Huppah and more shoe clips

Last week I posted about this quilt that I made as a wedding present, and I wanted to show you a picture from the wedding:

This is the huppah with both tallits (prayer shawls) draped on it.  I constructed the huppah canopy (from an IKEA sheet!), which was fun.  And it didn't fall on anyone, so that's good.  

It was a beautiful wedding.  

They loved the quilt.  

The bride asked me to show it to her 93-year-old grandmother, whose late husband's prayer shawl hangs on the right side.  That was awesome.

Had another set of shoe clips to show you.  

My mom went with me to both the wedding and Quilt Market, and she asked me to make her some shoe clips too.  (Here's mine if you haven't seen them)

So here's mom's shoes with the clips.  Just a simple bow with a pair of earrings destroyed to make the center stone.  Very easy, but very cute.

Here's the back.  I see more shoe clips in my future.....

If you arrived here by searching for how to construct a huppah, e-mail me and I'll be glad to help you out.

Quilt Market I... in which I got to take a picture with a celebrity.

Yep, that's me with my mom.  

My mom's a rock star celebrity to me because she went with me to Quilt Market and braved the thousands of booths and looked at all of the displayed quilts with me.  

Every single one.  And there were zillions.  

She discussed color and texture and different threads and use of paint on the surface and construction and all those other quilt words.  

She even hula hooped with me to get entered into a contest.

I'll have more to post about Market through the week, but I wanted to put this one up first.

Oh, and Ty Pennington's in there too.

I got to talk to him about his fabric line, which is very cool.

More to come.

A wedding quilt

Just a note... if your name is Jennifer and you're getting married this weekend, click elsewhere or risk spoiling the surprise!

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I have a friend getting married, and I wanted to make a quilt for her as a remembrance of the event. I've been blessed to help with some of the planning, and it's been a lot of fun.  I've learned a lot about wedding traditions in the Jewish culture!  It's always fun to learn new things I think.

At the ceremony, they will get married under a huppah, which is a canopy.  Both paternal grandfathers prayer shawls (tallit) will be draped on the canopy.  They don't get to keep the tallit, so my idea was to create a quilt that would capture them together signifying the union of the two families.

And I had never seen one, so I was utterly fascinated.  I snapped these pictures and put them together into an inspiration board:

The angel charm has special significance for her, and so I wanted it to be included on the quilt as well.

Here's my palette I chose.  

And my initial sketch.  Sorry the edges of the paper aren't showing up on the scan....

Then I stuck fabric to the sketch to decide what color went where, and got to it.

I tacked the inspiration and the sketch above my sewing machine.

The piecing went rather quickly.  I wasn't trying to exactly reproduce the tallit;  I just wanted to create a piece that reminded them of the tallit together at their wedding.

The angel I did in freehand embroidery.  Here's my chalk drawing.

And here's the stitched piece.

All in all, I'm thrilled with how this turned out!

I put their names into it and the wedding date.  (The names are across the diagonal of the picture)

I was able to add some interesting machine quilting to add detail to the tallits.

 I enjoyed this project so much!

Linking up to Amy's Blogger's Quilt Festival.  Click on over and check out some of the other entries!

Shoe clips. Really, shoe clips!

I decided I needed some Very Cute Shoes for a wedding I'm going to.  Now, I am not afraid of high heels in general.  But have you see how high the heels are this season?

 For example, I thought these were darling.  Ordered them.  They arrived -- darling.  But wait.....

Yep, that's right.  The heel is 6 inches tall.  Guaranteed that I would break an ankle on the dance floor.

(I returned them)

So I started thinking.  I have a perfectly comfortable pair of black high heels (by high I mean 3 1/2 inch heel).  That I can walk in.  Dance in.  But I needed a way to jazz them up.  

I remembered shoe clips.  From the 80's, yes.  And I started experimenting.

Here's the tutorial I used for the flower.  I didn't go to all the trouble she does in the tutorial for the backing piece, just hot glued it to some felt and called it good.

I bought some shoe clip hardware on etsy.  Here's who I bought mine from.  They arrived quickly, they stay on my shoes, they don't hurt my feet.  Enough said.

and for the wedding, I went with vivid yellow!  

For these I alternated satin and chiffon and it gave the flower a nice texture.

Best of all?  I have Really Cute Shoes for about $10.  That I can walk in.

Machine quilting work

 I really love machine quilting for other people.  Here's two pieces I finished up and delivered this week.

Love the pattern she used for the top.  We decided that it needed a swirly pattern in the quilting to set off the boxy pattern in the blocks.

 Here's a closeup of the quilting...

 I love how it turned out!

This one was a 9-patch pattern, and she wanted straight-line quilting on the diagonals.  Boy, this one took a lot of patience!  I used my walking foot on this one.

And here's a closeup of the quilting.  

I'm just sorry I won't get to see these all washed and crinkled up!

Fuddy is not (quite) Duddy Challenge Piece

I like a good challenge.  Especially when it involves miniquilts....

So I decided to enter Cheryl's Fuddy But not Duddy Challenge.

The requirements were to use brown, green and burgundy + one color to make a modern mini quilt.

Well, here goes:

I added mustard.  I certainly didn't intend to add mustard, which is think is rather fuddy in its own right.

But when I pulled out my solids, it actually fell into the pile, and it seemed nice.

I pieced it to take the shape of a rock formation.  You know, those ones that seem to be a zillion years old but look like they could fall over any time?

I wanted it to have a sense of teetering as if it could fall, but wouldn't.

I tried to also modern it up in the quilting.

You know I love machine quilting, right?

This was a very fun project.  

Thanks so much to Cheryl for hosting this challenge!

What's next, Cheryl?  How about mauve and country blue?

Actually, I'm not sure anyone or anything can modern those up.....

I'm linking this to the challenge.  Click on over and check out the other entries!

Cowboys!

I needed to create a baby quilt for a sweet little boy last week, and... you know, we don't do a lot of boy stuff around here! It's usually girly, girly, girly...

And I wanted to use my stash, so here's what I came up with.

I love those cowboys.

And I wanted it to be "monogrammed" but subtle, so I quilted the little guy's name into one of the blocks.

I especially like how well the clouds worked as a binding.

I have a lot of projects that I've neglected to blog about, so I'll be putting those up in the next few days.  Stay tuned!

Get thee to Target!

So I have 2 quilts I'm working on, and both have come from this palette.

I can't show them yet because they are both wedding gifts....  but stay tuned, cause they are fun!

The tops are pieced, so now I'm in the market for backings.

And today I ran across a DEAL I had to share:

Target has some sheets that are 100% cotton.  I got the set for $9.98 and I'm going to use the 2 sheets as backs for my 2 blue quilts.  That's less than $5 per backing, and I don't have to piece anything!  

(Happy Dance)

Also, it comes in this cute little velcro pouch:

I think I'm going to put straps on it to be a backpack for my 2-year-old.

And the pillowcase?  It's going to become a pillowcase dress for my 4-year-old.

Also, while I was there, I ran into this:

And since my 2-year-old is obsessed with all things elmo and the price was this:

he had to come home with me.  He's hiding in the closet until Christmas.

In case you're interested, here's the details on the sheet sizes. I'll use the top sheet for the larger quilt and then cut the elastic part off and use the fitted sheet for the smaller one.

Rainbow Melt

I saw this amazing rainbow idea here and knew I had to use it as a starting point.

But I didn't want a plain canvas!  I was going to use it in my sewing studio, which also doubles as my daughters' craft space.  So I figured out a way to combine those thoughts.....

I purchased 3 11" x 14" canvases in a pack for $5.47 at Wal-Mart.  They were not traditional canvas depth, they were mostly flat, which I liked.  And I liked the price. And I didn't want to make another stop, so into the cart they went!

I took a Sharpie and "took a line for a walk" around the canvas to break up the space.  And then in each one, I filled in a machine quilting design.  For inspiration, I trolled around Leah Day's Free Motion Quilting Project site and found lots of ideas!  {If you haven't seen Leah's work, it's amazing! She has wonderful instructions and videos for over 300 machine quilting designs.}

Just to save some time (and work) I marked off where the crayons were going to cover at the top and left that part blank.

I hot glued the crayons on.  Actually, before that I arranged them in approximate order.  My youngest daughter really wanted the white one on the left side (and she's 2, so I left it there!) so I put the black one on the left to balance it out.  All of these came out of a box of 64 crayons.

Then, the exciting part!  We got out the hair dryer, took it outside and melted it!

I love how it turned out!

Just a few tips in case you are going to try this:

It doesn't take long to get the wax to melt, and yes a hair dryer will work.

But it's messy.  And I don't say that lightly.  I am used to my projects making a big mess!

But the wax kind of flies around, so be aware of your clothes, your surface, your shoes, etc.  

They might get splattered.

what to do with orphan blocks?

I have amassed quite a collection of blocks without a home.  Extras I made, experiment blocks, blocks that didn't turn into quilts, blocks that got ripped out of quilts, etc.

I have seen some quilts in blogland where someone has just put all their orphan blocks together into a quilt and magically they look nice.  I am not sure that will be the case here.  I laid all of them out on the floor (I had more than I thought!) to kind of get an idea:

Now they are all different sizes.  Here's the possibilities I'm considering:

a.  realize it may not be cute and abandon idea.

b.  cut blocks into some set size.  put borders on smallest ones and cut largest ones down or into pieces

c.  assemble it like a jigsaw puzzle, leaving most of them the current size but cutting the biggest ones down into a few pieces to spread them out a bit.

What do you think?  Some of these blocks I'm a bit attached to.  There's pieces of my daughters' baby quilts in there, quilts I made for friends, etc.  I also thought about making some more blocks from scraps leftover from especially special quilts I've given away, thus allowing me to keep a little piece of that quilt.  But I'd like to hear your opinion.

Also, thanks for your feedback on garment making!  Thanks to your really excellent feedback, I now have a project in the works, and I'll be telling you more about it this week.

Spooky Cat Quilt

I have the privilege of showing you guys a quilt I machine quilted for Anita last week.
Please note: I didn't piece this quilt. I only quilted it.  I don't want to ever appear to take credit for someone else's work.
 Isn't it beautiful! She brought me such a cool piece to work on.  It was quite inspiring for me.

We decided on green thread that would match the wool eyeball applique.  Since the background varied a lot, I thought the green would be a happy medium.  Turns out it was a good choice!

I showed her a quick mockup of some quilting designs I thought would be nice for the background of the kitties.  The left is snail shells, and the right is eyeballs.

We went with the eyeballs, and as I was basting it, I decided to ask if we could do spiderwebs on the border.  And she thought that would be nice, so we were off and running!

Here's a closeup of one of the corners.  You can see that the eyeballs looked neat in the background, but I am awfully partial to the spiderwebs!

I liked how the green really popped on the different colors.

 The green and purple combo was my favorite.

 and I liked how the spiderwebs could be entangled in the corner applique.

All in all, it was fun.

and here's the finished piece.