Halloween Wave Quilt

To appease Ciara, here's pictures of my completed New Wave Quilt from Elizabeth's pattern on Oh, Fransson!. I hadn't posted them yet for two reasons: first, because it's a gift quilt and I wanted to give it to the person before I posted pictures of it online, and second, because my boyfriend was supposed to hold it for me while I took pictures and we kept forgetting.

So here's a picture I took of it on my own. It's a lot harder to photograph an entire quilt (even a lap-sized one) when no one is holding it.

It's smaller than the real New Wave quilt because I didn't have enough different Halloween fabrics. I also decided to not trim the edges straight and did the binding around the points of the diamond shapes. It wasn't all that hard and I think it looks cool.

One of my friends had asked if I would make her a quilt if she bought the fabric. I agreed, but then we never got around to shopping for the fabric. She had mentioned that she would be interested in a Halloween themed quilt and I already had all this fabric on hand (for what, I have no idea - why on earth would I have purchased this much Halloween fabric??). It took me only slightly over a day to whip the quilt up from start to finish.

Part of the reason it was so easy was because I had one of Jill's (Made On Main Street) fabulous acrylic templates. It makes this pattern super easy to cut out and once cut, it's fast to sew together. Here's her etsy shop, although she doesn't have a New Wave template posted.

After I finished the quilt, I had a bunch of fabric left over that I wanted to use (including bias-cut binding that I really didn't want to go to waste). I've been really into these pieced hexagons recently (from this potholder tutorial originally), but the triangles are a pain in the butt to cut using a regular rectangular ruler. Jill made me more fabulous templates for 45 and 60 degree triangles, which made it totally easy. I think I'll make an entire quilt from them next.

In keeping with the theme of angled binding, I decided to finish the pillow as a hexagon rather than making it square (like I did with my couch cushion pillow). This pillow is stuffed with random batting and fabric scraps that I'd saved for stuffing the dog bed. Rags will just have to wait for more scraps to come his way.

Quilt and pillow are headed to their intended recipient this evening, so I'll report back on how she likes them.

Rampant Productivity

Every once in a while, I get on a productive streak. This time, the productive streak was caused by my quilting friend Ciara, who stayed over last week. She brought over these awesome teal and green fabrics with which we made a pillowcase that she is giving as a gift. She left me the fabric we didn't use in the pillowcase and I was so inspired that I made a pillowcase of my own.

The two pictures above are the front and back of the pillowcase. I made the hexagonal side first (based on this tutorial from Jaybird quilts), then used the rest of my sewn together strips as the border for the square side. It matches nothing in my living room except for the potholder pictured below.

Then, being in a hexagonal sort of a mood, I made this potholder using a bag of strips that Ciara had left me from another quilt. The back looks the same as the front except that the center didn't quite match up as well.

And it's not just me that's being productive. My eggplants and tomatoes are getting in on the action, too! I'm so proud of them.