Weekends Tumbler Quilt

I finished my tumbler quilt about a week ago and I love the way it turned out!



While blogging has helped me get a bit more motivation to finish projects, it's also made it possible for me to look back and see exactly how long ago I started something. I first cut out those tumblers way back in February.

This quilt came together slowly. At first I was just using the the green colorway of this fabric collection, but all the patches just blended together. It needed more contrast so I added the solid aqua. Better, but not quite enough. So I cut some more tumblers from the violet colorway and it worked! Adding the violet colorway also allowed me to get in some more of those little bike prints. Squee!



I tried a finishing technique with this quilt that I've never done before. Rather than binding the quilt, I finished it with a facing (using this tutorial). I had wanted to bind it with the solid aqua, but I didn't have enough left. And this fabric had been sitting in my stash for ages, so I didn't have a color name/number, and I couldn't find a good match in any of my local fabric shops. So facing, with no fabric showing on the front, was the perfect solution.



I quilted it with simple straight lines, about 1/4" from the seams. The solid aqua tumblers got an extra outline stitch on the inside. You can see the quilting really well on the back. I like the back almost as much as the front!



And, just for fun, a peek at one of my little helpers:

WIP Wednesday - 11/14/12

Done:
My Weekends tumbler quilt! I'll be writing about it soon.



And to celebrate corduroy day, I made a sunglasses case.



In Progress:
I've had battling baby quilts up on my design wall for a couple of weeks.



I couldn't decide which one I wanted to finish for an expecting friend. She ended up having her baby a week early, so the pressure was on. This weekend I started a brand new baby quilt, and I'm almost done quilting it!



It has minky on the back and feels soooo cozy. It's gonna be hard to give this one up. But it is baby-sized so if I used this quilt, it would only keep a third of me cozy.

Future Projects?
I was at Target last night and saw this cute plate:



And now I want to make a quilt inspired by it. Will this actually materialize? Odds aren't good, as the number of things I want to make and the actual time I have to make all these things don't match up. But here's hoping!

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Giveaway!
I posted a little giveaway yesterday to celebrate my 100th post, so please hop over and leave a comment to enter!

Tumbling

I have access to an AccuQuilt die cutter at work and I've used it several times to cut little stacks of patches like this:



But I had yet to turn these stacks into anything. This weekend I finally got around to sewing some of them together!



I previously mentioned these tumblers here and here. All the prints are from the Weekends collection by Erin McMorris. At first I was planning to only use prints in the lime colorway, but all the tumblers just seemed to melt together. Then I added the solid aqua tumblers and it helped, but I still wasn't quite happy with it. This time I added a few prints from the violet colorway and I think it's just right!

Now, I'm not sure how I'd like to finish this quilt. Do I add a border(s) or just bind it?



Here's another project I've been working on this summer. I had planned to have a finished project in time for the Festival of Hexagons, but I had my dates wrong and missed the deadline-- boo! At least there's no pressure to finish it now. ;)



We went on a couple of mini vacations this summer and these hexagons traveled along with me. I made "busy bags" of activities and games to keep the kids occupied in the backseat. The supplies to make these little hexagons were in my busy bag!