Island Batik Pieced to Perfection Blog Hop

I have been itching to show off this new quilt I made for the Island Batik "Pieced to Perfection" Blog hop!  There is also a giveaway by Island Batik. Keep reading to see how to enter.

I got to play with the Island Batik fabric line called Park Avenue, a Claudia Pfeil Design Original, which is should be arriving in quilt shops next month! 

The challenge for this blog hop was to use either Foundation Paper Piecing or English Paper Piecing in our projects. I went for the Foundation version and fiddled around in EQ8.

I tried out designing blocks using the curved drawing options.  They turned out pretty good, but I still have some learning to do to get all the blocks to line up perfectly and to have the actual paper piecing pattern print out with curves.  

Some printed correctly and some printed half curvy and half blocky,  I do believe it was the way I drew out the shapes but I'm not 100% sure what I did. I will have to go back and watch more You Tube vidoes and play around some more.

After getting the layout done, my next challenge was dispersing the colors and fabrics to keep my yardage under half a yard for each print.  All the colors in this line play so well together it ended up being easy to mix and match the prints to make everything flow.

I used 15 of the 20 prints that came in the Bundle.

I opened a package of Hobbs Heirloom Premium Wool batting for this one. It quilted up fantastic and has such a nice fluffiness to it.

 

  

I used a Schmetz 90/14 needle for the piecing and the quilting. 

 

I had enough white Aurifil thread for the quilting and the perfect blue for the binding.

I did some free motion quilting on this one using the points of the blocks as my guides. I don't enjoy marking my quilts so I am glad there were lots of points on this one. 

This was a fun project from beginning to end. I really enjoy paper piecing and had a good time sewing out each unit. I didn't even mind taking the papers off the back.  There is something fun to me about tearing perforated paper.

Make sure to check out my fellow Ambassadors who are also showing off this fabric line today:

Mania Hatziioannidi, Mania for Quilts

Pamela Boatright, Pamela Quilts

Now for the Giveaway! Island Batik is giving away two fat quarter bundles!

Two fortunate winners will each receive one of the two Fat Quarter bundles, featuring new Island Batik collections highlighted this week – Pin Dot Floral by Kathy Engle or Park Avenue by Claudia Pfeil

To enter for your chance to win one of these these stunning batik bundles, please follow the easy-to-use prompts on Rafflecopter! 

  a Rafflecopter giveaway

You can also visit the Island Batik blog post to enter if the Rafflecopter is not showing g properly here.

Happy Sewing!

=^..^=

@QuiltedDelights

Follow me on Instagram

First and Last #6 Q4 FAL

This is my first finish for 2014. 

 It is also the 6th and last finish I will get done for the Fourth Quarter of the 2013 Finish Along.

The link to add fourth quarter finishes closes tomorrow at midnight, but I highly doubt I will get another finish done off my Q4 List.  Tonight I will be working on another quilt for a guild mate and then later I will be finishing up my entry for the Kona Solid Blog Hop.

Other than the border, this quilt is made from all Half Square Triangles. 

I quilted everywhere but the insides of the green pinwheels.
Wasn't sure what to put in there so I decided to put nothing in there.  :)

I love cute Christmas prints.  Particularly at the end of the Christmas season when they are super cheap.
But sometimes I don't know what to cut them into.  So I save some of them for quilt backs.  It is hard to see, but these are cute little Santa's and a added some green starry fabric to make the backing big enough.

Letting the sun show off the quilting.

The quit isn't too large, but perfect size for the back of a couch or the end of a bed.

These are the other five I completed from my Q4 List.

On January 9th I'll post my new Finish-A-Long list for Q1 of 2014.

=^..^=

Last Finish for 2013

I wanted to get one more finish in for 2013. So I worked on this little quilt late into the evening.

This is my Jacks Schnibbles quilt.  It only took me 2 hours to quilt the whole thing.

It is fairly small, it measures about 45 x 60

That gives me 5 finishes so far off my FAL 4Q list.
Link up for the Finish Along starts tomorrow and goes till the 8th.

So Technically I can work on more finishes for the quarter. But as of now I have 5 completed.

Happy New YEAR!!

=^..^=

Starry Night Complete - 4th Finish 2013 FAL

I've had quite a busy December and didn't get as much sewing done as I'd like (I'll give more info about my December adventures on Monday), but I did get another project knocked off my 2013 FAL list.  I finished binding My Starry Night Quilt late last night.  Got it done just in time for Christmas next year. 

  

I went down to the beach today to visit with family so I decided to bring my newly finished quilt along for a photo shoot.  No fancy quilting on this one, just some meandering and some continuous curves.
This quilt is for me and will be used till it wears out.  

=^..^=

3rd Finish for Q4 FAL

I was working on my Starry Night Quilt in hopes of having it ready for Christmas, but I had some cat interference and then I ran out of white quilting thread.  So what is a girl to do when the closest shop that sells white Guterman thread is 30 miles away?  ....

She gets out her yellow and pink threads and quilts up a different project on her Fourth Quarter Finish Along list.  

This is my Schnibbles Leap Year quilt.

I made it when I was playing along with Another Year of Schnibbles.

It was cold at the park today, but the sun was nice and bright.

My daughter's artistic view of how quilts should be displayed.  :)

I really like this yellow fabric, but as I started quilting it I made a mental note to myself to watch out for fabrics that have something "imposed" on them instead of it being part of the print. 

 I'm not sure what this white overlay stuff is, I usually see it on white on white fabrics, and I have been good about avoiding those but I didn't think to look for it on colored fabrics. So when I saw this yellow in the discount bin I didn't even think about it being like those white on white fabrics that my machine hates so much.   When my needle hits it a glob of white stuff head on it jerks slightly, makes a big hole, and gets me off my groove, which makes my next few stitches out of whack.

And sometimes it will make the machine skip stitches.

What ever that white stuff is, it is too thick in places and my needle doesn't like it at all.

Sometimes, it will just flat out break the thread as the needle goes down.

The fabric is pretty and feels nice to the touch, it just doesn't make for fun quilting.

This must be Sheen's favorite spot.

=^..^=

Cutting Up My Christmas Strips

 One of the items on my Q4 FAL list is to make a fourth Christmas quilt out of the 2 inch Christmas strips I cut at the beginning of the year.  I didn't remember how many I had cut out so when I counted 80 strips, I realized I could definitely make more than one quilt out of all these strips.

(The cut squares above the strips were used in my HST Christmas Quilt top.)

I started out sewing a red and green strip together to get 40 pairs.  I took 12 of those pairs, sewed a 3.5 inch white strip on top to make a tube, and cut them using the strip tube method.  So far I have laid them out in double hour glass blocks, but I may do a pinwheel instead, or even a mixture of both.

I took the remaining 28 pairs and put them together to get 14 strips of alternating red and green. 

 I decided these would make a great festive Dresden plate quilt.  Each strip gives me 20 wedges, which is how many wedges there are in one Dresden plate using the Easy Dresden Ruler by Darlene Zimmerman.   I plan on making these scrappy, and I want each Dresden to have one wedge from each strip strip, but that means I will need 20 different strip sets so I need to cut and sew 6 more alternating strips.  That will give me 20 Dresden plates.  That might be too many for a small quilt, so I'll break it up into two Dresden quilts.  That will give me three more Christmas quilt tops when I am finished, which is good, I have big plans for these beauties.  ;)

In the middle of my cutting, Jasper must have thought I needed a break.

He sat right on top of the strip I was cutting.

=^..^=

Another Finish for the Q4 FAL

I completed another one of the projects on my Q4 FAL list. It was my second oldest UFO. It was started in 2006 and put aside for various reasons throughout the years.   It was even put on my New Year's resolution list in 2009, but that obviously didn't go over too well. I did get the top finished that year though so that was progress right?

 It has been basted since February 2012, but again I got side tracked with other projects that took precedence.  This quilt has always been for me though, so that is probably why it kept getting moved to the bottom of the "To Do" list.

For the quilting I did some simple meandering on the pinwheel blocks, and then did a little more fancier quilting in the yellow inner border.


It is nice to finally have this one finished.  I plan to use it as my winter quilt in the family room.
Once all the Christmas decorations are put up, it will be nice to have these colors to brighten up the rest of the winter season.

=^..^=