Tag Archives: bloggers quilt festival

Blogger’s Quilt Festival: Doctor Who Quilt Revisited

Doctor Who Bed Quilt, 2013

Welcome to my second post for Amy’s Creative Side’s twice-annual Blogger’s Quilt Festival, this time in the Bed Quilt category.

Did you miss my first post? It’s right here!

Yeah, that’s right, I’m posting twice…Bloggers can enter two categories this year and my 2013 has been very quilty!

Also? Be sure to read to the end for a fun giveaway!

There are a couple of themes going on my BQF posts. 1) Fandom! Fandom! Fandom! and 2) Quilts made for people I love.

If you read my previous post, then you know I made an Agatha Christie wall hanging for my best friend’s birthday. This post is all about the Doctor Who quilt I made earlier this year for my daughter’s first dorm room.

To celebrate the 50th Anniversary of Doctor Who, my other quilting site, Fandom In Stitches, hosted a Doctor Who Stitch Along. Myself, along with an number of other talented designers, presented 12 free hand embroidered designs depicting the first 11 Doctors plus the TARDIS.

For my own project, I created a unique layout that would ultimately make a quilt large enough for my daughter to use while living away from home.

She’s a freshman this fall, and it was especially important to me to create a quilt that was meaningful to her.

The eleven Doctors and the TARDIS are surrounded by faux mitered blocks with an army of paper pieced Daleks marching around the border. (Free Dalek pattern).

The Doctors are hand embroidered using DMC on Moda Marble Dots.

The entire quilt was free-motion quilted by me on my Baby Lock Quest Plus.

Above, you can see the quilt on her first-ever dorm bed! I made the quilt at the foot of the bed, too. It’s also something she loves…InuYasha!

She texted this photo to me, and I still tear up a bit when I think of her wrapped in quilts I made. 🙂

See the InuYasha quilt here!

And, because I know it’s likely to come up, you can get the free TARDIS pattern by me (see the throw pillow?) on Fandom In Stitches! 😉

My daughter’s favorite Doctor? This handsome guy here! She wanted swirly quilting, so that’s what she got!

Watch the video where I talk about this quilt!

We also invited our community to share their own designs, like this 50 Years block designed by Jessica used for the label on my daughter’s quilt.

See more pictures of this Doctor Who Quilt.

Get free Doctor Who patterns from Fandom In Stitches.

As an added bonus today, comment on this post with the name of your favorite book for a chance to win one of two prizes! I’ll be giving away a free copy of Quiltmaker’s Quilts from 100 Blocks and a copy of of Quiltmaker’s 100 Blocks, Vol 7. to TWO random commenters at the end of the festival!

Quilts From 100 Blocks includes my pattern Corn Maze and Quiltmaker’s 100 Blocks, Vol. 7 includes my pattern Make Lemonade. Want these magazines now? Get them in my Etsy shop!

There’s always lots going on around Sewhooked! In October, join me Name That Mustache and Crafts of Halloweens Past!

Don’t forget to check out the Blogger’s Quilt Festival for more fabulous quilts!

I hope to see you around!

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Featured Pattern: Faux Mitered Marvel, $8 on Craftsy

Blogger’s Quilt Festival: The Body In The Library Wall Hanging

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The Body in the Library, a 17″ x 25″ wall hanging

Welcome to my first post for Amy’s Creative Side’s twice-annual Blogger’s Quilt Festival! First post? Yes, that’s right! I will be entering two quilts this year!

Be sure to read to the end for a fun giveaway!

The timing of this particular festival could not be better as my Wall Hanging entry, The Body in the Library, was just finished earlier this month!

For weeks I’d been wracking my brain for an idea for the perfect birthday gift for Jewells, my best friend of almost 20 years.

While thinking about things I know for sure she enjoys, Agatha Christie came to mind.

On a whim, I began Googling.

Then I found this:

Immediately, I knew it was The One. This was what I was looking for and it HAD to be a quilt; in fact, it had to be THE birthday quilt!

Don’t the graphics just shout QUILT!?

Within moments of finding this image, I’d fired up EQ7 and begun drafting.

In approximately two days, I designed, paper pieced, hand embroidered, pieced, free motion quilted, bound & labeled this little gem.

The shelves of the quilt are entirely paper pieced. These three shelves contain more than 36 pattern pieces. Not pieces of fabric, but actual pattern pieces!

Watch the video where I talk about this quilt!

I straight-line quilted around the books and free-motion quilted the shelves, border and background, all on my Baby Lock Quest Plus.

“Agatha Christie” is hand embroidered using DMC in a font called Alpaca 54. “by” was drawn by me.

The back of the quilt shows the quilting much better than the front!

You can also see the tabs I created for hanging. To make them, I fold a 3″ square in half on the diagonal and stitch them onto the corners when attaching the binding. Simply place a dowel rod in the pockets and it’s ready to hang! The best way I’ve found to do this is by using two 3M Command wire hooks placed approximately 6″ apart. The label is a larger square created the same way as the pockets at the top.

The Body in the Library is a Miss Marple mystery story. According to Freaky Trigger, this particular cover is the 1942 Australian Collins Crime Club edition.

Quilts From 100 Blocks includes my pattern Corn Maze and Quiltmaker’s 100 Blocks, Vol. 7 includes my pattern Make Lemonade. Want these magazines now? Get them in my Etsy shop!

There’s always lots going on around Sewhooked! In October, join me Name That Mustache and Crafts of Halloweens Past!

Don’t forget to check out the Blogger’s Quilt Festival for more fabulous quilts!

I hope to see you around!

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Featured pattern: Jack Leaves The Light On, $6 on Craftsy

TTMT #59 – Nada Question

Grannie’s Trunk Quilt

28 Replies

I see and touch a lot of quilts. With my work through The Linus Connection, literally hundreds of quilts will go through the hands of myself and the other volunteers when we distribute quilts each month. With that many quilts, it can sometimes slip my mind how special every quilt really is. It’s the time, the thought, and the effort that makes a quilt a quilt.

This quilt is very special, indeed. My mom unearthed it from a trunk in my grandmother’s house after Grannie passed away. It started out in my hands as an awkward UFO made of hand-cut (and perfectly proportioned!) flour sack blocks. These are not reproductions, these are the real deal, some of which still showed stitching marks from where the bags of flour were originally stitched closed.

It was very long, about eight blocks longer than you see in the photo here. It was narrow, too, just a long, skinny quilt top, with the occasional hole from being folded for 40 years (give or take a few). My mom estimates the fabrics themselves are much older because the original sacks were used as pillowcases before they were cut up for quilting.

The first thing I did was remove the extra length. Then, I very carefully removed the damaged blocks, most of which were across the middle, replacing them with some of the ones I removed from the length. All the blocks left over became new rows to make the top wider.

And then it sat in a bag in my sewing room for over a year.

It was my amazing friend Linda that inspired me to finish. She co-owns a long-arm quilt machine and was nudging our friends to share thing with her to quilt. I pulled out the border-less top and what remained of a bolt of muslin I bought several years ago. There was the perfect amount for borders and backing. Poking around my supplies, I realized I had batting, too! Obviously, the quilt needed to be complete.

Yesterday, Linda returned the quilt to me, which I have named “Grannie’s Trunk Quilt.” I added binding and washed the quilt – the first time this fabric has been washed in ~40 years! It washed up beautifully, crinkling just the way an old quilt should.

What will I do with it now that it’s done? I think it’s going back to the farm house where it began. It’s journey would be full circle then, and that feels right to me.

So, Mom, this quilt will be coming home soon. I hope you like it.

A close up of the beautiful fabrics and the scrunchilicious quilting.

Linda added flowers in the border, such a wonderful touch!

(L-R) Grannie, my sister Stephanie, Pa, me, and towering over us in the back, my “little” brother, Nathan. March 1994.

Thanks once again to Amy for hosting another wonderful Blogger’s Quilt Festival. I hope you’ll join in, too!

Happy Quilting!

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Blogger’s Quilt Festival: Facets of Friendship

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It’s hard to believe it’s already time for another Blogger’s Quilt Festival! It doesn’t seem so long ago that I was writing up a my post for the Spring Festival!

Facets of Friendship, 2008

Last year, my best friend, Jewells, of Julia Makes Stuff, had a big birthday. It was one of those lovely, once-in-a-decade numbers that seem ever so daunting when we’re staring them in the face.

She and I have been friends since college. In some ways, we’re polar opposites, but in all the ways that count, we’re not. The older we get, the more in common we seem to have. Jewells has been there for me through some crazy times in my life. She knew me before I started dating my husband of 15 years, before I had kids or a college degree. She stood up for me at my wedding and has been more like a sister to me than anything. The only thing I would change about our relationship is the geographic distance between us.

Jen & Jewells in 2007

To celebrate the big birthday and all the years we’ve been friends, I designed a quilt for her called Facets of Friendship. In it, I used only scrap fabrics from other projects I’d done. I wanted her to have a little piece of (almost!) everything I’ve made over the last decade and a half, just like she’d been woven in and out of my life over that time.

The quilt is inspired by a quilt top I found in a thrift store. It was completely hand pieced and unfinished, with a couple of blocks coming apart at the seams when I found it. I made my own version of the Four Pointed Star/Arkansas Snowflake pattern (paper pieced, of course!) in order to fill in those couple of damaged blocks. Those couple of blocks spawned the idea that to make an entire quilt for Jewells with that same paper pieced pattern.

The Thrift Store quilt that inspired Facets of Friendship

Over the course of several months, I shared lots of teaser photos, trying to not give more of a clue than I could. I wanted her to know I was working on something big for her, because, in my opinion, anticipation is one of the best parts of life!

Pile of Fabric
collecting the scraps (teaser #1)

all the quarters pieced (close up)

all the quarters pieced…close up! (this was teaser #2)

I also took photos of the process, so I could share them with her once the quilt was finished and in her hands.

arranging the quarters into blocks…with Marie’s help

The back pieced…with the paper still on

chain piecing the neutral border

the top pieced

My favorite way to gift a quilt – in a coordinating pillow case.

Jewells’ birthday is coming up next week on October 16. Her gift this year is not quite so exciting as last year, but she is still my best friend, so I guess that’s okay!

If you’re reading this, I’d love for you to take a minute to tell my best friend Happy Birthday over on her blog!

Quilting: Bloggers Quilt Festival

28 Replies

I just heard of the First Annual Blogger’s Quilt Festival yesterday and my first thought was “why didn’t I think of that?!” What a great idea, bringing quilting bloggers together by sharing photos of our quilts.

The idea is to post photos of your favorite quilt that you’ve made and tell it’s story. Excellent idea, huh!

My Magical Lens, designed, pieced and quilted by Jennifer Ofenstein

My all time favorite quilt that I have made, absolutely hands-down, is my Harry Potter quilt. I embarked on this project in early 2006. My family had long been fans (we started reading Harry in 1999) and I’d been quilting for a few years. After discovering what so many HP crafters now know, that licensed fabric is out of print and nigh on impossible to find (and expensive if you do!), I decided to try to design my own.

The very first HP block I designed was Hedwig, though not the one that ended up in the quilt (you can see it in the photo below…bleargh!). It was pretty dreadful, too complicated and just bad, bad, bad. I’d only ever designed simple blocks before, so I changed gears and started with a broom and a lightning bolt. The stack of blocks began to grow. All through the process, I was sharing on the Harry Potter Crafts Yahoo! Group. Members started asking if I’d share my patterns, and before long, my little craft site, then called Jen’s Crochet & Crafts, grew into sewhooked, full of all kinds of crafts, crochet, and now paper pieced patterns.

I went to Lumos in Las Vegas in 2006 and took my HP blocks with me to share with my online craft friends. By this time I was a Moderator at Harry Potter Crafts. Sharing my designs and other projects I’d made with them for myself and friends, on top of the fact that I knew HTML, led to a year and a half as a Crafty Witch at The Leaky Cauldron where I made truly amazing friends. The quilt that wasn’t a quilt yet was already helping me to connect with people.

In the fall of 2006, I decided to attend Phoenix Rising in New Orleans which, like Lumos, was a Harry Potter fandom conference, and was scheduled to take place in May 2007. Even though my quilt wasn’t even close to done, nor was I close to having enough blocks designed for a whole quilt, I entered a mock-up for consideration in the Phoenix Rising art gallery, and was, to my surprise, accepted. With a deadline looming, I started churning out patterns and blocks, finishing up the quilt in March of 2007, just two months before it was to be shown in New Orleans.

This quilt is more just a million bits of fabric stitched together. It represents all the years I’ve loved Harry Potter and some of my favorite things about the series. It has brought me friends, and fans, and brought more quilters that I can count into the wonderful world of paper piecing. In the fall of 2007, I started hp_paperpiecing on Livejournal as way to share more with other Harry Potter quilters than just patterns. I’ve posted over 100 unique HP themed blocks there and have in the process met a lot of awesome quilters and designers, many brand new to paper piecing.

The mock-up submitted for submission into the Phoenix Rising art gallery (complete with horrible Hedwig).