Talking Lunchbox Quilts

Designing birdhouses is just plain fun!  In fact, the sillier and goofier the better!

If I was a bird, I would want to live in a crazy colorful house.

The other parts to the quilt are flying geese (“headless” I call them since I usually chop off the point at the top), pinwheels (I love those!) and simple blocks on point.

I hope you enjoy looking at this one 🙂

I seem to like triangles – a lot!  There are so many different ways to use them and they’re easy to play with.  I was experimenting with a lighter color palette in this quilt.  My key color was aqua because it looks so fresh and I have never made a quilt with aqua as the focus color.

I like how the hollow triangles look but I also like how the striped triangles turned out as well.  I had a ball mixing everything up and putting them on my design wall!

I had to do something different in the bottom part of the border because I ran out of my crazy mish-mash blocks.  It’s a bit weird but oh well 🙂

I fell in love with the colors of both the Wee Wander solids and prints.  They are just beautiful; they kind of remind me of sherbets!   Add that thought to those donut shaped blocks, and yummy – now I am thinking of dessert!!

I was inspired by the pattern on the cover of Kate Henderson’s book Strip Savvy.  It looked like it would be fun to make and it was.   It did take a lot of Thangles – glad I had a bunch on hand.  🙂

I can’t wait to have it quilted!

Oh my gosh – did I ever make a mess!!  I had to move hundreds of fabrics from our little hallway into my office/sewing room so that our new dryer could be delivered.

I had brought my puppy, Kevin, downstairs to “help”.  He thought that finding boxes and shredding them to bits and pieces would be his contribution.  So that just added to the massive mess.  Poor Timmy just curled up in the corner of the window seat to watch this disaster.

Take a look at this photo!  Pretty much a pigpen, isn’t it?

Here is a shot of Kevin proudly helping me.  And now Timmy has wedged himself into a corner.  He thought that this grand mess had very bad feng shui.  It certainly disturbed his inner peace 🙂

So for two days I folded, stacked and moved those hundreds of fabrics back into the hallway.  But before I could make the move, I had to refold and reorganize my fabric closet because it was a disaster too!  As I was digging into fabric piles that were two piles deep, I rediscovered some beautiful pieces.  That was very exciting!  But then I also found some fabrics that were just awful!  What was I thinking when I bought some of them?  Yee gads!  It must have been those late night purchases when the brightness on my computer screen was severely compromised.  I can’t explain those purchases otherwise.  Tee-hee!!!  I mean I even found mustard and pea colored birds – they were dreadful!

Here are some shots of the stash once I got everything refolded and fixed my color piles again.

And lastly – my sewing room/office is basically back to normal.  PHEW!!!!

I have been doing some sewing as well.  Here is the center of a simple house quilt.  The photo was taken inside so its a little harder to see the colors, it is actually pretty bright.

I decided that all of the houses needed to be made from stripes and that the doors would all be red.  I also wanted to use a fat quarter pack of checks, so all of the roof tops came from those.  Then I used little 2″ squares (fussy cut) for the windows.  Those fabrics are all small Japanese prints.  I just love those!

I always love making houses – I think it was all of my Freddy Moran training!!  She always told us to make houses that would shock the neighbors!

When I made this sailboat quilt, I was experimenting with background colors.  I was trying to see what would liven up my boats so they didn’t look so much like stiff little soldier boats all in a row.  Because we certainly would not want that…hee hee!

I was also goofing around with variations on my boats such as invisible masts and booms, hull shapes and even an ark just for the heck of it.

This quilt now lives in Japan with a young woman who came to San Francisco with 5 other High School team members to sail for a week.  They had come from the tsunami area and were at sailing practice when the tsunami hit.  Fortunately their coach got them all out of the water and up a hill to safety.  All of their boats and equipment were lost.  They were a remarkable group of young men and women.  We had such a ball with them and will always remember the week they spent with us.

 

Also, I joined Bloglovin!

<a href=”http://www.bloglovin.com/blog/11298009/?claim=juu8ypxatxb”>Follow my blog with Bloglovin</a>

I still absolutely love the Jungle Creatures fabric line!  The colors are so cheerful to work with and the patterns are happy and full of energy.  Throw in some cute animals and I just find it irresistible!

The center of the quilt is really busy, like maybe I had one too many cups of Pineapple Lychee Green Tea 🙂  But actually when you look at it in person, it isn’t quite as nutty as the picture looks.  The borders were my attempt to calm it down a bit.  This quilt makes me giggle.  I think I am going to ask my friend Sondra if she can quilt monkeys and zebras into my quilt.  She can create anything with her long arm machine!

Now I need to decide if I want this to have a minky back or just regular cotton.  Hmmm…

Here is a close-up of the fabrics.  Aren’t they fun?

And my puppy Kevin who stood at the top of the stairs while we took a picture of the quilt.  Timmy was standing next to me so no picture this time of him.

Linking up with Kelly at http://myquiltinfatuation.blogspot.com/?wref=bif  thank you Kelly!

Linking up with Lorna at http://sewfreshquilts.blogspot.com/?wref=bif  thank you Lorna!

Linking up with Sarah at http://confessionsofafabricaddict.blogspot.com/?wref=bif  thank you Sarah!

And linking up with Amanda Jean at Crazy Mom Quilts at  http://crazymomquilts.blogspot.com/  thank you Amanda Jean!

I must confess that I have been drawn into the Golden Ticket promotion over at Pink Castle Fabrics.  The thought of potentially winning a Hello Kitty sewing machine tickles me to no end!

Since one must purchase fabric to get a Golden Ticket, (and I NEED a Golden Ticket), I just couldn’t pass up the opportunity to shop.  This is what I ordered and received this week (below).  My goal today is to use my Thangles and make a bunch of HST using the solids and black & white text prints.  I usually don’t make anything with just solids, so it will be interesting to see if I can stick with my initial plan 🙂   Tee-hee.

Happy Sunday!

 

Linking up with Molli at http://www.mollisparkles.com/ for Sunday Stash.

I really enjoyed making the Retro block from Camille Roskelley’s book, Simply Retro.  The block is simple to put together and has a fun final look.  The first one I made was with orange and purple.  As I was making that quilt, I thought I’d make another with the red and white.  This is the first time I made two of the same quilts back-to-back.

I had shown this quilt earlier as a work in progress and now here is the finished quilt.  It has been cloudy and rainy so my pictures had to be taken inside.  Wish they were a bit brighter – like the quilt – but oh well 🙂

My friend Sondra quilted these super cute daisies into the quilt.  I love them!

Here are a few close-ups of the quilted daisies.

    

  

The back of the quilt is a minky fabric.  Very, very soft!

This is the perfect quilt to make when you just want to sew, use lots of your favorite fabrics, and have a simple pattern to follow.  I grabbed the top 2 feet of fabric from both my red stack and my yellow stack and then started cutting.  From there it was just sewing together the strata and cutting the finished triangles.

I like that I used the strata for both the red and yellow parts – it makes it really fun to look at versus using a solid color or just one fabric.  The strata adds lots of spunk.

I had originally posted this as a work in progress and now here is the finished quilt 🙂

We have this really great store in Berkeley called Ethnic Arts.  They have the coolest collection of stuff I have ever seen.  I have found some super fun things in this shop, such as antique puppets from Indonesia, colorful, hand crafted David Marsh furniture and gorgeous mola pieces.

I love the mola pieces and a few years ago bought several of the larger pieces and had them framed.  They hang in our living room and I love looking at the colors, the shapes and the beautiful workmanship.  These women are incredibly talented.  On this particular trip though, I found some smaller fish pieces just stacked in a little wicker basket.  I immediately fell in love with the colors and the fish themselves.  I couldn’t seem to put them down once they were in my hands.  As I stared at them, I thought it would be really fun to put them into a quilt.  So I bought them and started thinking about how I could use them.

I decided that this would be a great opportunity to go kind of potlucky.  Most of the quilt was made with leftover blocks from other projects and scraps.  It is kind of a wonky quilt, but what the heck!  My fish have a home and quite a colorful one at that 🙂

Here is the finished quilt.