Curves in Quilts = A New Project

The program for last week's guild meeting was "Tackling Curves in Quilts" presented by Mary Ruth Hudson. She shared a great variety of different designs that all featured curves. The next day, she taught a workshop with the Blue Onion pattern by Karla Alexander of Saginaw Street Quilts.

Blue Onion pattern by Karla Alexander of Saginaw Street Quilts

That pattern might look familiar to anyone who has been reading my blog for awhile. I made the Blue Onion pattern back in 2021, renaming my version "Blooming Onion," and it is still a favorite of mine. I really need to get this one quilted and finished!

Blooming Onion quilt top, 60.5" x 80.5"

There were a few reasons that I took the workshop even though I had already made this design before. One was the fun of enjoying a sewing day with guild friends and learning some new tricks from an excellent teacher. Another was the fact that the class fee included the ruler that the Blue Onion pattern was designed to use. (The pattern does include instructions for cutting the pieces without the ruler, and that is how I made my earlier version.

Ovals All Ways ruler by Creative Grids

I didn't choose any fabrics for this project until two days before the class. My plan was to make a smaller version of the pattern, and I knew I could pull enough fabrics from my stash. I started with these three coordinating prints that I've had in my stash since around 1999, then pulled other fabrics to go with them.

We had a great time in class, and most of us got at least six blocks made. As expected, I did learn some new tricks from Mary Ruth, and I continued making more blocks after I got home on Friday and through the weekend. I still have one more set of six blocks to finish piecing. I've started playing with possible layouts. 

This is going to be an extremely bright quilt! My plan is to use 20 blocks for the quilt top, which should finish at 40" x 50". I hope to get the last group of blocks made today, and maybe even get them all joined together into a quilt top too. 

I'm  linking up with:

Design Wall Monday at Small Quilts and Doll Quilts

Monday Musings at Songbird Designs

Wednesday Wait Loss at Inquiring Quilter

Happy quilting everyone!

Julie in GA

A New Project--Improv Alphabet

The last thing I need right now is to start a new quilting project, especially with the busy holiday season upon us, but that's exactly what I did recently. Our November guild meeting featured a presentation by Elaine Poplin of Huntsville, AL, who shared many quilts she has made, including her inspiration and design process. Here are photos of a couple of her beautiful quilts with amazing quilting on them. You also get to see Elaine in a great jacket made from a pattern she designed. See more at her website HERE. 

Elaine Poplin

The next day was our "Outspoken" workshop with Elaine, where we gathered to learn her methods for making scrappy improv letters. 

Be Strong by Elaine Poplin

Elaine had samples of a full set of letters, numbers, and symbols up on the wall for us to study. We started with an easy one, a capital "E", to learn the basics, then continued from there. Here's what I had completed by the end of the day.

Some people were making letters for specific phrases, but I decided to shoot for making the whole alphabet, and I might make numbers as well at the end. The blocks will get joined together into horizontal rows, and some will need background added to get them up to size, like that small "w" needs an addition at the top to make it tall enough. 

As you can see, I'm using bright colors on scrappy black and dark grey backgrounds. The colors for my letters made in the class were chosen randomly from the scraps I had brought with me. After I got home, I wrote out the whole alphabet and assigned a color to each letter in order to get a fairly even distribution of the colors. Getting ready for Thanksgiving limited my quilting time, but I was able to complete one short phrase that seems appropriate this week. 

I was able to spend most of Black Friday in the sewing room, and I am very thankful for that. Here's where I am on my alphabet after my marathon of scrappy stitching. I count 26 letters done, which means I'm halfway there!

I'm currently working my way through each color separately (i.e. making all the red letters at the same time before moving on to another color.) That approach seems to make the process a little more efficient. I'm having a great time digging through my bags and bins of scraps to find pieces that will work together. These orange letters are nearly done, just needing some background added around them, then I can move on to another color today.

I'm  linking up with:

Rainbow Scrap Challenge at So Scrappy

 Oh Scrap! at Quilting is more fun than Housework on Sunday. 

Design Wall Monday at Small Quilts and Doll Quilts

Monday Musings at Songbird Designs

Wednesday Wait Loss at Inquiring Quilter

Finished or Not Friday at Alycia Quilts

Brag About Your Beauties at From Bolt to Beauty

Happy quilting everyone!

Julie in GA

A New Tool and a New Project

Our quilt guild held a fund-raising auction in September, with members donating a wonderful variety of items to be sold. I was the lucky high bidder on an AccuQuilt Go fabric cutter. I'd never used one before, but it seems like a useful tool to have, especially as I get older and rotary cutting becomes a little more difficult. The set I got includes a 2.5" strip die plus a Qube set of dies for 8" blocks.

I tried out the cutter this week, and decided to start with cutting strips, sewing them into strip sets, then cutting up the strip sets to make 16-Patch blocks. I pulled out a very old print to use as the lighter fabric in every block, then added a mix of brown and blue prints from my stash.

I've always liked brown and blue as a color combination, and I have a large selection of fabrics to choose from in my stash. There are many more blocks partially done sitting on my sewing machine. The assigned color for October at the Rainbow Scrap Challenge is dark neutral (brown or black,) so these blocks fit right in with that color scheme.

My blocks will finish at 8" square. I think I have enough strip sets started for 20 more blocks, which means I could set them 5 x 7 for a quilt that would measure 40" x 56". I might pull more fabrics and make it even bigger.

Be sure to check out all of the wonderful scrappy projects at the Rainbow Scrap Challenge every Saturday and Oh Scrap! over at Quilting is more fun than Housework on Sunday. 

Happy quilting everyone!

Julie in GA

Design Wall Monday 9/29/2025

There is a brand new project up on my design wall this week! This is my Exploring Complex Curves quilt top. I think it looks like planets and the moon in the night sky.

Exploring Complex Curves, 24.5" square

I'm not terribly up to date on what's happening in the modern quilt world, but I did go to QuiltCon when it was here in Atlanta in 2023, and that's when I first saw some of Audrey Esarey's works. Let me tell you, they knocked me out! My favorite was her quilt Aura No.1, which took 1st place in the Minimalist Design category. 

Aura No.1, 2022 by Audrey Esarey

The simplicity of this quilt blew my mind. Audrey explained in her presentation to the guild that there are only two seams in this quilt, one on each side of the light blue ring which is pieced, not appliqued, to the purple background. It looks like the background is four squares pieced together, but it is actually a single piece of fabric, and the different colors of her quilting stitching are what make the color change. You can see many more of her amazing quilts on the gallery page of her website Cotton and Bourbon.

I had the very good fortune to get a spot in one of Audrey's workshops over the weekend. Our class was called Drafting Complex Curves. We learned how to draft our own patterns with curves, followed by some piecing of curves. We began by drafting a Drunkard's Path block, and then we pieced that block in fabric. No more need to buy acrylic templates for this kind of block.

Drunkard's Path block, 6.5" square

The next exercise was making a larger piece with curves. We had the choice of doing the Quick Curves exercise... 

Quick Curves exercise, 13" x 17"

or we could start with the larger Exploring Complex Curves piece. Since I already had a fair amount of experience with sewing curves, I dove right into the larger project, which is the piece shown at the top of this post. I made the Quick Curves block the next day, and added borders to get it to the right size for a placemat.

Here are all three of my pieces together.

The workshop was very informative and a lot of fun. Audrey is an excellent teacher who really makes both the drafting and the piecing part of dealing with curves manageable. I hope to be able to take more classes with her in the future. She has a wide variety of quilt patterns available on her website Cotton and Bourbon, and she teaches some of her patterns as virtual classes. I urge you to check out her amazing quilts!

I'm  linking up with:

Design Wall Monday at Small Quilts and Doll Quilts

Monday Musings at Songbird Designs

Wednesday Wait Loss at Inquiring Quilter 

Needle and Thread Thursday at My Quilt Infatuation

Finished or Not Friday at Alycia Quilts

Brag About Your Beauties at From Bolt to Beauty

Oh Scrap! at Quilting is more fun than Housework

Happy quilting everyone!

Julie in GA

Stash Report and Stitching Time 9/14/2025

Once again, there were no changes to my stash numbers for the past week. I finished the Mondo bag that I shared in last week's post, but I'm holding off on reporting the fabric used until I get some photos and write up my blog post about it. I didn't buy any new fabric last week, but I did get a new pattern for an upcoming class that I hope to attend.

This is Mobius Radial by Audrey Esarey, a well-known modern quilter. Check out her website HERE. I'm on the waitlist for the workshop at the end of the month, and I really hope there will be an opening for me. If not, I'll just have to make it on my own at home.

2025 STASH TOTALS

Used last week:                   0.0 yards

Used year to date:            48.25 yards

Added last week:                 0.0 yards

Added year to date:        58.375 yards

Net added in 2025:    10.125 yards

Kate's 15 Minutes to Stitch Challenge at Life in Pieces has us tracking how many days each week we get in at least 15 minutes of quilting time. I worked on a wide variety of projects last week, including finishing the Mondo bag, making a batch of blocks for my Temperature quilt, and starting the machine quilting on a kid's quilt.

15 Minute Challenge for 2025

9/7 - 9/13                7 of 7 days

2025 Total         254 of 256 days

Success rate                99.2 %   

Check out more stash reports at quiltpaintcreate and join the 15 Minutes to Stitch Challenge at Life in Pieces. Thanks so much to Donna and Kate for continuing to host these link-ups. 

Happy quilting everyone!

Julie in GA

Stash Report and Stitching Time 9/7/2025

There are no changes to my stash report for the past week. Our guild held a Mondo bag workshop on Friday, and I was able to pull together a collection of scraps and other fabrics from my stash for that project, but I still need to add up the total usage once I get my bag done. Here are some of the fabrics used for the bag.

2025 STASH TOTALS

Used last week:                   0.0 yards

Used year to date:            48.25 yards

Added last week:                 0.0 yards

Added year to date:        58.375 yards

Net added in 2025:    10.125 yards

Kate's 15 Minutes to Stitch Challenge at Life in Pieces has us tracking how many days each week we get in at least 15 minutes of quilting time. I've been busy catching up on guild business, but I did finish a couple more of the applique blocks that were prepped before our recent trip, plus I attended the Mondo bag workshop. I hope to share that as a finished project very soon.

15 Minute Challenge for 2025

8/31 - 9/6                7 of 7 days

2025 Total         247 of 249 days

Success rate              99.20 %   

Check out more stash reports at quiltpaintcreate and join the 15 Minutes to Stitch Challenge at Life in Pieces. Thanks so much to Donna and Kate for continuing to host these link-ups. 

Happy quilting everyone!

Julie in GA

Design Wall Monday and One Monthly Goal

My design walls currently display a wild variety of projects, ranging from very small, intricate blocks to much larger and simpler blocks. It's that kind of variety that keeps quilting interesting for me.

top: Temperature Quilt

bottom: Quarter Log Cabin

I've posted about the Temperature Quilt project before; you can see a couple of earlier posts HERE and HERE. I've been doing well at keeping up with making the blocks, never getting more than a few days behind. The photo above shows all of the blocks through April 2nd.

Just last week, I figured out the layout for my temperature blocks, and I started joining the blocks together into groups. It's tricky to keep them in the right order and pointing in the right direction, so I have to be very careful during this part of the process.

The lower half of that design wall contains my newest project, Quarter Log Cabin blocks. Our guild is having a community service sewing day in late May, and we will be working on throw quilts to be donated to Meals on Wheels, along with the placemats that we give them. The guild's community service chairperson had put together bundles of fabrics that could be used for 3-yard quilt patterns, and I offered to make a sample to show at the next meeting.

Quarter Log Cabin blocks

The design I chose is the Quarter Log Cabin pattern from the Sew Can She website. Caroline at Sew Can She offers a huge selection of free patterns on her site, including several of the popular 3-yard patterns. If you sign up to receive her daily emails, you can get that day's featured pattern as a free pdf download.

I've been enjoying making this quilt because it is coming together so quickly. Using only three fabrics made the cutting much faster than my usual scrap quilts, and the blocks are very easy to put together. They will finish at 10" each, and I need only 20 blocks for the entire quilt. I especially love the red paisley/floral print that was included in the fabric bundle. One selvage was gone, so there was no maker information on it, but it has a wonderfully smooth feel to it.

Finishing this quilt top will be my One Monthly Goal for April. I will need to make 14 more blocks, join them together, then add three borders. The guild meeting is next week Thursday, which gives me only 10 days to get it done.

Completely on the other side of the spectrum as far as block size and complexity are the latest blocks to be finished for my version of the Jane Stickle sampler quilt. I finished four blocks last week, bringing my total number of finished blocks up to 14 (out of a total of 169.) My current goal is to make at least two blocks each week. These blocks will finish at 4.5".

Top row: Blocks C9, D10

2nd row: Blocks E3, I3

Now you can see what I meant at the beginning of this post about the variety of projects I've been working on. When I'm in the mood for something easy, I can make temperature blocks or the log cabins. If I'm ready to be challenged, I can make some of the Jane Stickle blocks or join more of the temperature blocks together. That's all a big part of the reason why I tend to have multiple projects in the works at the same time.

I'm  linking up with:

One Monthly Goal at Stories from the Sewing Room

Design Wall Monday at Small Quilts and Doll Quilts

Monday Musings at Songbird Designs

Wednesday Wait Loss at Inquiring Quilter

Happy quilting everyone!

Julie in GA

Starting Something New

A recent trip to Paducah, KY naturally included a stop at Hancock's of Paducah. Actually, I ended up going there twice in the two days we were in town. I didn't have a specific project or plan in mind when I got there, but something about their beautiful lineup of Grunge fabrics really spoke to me, especially the teal and turquoise variations. Here's what I bought.

For some reason, these fabrics sparked the desire to get started on a quilt project that has been on my bucket list for many years. That is the Jane Stickle sampler quilt, commonly known as "Dear Jane." For those who aren't familiar with the name, "Dear Jane" is a book by Brenda Manges Papadakis, originally published in 1996. The full title is Dear Jane: The Two Hundred Twenty-Five Patterns from the 1863 Jane A. Stickle Quilt.

Sampler by Jane A. Blakely Stickle, 1863

80.25" x 80.25"

Brenda was a math teacher and quilt scholar when she became fascinated by the Jane Stickle quilt. She began by drafting the blocks from a photo of the quilt in a book, then later from photos taken by a friend. She was able to see the quilt in person in 1992 and traced the designs for the rest of the blocks.

The Jane Stickle sampler quilt consists of 169 square blocks (13 rows of 13 blocks.)  The finished size of each block is 4.5", and there is 1/2" sashing and cornerstones between them. The border has 52 triangular blocks along the sides, and four kite-shaped blocks in the corners, bringing the grand total to 225 blocks, and all of them are different.

Block E7

The first block to be made was #E7. The blocks are numbered in the book by row, then counting across. I started with this aqua fabric to make sure it wasn't too pale. I put it up on the wall along with squares of most of the other colors. I'm glad I tested it first, because it does look too light to me. The solid squares of that color (Pool) are okay, but in lower light, the pale aqua just disappears. I don't want to put all this work into blocks that blend into the background.

The other colors featured in the above photo all made the final cut for the quilt, although they will not line up in the order shown. The colors from top to bottom are Jade, Horizon Blue, Ocean, Cabana, Turquoise and Prussian. My background choice is Cream (or Creme.)

After figuring out my color choices and assigning them to the quilt diagram, I was ready to begin making blocks. I started at the very beginning of the patterns in the book with A1 and have completed enough blocks for about half of the first row so far. 

Top row: A1, A8, A2

Second row: A4, E7, A3

Third row: A6, A5, A13

Some of the blocks are very simple, but most are not. There are quite a few that include applique, and many are easiest to piece on foundations. I have found a few blogs/websites with tips for making the blocks, but I can generally figure it out for myself too. 

This will be a very long-term project, with no deadline for completion. I have only 1/2 yard of each of the Grunge colors that were selected, so I need to figure out how much more of those to buy, plus I will need lots more of the background. I might end up getting a whole bolt of that. I'm sure there will be plenty of frustration at times, but I'm looking forward to the many challenges of this new project. Wish me luck!

Linking up with:

Design Wall Monday at Small Quilts and Doll Quilts

Monday Musings at Songbird Designs

Wednesday Wait Loss at Inquiring Quilter

Happy quilting everyone!

Julie in GA 

Planning my Temperature Quilt

One of the quilt guilds I belong to recently hosted a Zoom presentation by Jo Avery of the UK on Temperature Quilts. Jo has made several temperature quilts, and she shared all sorts of information and photos of her own quilts, plus those made by many other quilters. Check out her website HERE to see some of them.

Ever since her lecture was scheduled, I've been seriously thinking about making a temperature quilt myself. We even decided to use it as a guild challenge. I've been doing lots of research and planning, one of my favorite parts of quiltmaking. I have purchased a group of fabrics for my quilt, Glaze and Glaze II by Libs Elliott for Andover. I have over 30 different colors, and a few of them will not be included. I also have grey and black as background options. This is my current gradation.

The other decision to be made before January is choosing a block. I've been considering many different designs over the past month or so. I want it to be a block that is easy to make, but not too boring. I don't expect to make my blocks every day; I will probably save up the temperature information and make blocks once a week, or maybe even further apart.

Patty at Elm Street Quilts has made multiple temperature quilts. She shares lots of inspiration and information on how to get started at her page. One of my favorites was her quilt for 2021 (see it HERE.) I decided to try making a few sample blocks.

These blocks certainly met the requirement of being easy to construct. Mine were made with scrap fabrics and a single background instead of varying that fabric too. I like the way they look in Patty's quilt, but they don't really hit the mark for me.

I've seen several temperature quilts made with applique blocks, including circles and orange peels. I love the look of them, but I knew that making a hand appliqued block every day was more than I could handle, and I'm not really set up to do machine applique. Then I discovered this design.

The design is called Wildflower, and it is a free pattern at Andover fabrics. The fabrics in this design are the original Glaze line by Libs Elliott. I like the way those tilted diamonds sort of resemble orange peel blocks, but with straight lines instead of curves. The blocks in the pattern finish at 7", and they are foundation pieced. I needed to scale them down to less than half that size, plus I hoped to avoid the foundation piecing. 

I drew out a smaller-scale block and played around with how to cut the pieces. These were my first sample blocks for this design.

You might notice that the top left diamond is smaller than the others. I'd started by making the other three, then decided to set the diamond back from the corners of the block a bit more. The next samples were made with stash fabrics to approximate the colors I would have used for January 1 - 4, 2024.

Yes, I think that's going to be my block! The design will give my quilt the motion I'm hoping for, with those diamonds tilting up and down. It's interesting how the different color combinations work out some with high contrast and some very low. The blocks will finish at 3". I need to press up my fabrics and maybe do a little precutting, but other than that, I'm ready to get started on my 2025 Temperature Quilt!

Linking up with:

Design Wall Monday at Small Quilts and Doll Quilts

Monday Musings at Songbird Designs

Midweek Makers at Quilt Fabrication

Wednesday Wait Loss at Inquiring Quilter

Happy quilting everyone!

Julie in GA 

Scrappy Squares and a New Project

July is slipping by much more quickly than I would like, and my projects for the Rainbow Scrap Challenge reflect that fact. I was able to complete my set of nine Hollow 9-Patch blocks this week, using lots of squares of favorite aqua, teal and turquoise fabrics.

I also used some of my blue-green scraps to try out a new idea, a herringbone design. I like the way it's looking, but I'm going to run out of the light print before I get very far. Maybe there's enough for a baby quilt? Or I might go through the fabric stash again and try to find some other light fabrics to mix in. There's always the option to switch to solid white.

Be sure to check out all of the wonderful scrappy projects at the Rainbow Scrap Challenge every Saturday and Oh Scrap! over at Quilting is more fun than Housework on Sunday. 

Happy quilting everyone!

Julie in GA