Becky's quilt obsession

Gorgeous quilt alert!! Please go on over to Quilty Pleasures blog to read about Gina’s fall quilt of stars. It is so beautiful. Take time to admire the quilting as shown on the back. Oh, I wish I could do as well. Maybe when I grow up (says the old lady of the scrap squad). Oh, my, until I just looked at the thumbnail I didn’t realize how careful she was with color placement. Look at the great secondary diamonds. Way to go, Gina. Happy Quilting, Becky

My goal has been to use up all the grey and black diamonds making LeMoyne stars. I’m really tired of making 6” stars. There at the side you see some experiments with other settings for diamonds and scraps. I decided there was very little texture in this quilt, so I played with more of the RWBs I had pulled for scrap squad. I bought several template sets from Material Obsessions a while back, and decided to incorporate this one. I also started a large feathered star to add to the ever growing stack of stars. Some have asked how I’m planning to put them together. This is a very poor picture of Sam’s first big bed quilt, made in 2001-2. I had border fabric (off the sides of the table) and a bit of Jennifer Sampou’s  Rain Forest fabric, and kept pulling brights and backgrounds to go with them. I made a bunch of stars (I’ve taught a lot of stars classes), put them on the design wall, and then made connectors. That’s the same plan for the reds. Visit more design walls over at Judy’...

Such a wonderful start to my day. Roses arrived from my DH – he always sends a day ahead as you receive the best roses then. I then opened my inbox, and there were more emails than I’ve ever received at once asking for a copy of a PDF file I made of paper-pieced houses. If you are here looking for them, they are now in the Yahoo group Stashbuster files. I completed the components for the second “round” of the JN Lone Star, and I now like it. The dark second background brings out the center first star. I have another ongoing project I could use your opinion on. I bought these old kaleidoscope blocks on eBay a long time ago. I took some of them apart and remade them a bit – only recutting the center part, leaving the second round and the corners alone. They started out, and are ending up several different sizes, from 8 to 9+ inches. In the picture the pink one lower right is one of the originals and you can see that it is very wavy. The others I have remade. I thought about setting th...

It has taken a huge amount of time to get to this point on this Judy Niemeyer Lone Star, and when I put the diamonds up on the design wall last night I was really disappointed. I wanted to do a more neutral quilt, but this one is really blah. It’s not so bad up close where some of the smaller textures show, but it definitely is missing a zinger. I have my final class on it tomorrow. I bought enough patterns and fabric to make it up to a queen size quilt, but now that I see it, I’m not sure I want to put that much more work into it. Bummer. I hope your design wall Monday is better. Happy Quilting, Becky

I’ve had multiple inquiries about the quilt in my header, but most of them have been left by visitors that are no reply. I decided I would just post about it, so everyone would know. This quilt hangs above our King-size bed, so I pulled the bottom of the quilt forward over the pillows to take a picture of the whole thing. This, of course, made it keystone, but that’s the best I can do. I was fortunate early on in my quilting hobby passion, to take a two day class at a LQS from Alex Anderson called Simply Stars . That class changed how I made blocks. She demonstrated how to make blocks “even” on the outside so you didn’t cut off points. She taught us a Split LeMoyne star, which is my favorite block.  I also learned how to make flying geese by just cutting them out and sewing them together – 3 triangles –and they turn out fine! I had begun teaching a beginning class in hand piecing, but it rapidly changed to machine piecing. Then I started teaching what I learned in her class – s...

This isn't a very good picture, but someone on Stashbusters wanted ways to use up a large amount of homespuns. This one is made from plaids and train fabric. I made it in 2002 when DH and I were doing long-distance dating. We had gone to Gold Country in California for vacation, and I mapped out the quilt shops. Most of the fabrics were bought then, but I also had homespuns in my stash. DH enjoyed looking through the quilt shops. He found the train material that is in the center, found me, and said, "If you don't want to buy this, I do." It has steam engines, and he models 1895. Christine Meunier has a similar pattern in Easy Traditional Quilts - Stars . The dimensions are a little different than this one, and I added the extra "stuff" in the large triangles and corner squares. The end product looks a lot like the block "Best of all". I also added a row of 6" Sawtooth Stars to both the top and the bottom. It fit his queen waterbed at the time. ...