Friday, September 13, 2013

50% Off My Craftsy Class Through Spetember 21st!

50% off is a great bargain!  Craftsy has so many great classes and lovely fabrics, yarns, and other goodies, too.
Remember, you'll receive an ebook copy of my book, Allie Aller's Crazy Quilting with your class materials when you purchase my class, even at this low price.


HERE IS THE LINK!!!!!!

Thursday, September 5, 2013

Noah's Quilt

My niece Naomi and her wonderful husband Dino had a baby boy in June.  I finally get to meet the little prince this week-end and will come bearing his baby quilt.

I have got this burgeoning passion to work with vintage textiles, incorporating them into contemporary quilt work.  For Noah's quilt I dipped into my Ebay bin of old blocks, tweaked a few of them, assembled them with some old jellyroll Moda sashing, some plaid cotton upholstery samples, and a few quilters cottons that I had on hand....seriously, this went together F-A-S-T, especially as I quilted it on the HandiQuilter Sweet 16 and machine sewed a ribbon binding on it.  4 days was all it took, with time off for baseball too!

One of the blocks needed red in it to match the other two I used, so a quick applique job took care of that!

Another block had its center taken out (you can see it on the left), with some vintage feedsack cotton swapped in place, so that I had a place to put the name.

These letters have fusible web on the back.  I've learned the hard way to always always always use a ruler to line them up before ironing them down.


 And here are the blocks, ready to be sashed and bordered!

You can see, this will be quick....

Sashings and borders on, piece of cake!
Then I used a tip I learned in Cindy Needham's Craftsy class, "Design It, Quilt It".
Maybe you all know this but I didn't: tape the quilt back to the table nice and taut before layering it with batting and top to pin baste.  What a difference this made! You can see the tape in the upper left corner.

I enjoy making an all over fan quilt design, freehand, no marking.  Easy peasy, and really fun.

A plaid taffeta ribbon made binding the quilt a snap.  What you see here is one of the corners from the back.
One line of zig zag stitch, carefully making sure that the front and back binding edges were sewn down, and it was a done deal.

I didn't want to make a big ol' label but thought a little inscription for the record would be better for this baby quilt. I used a Pentel Gel Roller for Fabric pen.

And here is Noah's quilt, ready for delivery...

 
It is 46" X 48".

Hooray for Noah!