back with this Utopia print.

This was like putting together a puzzle and I'm very pleased with how it turned out. 

The top and backing layered...

Wouldn't it be fun to do a spirograph-style quilting on this? I have a few fun ideas for the quilting so I better get cracking!

Check out what the other participating AGF Stitched bloggers have done with this pattern:

Katarina Roccella
Erica Jackman of Kitchen Table Quilting
Christina Lane of Sometimes Crafter
Natalia Bonner of Piece N Quilt
Riane Menardi of Vessel Quilts
Afton Warrick of Quilting Mod
M-R Charbonneau of Quilt Matters (oui, c'est moi!)
Jess Frost of The Elven Garden
Caroline Hulse of Sew Caroline
Rachel McKeeman of The Floral Suitcase

I can't wait to see what they did with it!

Oh, and Y seams? No more fear, baby! :)

TGIFF! - Rainbow Creek Meets Niagara Falls

Happy, happy Friday, all! I'm excited to share my finished Rainbow Creek quilt with you! Woo hoo! Yes, another rainbow quilt. There can never be enough rainbow quilts, right? Right!

This was made using a jelly roll of Kona's New Bright Palette, a few more strips for the rainbow from my stash and some Kona Charcoal.

The quilting is straight-line like Mod 1600, but I added some wavy lines in some of the blue strips. Still love the fact that it looks quilted every 1/2" on the front, but when you flip it over, there are skipped lines. I don't know why, but little surprises like that make me smile. It's quilted with 50 wt. Aurifil 2630 on top (perfect match for Kona Charcoal!) and 2021 on the back. Yum!

The back uses the IKEA Numbers fabric paired with some good ole Cape Breton tartan. You'll be seeing a lot more of the Numbers fabric for my backings as I just snagged a bolt of it. Why a bolt? Well, it's been...wait for it...discontinued! Gasp! Thanks for the heads up, Katy.

Lessons learned:

• Do not assume that all the strips coming out of a jelly roll are the same length. This strip quilt would have been easier to keep square if I'd cut all the strips to the same size before sewing them together. I ended up cutting a lot away from the edges because I just sewed them all the strips together without checking their lengths.
• Taking photos on the Hornblower by the Falls is wet. Very wet. ;) My family is getting used to me bringing quilts along to get photos at interesting places. We'll see how long that acceptance lasts. LOL! Here are some of the outtakes:

Finished Size: 80" x 91"
Batting: Hobbs Heirloom

Linking up with the Lorna @ Sew Fresh Quilts who is hosting this week's TGIFF!

Bloggers Quilt Festival - Scrap{Bee} 2.0

I was planning on sharing the results of my minimalist quilt exercise today, but when I started taking pictures this morning, there were some rather noticeable water stains from removing a stain the other day. So it's in the wash right now. Fingers crossed! Lesson learned - don't bother spot cleaning a white quilt, just wash the whole thing! Barring any other quilty hiccups, I'll share it tomorrow.

No worries though because the Blogger's Quilt Festival starts today! Woo Hoo! I love this festival and always come away inspired and motivated to try something new. Thanks to Amy for organizing such a great event!

I decided to share my Scrap{Bee} 2.0 for the festival. It certainly feels like my biggest quilty accomplishment (literally and figuratively) over the last few months and I'm just so happy with how it turned out. :)

This quilt began as a challenge to use my more traditional fabric scraps in a modern design. I enlisted the help of my Don't Worry {Bee} Happy bee mates in 2012-13 for making most of the blocks. Huge thanks to these wonderful women:

Katie @ There & Back
Charlotte @ Twelfth Zodiac
Chelsea @ Pins and Bobbins
Elyse @ ElyseSusanDesign
Alisha @ A Squared Craft Affair
Marian @ LookWhatLadyFaceMade
Heather @ Winding Bobbins
Rebecca @ Sew Festive
Bianca @ Sweet Diesel Designs

Previous posts about this quilt and how I made it can be found here, here, here, and here.

The full frontal:

Each coloured square is quilted with a different motif in the coordinating colour. The background was improv quilted using a cream coloured Aurifil thread (thread colours below).

The backing is pieced with scraps from the front and some beige yardage from my stash.

This quilt has been a test at almost every step of the way, but I've learned so much and tried some new things throughout the process. My lessons learned can be found here.

Fabrics: Colours - scraps, Neutrals - Kona Parchment, Raffia, Bone, Oyster, Ivory, Natural, Cream, Eggshell, Champagne, Putty, Tan, Wheat, Sand and Essex Linen. Backing - Scraps

Thread: Aurifils 2000, 2314, 2140, 4093, 1243, 1320, 1135, 2581, 2740, 2460, 2870, 5017, 2875, 5124, 1104, 1100, 2885, 1240 and Gutermann 2626

Batting: Hobbs Heirloom

Finished size: 86.5" by 86.5".

I'm putting this in the ROYBGIV category of the Blogger's Quilt Festival. Hope you get a chance to check out the inspiration at the Festival and participate!

Up A Creek

Time for something fresh. New. Fast. I'm feeling the need, the need for Speed!

Inspired by this quilt and this quilt, I took a jelly roll of the New Bright Palette by Kona, paired each strip with a Kona Charcoal strip and then cut the Charcoal strips at somewhat varying lengths. If I just used the jelly roll, the quilt top would have been 82 inches long. I decided to add four more colours though so that the top would finish at 90" long and could handle the quilting without shrinking it too much.

As the strips got sewn together, I kept thinking that it looked like a creek, a rainbow creek more specifically.

The top's not quite together yet, but I'm already loving the rainbow progression.

I'm also working on my photography skills. I'm taking the Shoot It: Product Photography Class on Craftsy class, as well as reading Maria Elkins' tutorial and the Shoot That Quilt! site. I'm trying to get the whites in my quilts to look white, the reds and oranges to stop looking over saturated and the quilting to show. Not asking much, am I?

Below is one of my mistake shots, which I think looks kind of cool. Hope I can figure out how to do it on purpose. LOL!

Wishing you sunshine and rainbows today, my friends! ;)

I'm linking in to WIP Wednesday at The Needle and Thread Network, W.i.P. Wednesday at Freshly Pieced and Let's Bee Social at Sew Fresh Quilts.

TGIFF! - Rainbow Beaver Mug Rug

Welcome to TGIFF!

One of our Beaver leaders is stepping down so I wanted to do something nice for her. Her Beaver Leader name is Rainbow and she loves my rainbow quilts so it was fitting that this mug rug include some rainbow, don't you think? Ann Kelle Bright Remix stripe coming right up!

I also wanted the kids to have a chance to sign it so she'd have a keepsake from her time with us. We had them sign their names on the back with fabric marker. Despite being supervised, one of the kids managed to sneak in writing 'poo'. Grrr! I'm thinking that it may be a perfect spot for some creative appliqué. LOL!

Hope Rainbow likes her rainbow beaver mug rug!

An InLinkz Link-up

Scrap{Bee} 2.0 - A Work in Progress

The last time you saw the Scrap{Bee} quilt top, it looked like this:

It was a fun, twin-sized improv scrappy quilt. I liked it, but I didn't love it. There was actually another block that I had taken out so that it could be a 3 by 5 block quilt and I was going to use the remaining block on the back. 

Shortly after my last post about the top, I decided to take it apart, add the remaining block and change it to a 4 by 4 block layout. And I added an improv pieced border. 

I love it now. Absolutely love it! Now I feel it does better justice to all the work my Don't Worry {Bee} Happy bee mates did on their blocks. 

It's now 93" square!

I really like the rainbow spectrum arrangement of red purple to blue purple. It worked well with 10 Years And Still Over the Rainbow so I tried it with this layout too. It just feels more balanced to me than red to purple and gets the lighter colour value of yellow more centred in the spectrum.

More gratuitous? photos:

I like rainbow. :)

I'm linking up to WIP Wednesday at The Needle and Thread Network and to W.i.P. Wednesday at Freshly Pieced. Thanks Monika and Lee for hosting such great linkies!

I'm also linking up with Let's Bee Social at Sew Fresh Quilts!