Day 59 – Petunia Picnic

The above version of Petunia Picnic was done for our fourth book Four Season’s of Quilts. This quilts is 56″ x 56″ and was intended to be a large table square or a picnic blanket if you so dare! The pieced blocks are actually paper pieced and I guess we were ahead of our time…using so much white – we are big into that right now, as you will see in the next version below.

This version was one I did for myself just recently. I feel in love with the Amy Butler print that I used in the center. I changed the layout slightly, still paper pieced the “flowers” and changes the dimensions to 30″ x 34″ for my table center. For the flowers I used three fabrics from our Bohemian Rhapsody collection, a coral, green and yellow. And again I used a solid warm white to calm the whole thing done. This is kind of a lesson in fabric if you will. Sometimes when you use too many of these more modern fabrics in one project it gets to over done and busy. That is why we love to through in some tonal fabrics and of course white or ivory – a place for the eye to rest and then the modern fabric becomes the star and the other fabrics just enhance it!

The quilting was done by a good friend of mine, the floral vine in the border was just the right thing. I never told her how to quilt this one, it was a great surprise to unwrap this parcel.

Do you like the more modern fabrics? How do you use them?

~Cori

p.s if you are wondering what Myra is doing today…she is at the hospital with her daughter. No emergency, Robyn is having her tonsils (i am not sure i spelled that right!) out today.

Day 58 – Charm Square Quilt

Isn’t this quilt great! It’s another one of my favorites, and it’s not mine. I really shouldn’t be talking about this one, because Cori is the one who dreamed it up, and created it.

A few months ago we were at a quilt shop, and Cori picked up a charm pack. Who can resist them? They are fun to buy, but do you ever get anything done with them? Personally I would just keep adding them to my ever growing stash. But when Cori has fabric sitting around, it MUST be used up in a project.

The quilt idea was simple, but beautiful. She framed the various charm pack blocks with either white, green or chocolate. And there are an odd number of each framing color. I also love that she used a huge print for the backing, which was actually from the same fabric series as the charm squares. And my final comment is about the quilting. The linear, simple, square quilting is the perfect fit for this project. It makes it feel more modern and structured, where meandering quilting would make it feel more country.

That’s it for my insights.

-myra

Day 57 – Prairie Acres

Today we are going back to the beginning. Do you remember me talking about the absurdly long village I created when I learned how to paper piece? Well, that long row of houses inspired other villages, city streets, country school houses, and churches. We had so many idea’s that we put them all together, and sent them off to Martengale & Co. And that is how our first book was created.

When you send in a book proposal, there is a lot of information that needs to go along with it. You also need to send a sample of your work, so that they can look at your workmanship to make sure that it is up to their standards. This is the project that we made to send a long with our proposal. Well, actually this is the second version of the project.

We have had an enormous education in writing books, and magazines. We first created this book using 5″ blocks. As we went through the process of writing the book, we realized that the actual ‘print area’ on a page is 7″ x 9″. So if we kept the blocks this size, it would greatly increase the number of pages in the book, which would increase the cost of printing, which would ultimately increase the final price tag of the book. So, we re-created this project using 4 1/2″ blocks, so that 2 blocks could be printed on each page. And we also made sure to keep these measurements in mind as we created the other chapters as well. (You can have great quilt creations in your head, but when you have to put them down on paper, you may have to edit your grand idea.)

Our first book ‘Down in the Valley’ was broken into four very distinct chapters. The first chapter was called Prairieland, and it was very important to us, because it represented where we live. This small table square has fields as the center, and it surrounded by a farm, a school house, a town and a church. It really was fun to create, and looking at it again, I almost get the itch to start piecing houses again.

See you tomorrow.

-myra

Day 56 – Town and Country CD project

We did this CD for Electric Quilt a number of years ago (Myra will remember the year!) You can still get it if you go to http://www.electricquilt.com/

It was a collection of paper pieced projects, inspired by our first book Down in the Valley. We designed 30 projects under the headings; City Streets, Country Roads, Mountain Trails and Prairie Paths. What’s so neat about the CD is you can choose a projects, then you can change it and re-color it and then print out the paper piecing sheets all on your home computer – you become a designer. It has cutting instructions and other tutorials.

So now that I have dug up this CD I am inspired to make some of these projects! The nice thing about the CD is we did not have to make all 30 projects because it is all virtual!! But I must say there are some really good ones in there. We did make a few for display so I will post a few more in the next 44 days! Can you believe that we have posted 56 quilts, It has been amazing for us to see all of our projects. When you have so many it is hard to remember. (yeah, I know boo whoo)

Back to the project at hand…Myra made a sample of this quilt when we did the CD but this one I made for my mom and dad for Christmas a number of years ago. It hangs in the stairwell. The whole thing is paper pieced and all of these projects are larger, some full size bed quilts that are paper pieced! This quilt is probably about 50″ square, but I think that Myra’s version was larger.

Thanks for watching!

~cori

Day 55 – Out of the blue

What kind of quilt can you make for a young boy? Well, how about an airplane quilt. We usually have a subject in mind when we design a quilt, and this is one that we created last summer.

The top quilt is twin size, and the bottom one is baby size. Both quilts use the same size airplane applique template, and they have the striped quilt backs that we love. We created both quilts using the RJR handsprays, but they would look great done in prints as well.

Cori and I have endless kids quilt ideas, but by the time we get all of them made, our kids will be grown.

See you tomorrow.
-myra

Day 54 – Nantucket Rose

This is DEFINITELY another one of my favorites. (I have a lot of those) We created this large wallhanging to show off our Cape Cod fabric collection, and I love the way it turned out. I think it is a very classic quilt, with traditional piecing, but in the urn, we created a unique flower arrangement, so that it did have a fun little twist to it. We also chose a very classic color combination, keeping everything in the tan/brown/chocolate family, and only adding a spark of burgundy, and green.

If you ask Cori, she will tell you that this project is ‘Myra size’ which means that it is probably 70″ x 70″ square. For some reason, I really do like this size. It’s an extra large wallhanging, and I love those. Most people do find this an un-practical size, but I enjoy making quilts, they don’t always have to be practical. So I have a question for you. Do you choose projects to make, based on their finished sizes? Because with some quilt patterns, the finished size is really odd. So does that matter to you? Let me know what you think, so that in the future, I know if I need to designs quilt to be a bit more practical.

See you tomorrow.

–myra

Sharing Inspiration

We got this picture e-mailed to us, showing us another idea for what to do with a side border.

Diane made this quilt, which is loosely based on our Baby Blessings quilt (day 8 of 100 Days of Quilts) but she added a verse where we had put a baby initial, and she added a side border of piano keys. My first response was WOW, and my second response was ‘why didn’t I think of that?’ So this is a great idea that could be used in combination with our last quilt we posted, or just to add to the side of any of your other quilts.

Thanks for the idea Diane!

-myra