Hitting the Blocks

Phew! After over 75 different designs and almost 200 hours of hand-stitching, my quilt is in the mail (please, please USPS, do not be late!!!).

For those of you who are unfamiliar with the Hoffman Challenge, here is the company’s own definition:

“Every year, a team from Hoffman Fabrics chooses an upcoming fabric design and then issues a challenge to quilt, clothing, doll and accessory makers to create an original item using the fabric…Judging emphasizes originality and creativity, creative use of the challenge fabric as it realtes to other fabrics, visual impact, and workmanship.”

My original idea involved a geisha wearing a challenge fabric kimono. Much to my chagrin, I discovered (after several dozen design tries) that one of the challenge winners from a few years ago had the same idea. Sigh. So, I pitched that and tried again. What I finally came up with was a giant urn with cherry blossoms in it, sitting on a window sill. By the time I was finished, I’d done hand-piecing, hand-quilting (tear-away stabilizer is my new best friend), 3-D applique, homemade piping, yo-yo flowers, and beadwork. Oh, and poetry writing too. Mixed media indeed!

Here’s the underlying design made using EQ6 (oh, marvelous, marvelous EQ!). I settled on using the traditional Storm at Sea block, mainly because I love the movement it creates. The cream-colored blocks are where I appliqued a huge vase.

The pieced and quilted block. Those little triangles were way too tiny for me to do on the machine (well, I could have, but hand-piecing was actually much easier). The “ribbons” created with the cream and brown fabrics are outlined with quilting. That was originally all that I was going to do, but then I did the flowers and leaves and finally the diamonds.

Each of the brown and cream diamonds is quilted with a spiral design in variegated browns. Okay, I confess–I had to quilt them because they were puckering funny. Mainly that cream with the brown veining. Serves me right for using a substandard fabric in with all the nice designer stuff.

The center square is fussy cut from the challenge fabric and quilted with a cherry blossom in variegated pinks.

I also quilted pale green leaves in the two leaf fabric squares.

Only after I finished the quilt and wrote a tanka for it did it occur to me that the spirals were like storm winds blowing the leaves and blossoms about.

Continues in next post

Howdy!

Not playing hooky this time. Nope, I’m neck deep in the Hoffman Challenge, which is due July 25th. I don’t really think I’m an accomplished enough seamstress to actually win, but I fell in love with this year’s challenge fabric, so I decided to give it a shot.

So…after 75 (yes, 75) different rough drafts (thank goodness for EQ6), I finally came up with a design I liked. However, since the patches involved are fairly small triangles, I am doing it all by hand–machine-piecing triangles is just asking for stretchy bias hassles. And since I’m rather new to this hand-sewing business, the piecing is going very slllooowwwly.

So, off I go to stitchy-stitch whilst the Punkin sleeps.

TTFN

PS The For Sale section of Hitting the Blocks is now updated with better links to our Ebay store. Check it out!

Eleven cushions. Four curved backs, four large seats, and three small ottoman/coffee table. I’ve decided Lily (my machine) and I don’t do upholstery projects (except for myself). Enough said.

Now back to my previously scheduled life.

Wahoo!

Finally got the last of my baby quilts done (for now). This one is the smallest I’ve done in a while, and took the longest to get to its little girl. But now it’s there, and everybody’s happy.

Heidi’s folks didn’t know this was coming, so all I had to go on was yellow and purple, and nothing terribly frou-frou. Heidi’s mum is a dear friend from college, so I did have a pretty good idea of what she would and wouldn’t like.

A special thanks to those of you who turned in your squares so I could make this!

Not much more to mention, so I’ll be a good girl and go get the last of the couch cushions I’m re-covering done so I can focus on my next project–the Hoffman Challenge.

Three baby quilts in as many months. Granted, I didn’t sew one of them (see previous post), but still…that’s a lot of quiltage. And I’m almost done a fourth. Only nine months behind schedule on that one.

Anyhoo, here’s Tyler’s quilt. If you can’t tell, he had a cowboy theme going. His mom had already made some bedroom accessories from the green, red, and cowboy print fabrics, and gave me the extras so the quilt would fit in even better.

The horse is one I found in a book, but had to redraft from an 8″ by 11ish” applique to a 2′ by 2′ square. The fabric for the body I’d had hanging around for almost 8 years–it was leftover from a shirt my mother made for a former roommate. I used double batting to give the body depth, hand-quilting it once as a 2′ by 2′ section, then sewing it into the main quilt and hand-quilting it again. I think the fringed mane and tail are my favorite part. They’re so much fun to play with

I’m hoping to have the last (whew) baby quilt done by the end of this week, so I’ll get that up as soon as I can.