Rag Quilt with all Minky Back

 Post by Tanya. This rag quilt is made of prints and solids from Glimma and some gray minky for the back. It is the leftover fabric from two tops that are in the to be quilted pile.

 I did larger squares, 8 1/2 in squares and all minky for back.  This is the first time have done the back in minky. This took hardly any time to sew or to cut.

The hardest pat of this quilt was washing/drying and trying to get it to start ragging.  Quilt store quality cotton does not fray as easily as flannel or lower thread count fabric.  

Hope you are having a great 4th of July.  Here are some pictures of our younger kids at bike parade and community breakfast, now to get some sewing in before fireworks.

Julia getting ready to go. 

Jared waiting for parade to start.

Julia thought it would be more fun to push stroller than ride in it. 

New Fabric

 I know misleading title, this fabric line Bungle Jungle is quite old, but new  for us. I love buying  fabric when it is on clearance. We (Tanya) can't help shopping.  I guess I did grunt sure when she asked if I thought it was OK, but its all her. Anyway we have a lot more girl than boy quilts in our Etsy store, so this should give us a good start on some boy and gender neutral ones.

We sold a quilt the other day and within 20 min of the money showing up in Paypal, Tanya was plotting of what she wanted.  The above bundle is huge and its cute all baby prints.  This works great as we love making baby quilts.

This smaller bundle has a panel and then a bunch of other cute baby (OK, Tanya says preschool) prints.  They have animals and numbers and letters.  I have no plan what we are making, but I am sure soon enough I will have a plan drawn up and on my desk with Tanya standing there wondering why I am not cutting fast enough.  Speaking of cutting I did go out and buy new blades for my rotary cutter as my old blade was not playing nice.  I was ready to snap it in half. I even tried Rebecca's and hers was much worse than either Tanya's or mine, it wouldn't cut fabric at all, just sort of perforated it.  I promptly had her blade disposed of. Any way happy quilting all.

Modern Take on Jelly Roll Race

This is one of those quilts that didn't turn out quite the way we wanted.  We ended up with a few minor puckers (don't you mean major, Hush Richard).  To add insult to injury, the binding color choices didn't quite do what I had hoped.  We did a scrappy binding with two colors.  Have you ever had those quilts that you don't seem to love as much?  There is nothing functionally wrong with it, just not one of our favorites.  There is a similar top waiting in the UFO pile. It still needs a back and binding.  We decided to use the back we had previously bought for another quilt.  

Now that Tanya is done talking, I will say a little.  I loved the idea for this quilt and Hate how it turned out.  Mostly I hate how I quilted it.  I tried to do something different to prevent puckers and I think I caused a hundred times more.  I quilted in the same direction as the 2 1/2 inc row strips.  I quilted one row skipped 3-4  quilted another and did the same thing all the way across quilt.  I flipped it around and quilted a row skipped a few then quilted.

The Idea was that if I sewed both directions then it would not look like the quilt pulled one direction on one half and then pulled the other direction on the other half.  What in reality happens is every single row looks like its being tugged against each other.  Oh well.

The good thing is we have plenty of friends having babies and once I give it away I will never have to see it again (accept maybe at church in the hands of the baby) and then I can just forget how much I hate the quilt. LOL.  Live and learn they say.

Link A Finish Friday #73

It is now time for Link A Finish Friday.  Today I would like to start with a big thank you to Fat Quarter Shop who has offered to Sponsor our Link A Finish Friday with Prizes.  This month's winner (June) will win a $15 gift certificate to spend at Fat Quarter Shop. 

Please remember to thank our sponsor by visiting their store at http://www.fatquartershop.com/ their blog http://www.fatquartershop.blogspot.com/ and Facebook page http://www.facebook.com/FatQuarterShop

Vacation is over and we are back to work quilting, its amazing how much a slacker I feel when I don't quilt at least one thing in a week.  Last night I finished this top and wanted to show it off.  Then as promised I will show off many projects from others over the last 2 weeks as I did not show off any last week.

This is the first quilt pattern that is created by Tanya and will be listed in Craftsy.  This quilt is based  off Train Wrek my very first pieced quilt I ever made.  Tanya has called it her Windows quilt as the little boxes are looking out of windows. 

Now for the stars of this week these are some of the quilts I enjoyed over the last 2 weeks.

Feathered Feather - Sophie Junction

Another one off the list - Lala's Lovelys Quilting

Round Robin Quilt - Sophie Junction

Madrona Road - Monkey and I

Quilt for DS2 - Quilt in a not-shell

Kaleidoscopic Finish - Quilty Creations

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1) Who likes rules. Toss them out.

2) Add a link to your finish blog or where ever you show off your finishes (Not limited to quilts but I like them the most).
3) Visit a few of the finishes and comment or encourage them on.
4) Monthly random winner picked from all of the months linkups to $15 gift card from Fat Quarter Shop.

Not required but fun to do

1) Follow my blog.
2) Follow the blog of all those that link.
3) Link back to my blog.
4) No finish, go quilt and stop reading the web.

Back to work and having fun!

While taking a short break during vacation last week, Tanya created a new pattern for one of our first quilts Train Wrek if you have not ever seen that quilt before it is a real winner or well loser.  This is the point in quilting that I learned that you needed a pattern or at least a real plan before you just started.  So with Tanya's real plan, I started with the pile above and then cut it up.

Once you get things chopped up there is a intense desire to sew it all back together.  So yes you can guess that I had to do such.  The small blocks on top still need a strip around it to make it the size of the bigger block.  But it is at least a good chuck along towards a quilt top.

Tanya has a pile of 5 quilts that needs quilting. I seem to not be quilting them fast enough for her, so she used my machine the other day (The day before I broke my needle). She was doing this while I was looking at vacation pictures.

Originally her plan was to echo quilt the top blocks, but she decided that after a few rows were done she did not like it, so she changed her plan and unpicked all of the rows she had quilted.  This is one of those big differences between our quilting styles.  These first 2 pictures are of the back of the quilt.  This quilt is again a flash back to our past.  We have not yet made a quilt for our own bed yet. These blocks were the original plan.

It is funny looking up the post about this heart block I wrote it as the 21 post I ever wrote over 1 1/2 years ago.  It is sad it has taken that long to get these hearts into a quilt.  We gave up on these being made up into a quilt for our bed,  it will now be 2 or so baby quilts.  Lucky for me, Tanya has decided to practice her quilting on it, which means I won't have to do all of the quilting.  I think its that pile of 5 quilts that are getting to her.  I have found its more fun to start a quilt then to finish one, ha ha.  For those interested in a blast from the past I also had some fun getting rid of the scraps from making this quit block.