Design Wall

I'm making a quilt based on some of the quilts in Sizzlin Sixties by Heather Mulder Peterson/Anka's Treasue (http://www.ankastreasures.com/item_212/Sizzlin-Sixties--ANK292.htm). I bought the book and a table runner kit last summer during vacation in northern Minnesota. The table runner is all pieced and ready to be quilted. I love the patterns as they are hexagons that don't require set in seams.

Anyway, my idea was to make a quilt using the 6 different layouts. I started making quilts with a jelly roll of Fresh Flowers (Moda) and a jelly roll of white (Robert Kaufman) fabrics. The two together ensure some great bright colors and lots of white. Anyway, I was having problems laying out the blocks... when I thought about the hangers and dowel I had bought to hang my Grand Canyon quilt. One of the only walls I have in my living room that is blank and easy to get to is the entry way (yep, you enter the front door into the entryway and the living room is immediately to the left). Anyway, I was hanging up the rod and my DH wasn't too thrilled with what I was doing...until later in the day when I had blocks on the batting. He was ok with my placement after that.

When we had company last weekend, I put my Grand Canyon quilt on the dowel as I didn't want the blocks to fall down. So here's a picture of the dowl with my Grand Canyon quilt:

(yeah, a little too high for this quilt... but than again not too bad) My front door is on the right, the bookcase on the right is at the edge of the living room. Everything else is the entry...
Here's a picture of the "design wall":

The batting is a lot wider than the dowel. Last weekend, I let it fall off both ends. This time, I scrunched it up on the right...It's a little hard to see the white batting on the white wall...
I'll take a picture later today/this week when I put my 1/2 blocks back up for designing purposes... This has really helped me to layout this quilt! I actually laid out the quilt blocks three different times. I remade a couple of them and streamlined the amount of blocks I'm going to use. Today, I'm making more blocks as the quilt was getting long but still pretty narrow... I'm confident the quilt will be great.

String Clean Finish

I finished this quilt on August 4th. I was going to blog about it last weekend, but we had other plans. Here's String Clean:

This quilt is about 60" square - a little too big for my table at work and a little too square for other uses. I think it's a decorating type of quilt. I've got another similar pattern to make - maybe with smaller blocks? The quilting is custom and is wavy lines following the stings. Here's a close up on one of the blocks:

The  quilting gives the front lots of great texture and here's the back:

Cool huh?

I also finished my Sparkle Stars. I loved it so much I took that one to work and it's on my table. When I bring it home (after Labor Day, most likely...), I'll take pictures and post them. I still have 3 more quilts at the LAQ - almost brought another one home but as we were looking at it, she noticed a bad run of bobbin thread. She's so cool in that she's going to fix just that little area. Talk about attention to detail!