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Showing posts from June, 2025

2025 Q2 Goal Recap

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It's summer again!  It was snowing out when I published my Q2 goals and today it was sunny and hot!  I'm spending time outside biking and walking and time inside bowling.  I didn't work on a lot of different projects this quarter, but I finished two old WIPS which is always a joy. Quilt Tally WIP List to Start the Quarter: 10 WIP List to End the Quarter:  11 Active QAL Projects:  1 Untouched in 2025:  5 Finished in Q2:  4 quilts, 1 cross-stitch project, 7 small projects A look back at my goals for Q2 : 2025 Q2 Goal 1: Start a New Leaders and Enders Project I started a new one and it's also blue! Instead of a  four patch design , I'm doing a coin layout with blue and low volume scraps.  I'm currently piecing them into sets of four, then planning on turning them into blocks of eight before sewing the whole top together.  This one isn't worried about unique fabrics (I'm cutting as many rectangles as possible...

Mini Zephyr

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It's June and the annual Minnesota Quilt Show has just ended.  In previous years, I've had quilts in the special exhibit hall and was part of a panel talking about pattern design .  This year, I dipped my toe in a bit farther and entered a quilt in the judged category.  Presenting Mini Zephyr! One of the categories this year was "miniaturization", or making a tiny quilt that could be mistaken for a full-size quilt in a photograph if there wasn't a point of reference available.  As soon as I saw this, I immediately became obsessed and had to try it with Zephyr . The mini Zephyr, or "Love Letters via Zephyr" as it was officially entered into the quilt show, has the exact same number of blocks as the two cover quilts, it's just made at a very small scale.  I actually used the baby size Zephyr as a guide for fabric placement ( this is the bottom quilt ). And here's how it looks compared to ...

Announcing: Pin Banner!

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It's summertime at last!  If you have school-aged kids, then I'm sure your May was filled with end-of-year concerts and celebration assemblies too.  My high schoolers are active in drama and two years ago, my oldest and I designed a banner to display the varsity letter he earned .  This year, my middle child lettered for the first time and asked if I could make him the same thing to display his letter.  As I was measuring the original banner to reverse engineer how I made it, I thought "I should write this down in case my youngest wants one in a few years too," which turned in to me writing this project pattern! It's been a while since I wrote up a project pattern, and it was fun to write something a little less involved than a full quilt pattern.  This little project can be finished in a single afternoon, with very little hand sewing (aka, there's no bias binding to make and attach). Pin Banner is sized to fit one let...

The Rest of the Quilt Back

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One thing you may have noticed about me is that I don't like to let a finished top sit.  I might drag my feet on finishing the top, as my never-ending WIP list can attest, but once it's done, I want the whole quilt to be done.  The only notable exception before now that I can think of is my Sweet Treat quilt , which sat because I was waiting for the Ruby Star Ice Cream print to come out to use as my backing fabric. Last year, I designed this quilt blocks for a row challenge quilt put on by my quilt guild.  My partner picked a classic block for each row and I put a modern twist on it.  Then we wrote up both patterns and released them to the guild so they could choose whichever one they preferred for their own quilts.  This was a great exercise for me because each row used a different technique, which meant practicing different types of pattern writing.  The picture above is a little misleading because all of the blocks ar...