Back in the fall, my grandfather was in the hospital and I had asked for star blocks to help make a quilt for him. I've since been absent from blogging while dealing with an unrelated death in the family, so now that I'm back I wanted to show you all how beautifully this quilt came together!
Roughly half the blocks were made by me, and the others were donated by kind friends from the blogging and Instagram communities including my name-twin Eileen, Rebecca, Lisa, Sandra, Lalaluu, Cathy, and Julie. I'm fond of how striking this quilt is, but I'm mostly just honored and humbled by the kindness of fellow quilters.
This quilt was given to my grandparents at Christmas and they were delighted with it; my grandfather is doing much better now and has made a full recovery! Thank you to everyone who has made blocks and sent well wishes.
I also finally finished the behemoth Goodnight Irene queen sized quilt for my cousin and his wife in time for Christmas. This one used mostly Denyse Schmidt fabrics and was longarmed by Shannon Parrott of River House Quilting.
Hello! I'm Eileen, and I'm excited to be part of the 2015 New Quilters Blog Hop. I'm fortunate enough to have a day job that allows me to be creative, doing illustration and freelance art for various clients in NYC. I mainly work in children's media including card games and comics. I've always loved to play with blocks of color and patterning; last year I illustrated and published a book of fashion art that got me interested in fabric patterns and prints.
Since I grew up with a grandmother who lovingly made us all quilts, it wasn't a very big jump from there to learning to sew myself!
I began my first quilt in the fall of 2014, and it's been an interesting learning curve to say the least! I'm very grateful for the internet as a whole and the quilt blogging community for all the invaluable advice and support I've received already. Without all of the great tutorials that are out there, I suspect I'd have given up midway through my first (regrettably queen sized, as I don't do things by halves) quilt.
I started blogging to keep a record of what I'd made, and also to connect to other quilters since it's not a community I have much access to offline. NYC is great and we do have some incredible fabric shops, but quilting is not the most common hobby here!
I haven't made many quilts yet, but I can see how much I've improved already - mainly in speed and confidence as I learn shortcuts from other bloggers. These are the quilts I've finished thus far:
It is incredibly satisfying to be able to see myself improving! I'm becoming more comfortable not only with basics but also with experimenting already Sewing feels almost like meditation to me - I can just sink into the zone when I'm working with fabric.
One of the most useful tools I've found since I started blogging was the Pin It! extension for my browser - if you use Chrome, this extension gives you a little button to automatically pin an image to your Pinterest boards whenever you hover over it. This lets me quickly add pins even if a blogger's website doesn't have a built in Pinterest button on their images. I've also started tagging my photos in Adobe Lightroom, which I use to edit them; this allows me to search my photos as if I'm using blog tags and quickly find anything I need on my computer.
The biggest tip I have about quilting, though, is that sometimes you just need to trust yourself and go with it.
I had bought a fat quarter pack of Anna Maria Horner's Pretty Potent line when I fell in love with the fabric, and then I spent a few weeks staring at it every time I walked by my sewing table. We all know how it goes: you impulse buy some fabric, swearing you'll save it until the perfect project falls out of the sky into your lap... and then it sits there while you can't properly use or enjoy it.
I realized that what I loved most about this particular fabric was the large scale prints, and that I wanted to be able to look at it and use it every day - so one night I walked by it, turned back around, pulled it all off the shelf and just started slicing into it. I cut large half square triangles to keep the pattern as intact as possible.
It wasn't big enough to be a lap quilt and I'd run out of fabric, so I whipped up a border with some grey solid I had on hand and used the few remaining scraps to make flying geese. The small amount of scrap forced me to get creative, and I enjoy the partial border more than I would have a symmetrical full border of geese, so it worked out!
Do you have fabric sitting in storage that's too precious to cut into? Have you ever changed your mind about a pattern or design part way through and worked what you'd already made into a finished quilt you're even happier with? Or are you the sort of quilter who's happiest if you plan everything out ahead of time?
Some final trivia about me:
I love reading, but can't stand audiobooks - I can't focus unless I'm looking at it! I envy those of you who can listen to audiobooks while you sew. I do, however, watch detective shows from behind the sewing machine. My favorite classic detective is Poirot.
I read a lot of comics due to my day job. If you've never read comics or graphic novels but are curious, I highly recommend Shaun Tan's "The Arrival." It's a gorgeous, wordless sepia-toned story about an immigrant's life arriving in a new town - a fantasy version of Ellis Island.
My dream vacation involves going to Ireland again, and I'm making it happen later this summer! I've been playing traditional Irish folk music on the fiddle for the last 20 years, so I'm going to be traveling to a lot of small towns to play music and study with a violin maker. I can't wait!
For fun, I'll leave you with a video of me playing an Irish reel called Maudabawn Chapel.
This is the first time I've participated in a swap on Instagram! I enjoyed scoping out my partner's feed and planning out this little quilt. I winged it a bit with this quilt, making a section of flying geese at a time and then moving around the layout as I went until I got something I liked.
Rearranging as I went was fun and freeing - and while my points aren't all perfect, my flying geese definitely improved! I quilted it with quarter inch straight lines using the walking foot as a guide.
I also included these two cute little kitties in amongst the flying geese. I think I hit a good balance of scrappiness through a variety of fabrics while still limiting the color palette and keeping it from becoming too busy. I'm very fond of the backing lightning bolt fabric as well.
I've just finished a quick new quilt top today; I suddenly wanted to cut into the fat quarters of Anna Maria Horner's Pretty Potent that I had in my stash, and there wasn't really much total yardage so I added the borders from a grey I had on hand and flying geese from the last scraps left. I really enjoyed working on this as the limited amount of the fabric on hand forced me to get creative. I actually love how the grey makes everything pop more, and the partial border is more interesting to me than if I'd had enough fabric to do full rows of flying geese.
Now if only I had any idea how to quilt this! I can't decide on a design.
It's finally finished - the first quilt I ever started!
The herringbone quilt for my friend Wendy is complete - at about four months after her birthday that it was intended for and just in time for warm weather, whoops, but she absolutely loved it and that's really all that matters.
I hand sewed the final edge on the binding for this quilt, which was a first for me. I do like the effect better than machine sewing even if it is time consuming. Many episodes of Poirot were watched in the final stretch of binding.
I ended up only using the green thread and quilting a simple quarter inch grid to keep the fabric center stage, and used a cute mint and white polka dot sheet I found at Target for the backing.
I surprised Wendy with the quilt during a picnic with friends at the Brooklyn Botanical Garden. If you are ever in NYC I recommend visiting; the gardens are breathtaking, particularly the Japanese koi pond and shrine. They have a cherry blossom festival every year as well.
Unfortunately I've been playing violin so many hours that I've caused myself some wrist and arm strain, so I'm taking it easy for a few days! I've had some therapeutic taping done to help reduce muscle strain and pain that is making it feel a lot better and they were nice enough to color coordinate it with my outfit:
So I was a few days late finishing up my April goal, but hopefully May will go a bit smoother!
My goal for May is to finish at least three Swoon blocks. I am making a large Swoon quilt for my grandparents who are moving out to the east coast near me and into an assisted living facility. All of the Swoon blocks for this quilt will have at least one fabric that reminds me of my grandparents, including a lot of midwestern motifs; they've been splitting time between Iowa and Arizona for the last few years.
They're both very sad to be moving away from their home but my grandmother is having some health difficulties and we wanted them to be closer to family, so they'll be a town over from my aunt and cousins, and just two hours from me by train which I am so glad for. I've been worried about them many hours away by plane because it would be so difficult for us to get out there quickly - and now I'll be able to see them more than once a year.
They have been married for over 65 years now and my grandfather still takes her dancing every week! They're still so in love all these years later.
My grandmother taught me to sew when I was little. I didn't stick with it at the time, but I've always respected her quilts and all the little decorations she's made for me over the years. Some day I will have to photograph them all properly so I can share them. She made every one of her six grandkids a quilt as a high school graduation present.
My graduation quilt is on my bed right now, claimed by Her Royal Highness the cat.
I'm a bit late to the party, but I'm joining in A Lovely Year of Finishes to try and get some of my WIP quilts finished. This chevron quilt was intended for a friend's birthday in January and it's now very late, so my April goal is to finish this quilt.
I'm also going to extend ALYoF since I started late - I still want to get 12 projects completed between now and the end of 2015. To that end, I'm going to get the simpler blocks finished for a Dallas Stars hockey quilt I'm making for a friend. All of the single patch and four patch blocks should be finished by the end of April, leaving me with just the stars and the paper pieced blocks to do in May.
Towards the end of 2014, I decided that I was going to do something very ambitious and get back into sewing by making a quilt from scratch for the first time. I hadn't sewn at all since I was twelve or thirteen and begging my grandmother to help me make a cosplay costume for a convention, and back then I hadn't been responsible for anything beyond stitching the edge of the skirt so I could feel like I was 'helping.'
I devoured quilting blogs, wasted away many an hour browsing online fabric shops, and finally ordered a bunch of charm packs and got to cutting and laying them out for weeks.
This is not that quilt.
Mainly because when I said 'ambitious,' I meant 'I started out queen sized and now I can't figure out how to baste the thing in a tiny NYC apartment.'
(sad trombone noises)
I'm planning to test out the tabletop basting I've read about, but in the mean time, I decided to make a small throw quilt for a friend to practice maneuvering something smaller through the sewing machine.
The cat is very fond of the birds and had to be locked in the bedroom so I could baste it.
This quilt uses Amy Smart's Fast Four-Patch Quilt Tutorial and makes a quick baby quilt or throw. It was easy even for me with my complete lack of experience to put together, and I would definitely recommend it to another beginning quilter or someone who wants to let the fabrics take center stage - the large blocks finish at 8in, so it's a good way to show off larger scale prints.
I used a variety of different bird prints in the large squares and a fat quarter bundle of Cotton + Steel basics in Splash that coordinated nicely for the four-patches. I also pieced a bird and hand-embroidered a label out of scraps for the back. It was quilted with simple straight line quilting, and while I need more practice to avoid puckering, I'm very proud of this as a first effort!
This quilt is now being packed up and shipped off as a surprise to a friend who's had a rough year - hopefully it will cheer him up a bit!
I'm looking forward to continuing to make more quilts, including finishing up my queen-sized monstrosity and making a surprise quilt for my grandparents who are moving into assisted living this spring.
