Something new, something old

I love going to the quilt shop, browsing the fabrics, choosing my favorites (so hard!) and buying too much, who doesn't? But getting the fabrics all the way to your doorstep is very special. Today I had the pleasure of getting a package with the most wonderful fabrics:


The top red is Robert Kaufman Metro Living Circles in Orange and the yellow, green and red dots are from the wonderful It's a Hoot collection by MoMo for moda. I love these big dots, and especially the reds. Such great bright fabrics (red is my favorite color all over)

I ordered these fabrics only a week ago, from the Etsy shop of hbfabrics. Considering the distance (two and a half continents away, I live in Israel), the fabrics got here amazingly fast, beautifully packed. Really great service, highly recommended! Thank you Hilary and Chris!

Now to something old: I made this pot holder more than 15 years ago, with my teacher Joan in LA. Still looks cute after all these years!



Of course I forgot altogether how I made it, so now I'm refreshing my memory with my new teacher, Marganit

I'm going to use the same technique (name?) for a pillow, this time with solids. Hope to show it quite soon.

Fabrics for a new project

I started quilting the value quilt but encountered some technical problems. Hopefully they'll be solved when I find a walking foot for my vintage Bernina 807.
In the meantime I'm starting a new project, a blue & green quilt for my son.

I started with my most favorite task: pulling out fabrics. This time I'm going to use mainly new fabrics, bought recently in New York. I'm so excited to start cutting these wonderful fabrics!

I really like this combination, but tried adding some reds to see the effect:

What do you think? I think the red adds some interest, but will have to check on the design wall.

This is the blue-green combination, nice and safe

And this is the collection with the red addition:


Off to the scary and exciting part of cutting the fabrics!

Sneak Preview - value quilt

For my beautiful 2 years old grandson I chose to make a value quilt. There are lots of great value quilts on the web, and they were all my inspiration. I tried to use mainly kids fabrics (boys!), and found quite a lot, like these


some from my old stash from the 90's, like these reds

and some new, including this Kaffe Fasset

The quilt is all basted with safety pins and ready for quilting. It's quite a large quilt (50 x 80 inch), so off to work!

I was awarded!

An amazing thing happened yesterday, Beth of smazoochie awarded me the Leibster Award

I am so honored and excited! I started quilting only a few months ago, and blogging three weeks ago. Thank you Beth for noticing my work and for awarding me this award! You should all visit smazoochie blog. Beth is a great quilter and a very talented writer, her posts are full of humour, ideas and inspiration.

The Liebster is awarded for posts with less than 300 followers, and the winners have some obligations:

• Tell your readers who nominated you.
• Add a link to their blog.
• Pay it forward!!! Award 3-5 bloggers who you think deserve this award.
• Inform then and post directions to your blog
• Pick blogs with under 300 followers

I'm so happy to be able give this award to other talented quilters:

1. izzy inspired - I'm following this blog for quite a while, I was drawn to izzy inspired's quilts by the innovative work and amazing use of color
2. Handmade by Beth Gracie - another young quilter who is a real artist. Bet Gracie's quilts burst with color and are a great inspiration. Beth Gracie also has some great tutorials.
   
3. Fairy Face Designs - Sarah of Fairy Face Designs specializes in baby creations. Her baby quilts are simply stunning.
4. Swim, Bike, Quilt - Kate is a great quilter and also a very inspiring athlete, reading her blog make you want to get up and run!
   
5. Teaginny - Apart from beautiful quilts, this blog also features lovely small things - handbags, scarves, pouches and cards, plus great tutorials.

Please visit these wonderful blogs, great work and inspiration.

I'm posting again the quilt which got me this award: Homage to Mondrian

Homage to Mondrian - finished!

At last! The quilt "Homage to Mondrian" is finished! This work started as a personal challenge, and evolved into a wall quilt inspired by Mondrian. It will be hanging in my son's apartment, such a great compliment.



I really struggled with this quilt, I think I had to rip and sew again every seam... Thanks so much to my wonderful teacher Marganit for helping me.
The fabrics are an assortment of cotton solids from my old stash, except for the black which I had to run and buy at the local general fabric store. It is linen, and unfortunately, as discovered too late, mixed with lycra, so it makes the fabric stretchy, and very difficult to work with.



I didn't want to put binding, so I used pillow-turn finish (showed to me by Marganit), I'll post the tutorial later. The batting is very thin fusible polyester, and the backing is white muslin.



The quilting was done with an invisible nylon thread. The quilting lines were marked with the wonderful gadget Hera Marking tool (made by Clover). I learnt about it from the amazing Red Pepper Quilts.
I am very happy with the result, I love the fresh and intense primary colors on the white background, and I also like the grid, though it's not perfectly straight, but that's how you know it's a quilt!



The wall quilt size is 35.5" x 34" (90 x86cm)