Walk Among the Stars Published

 Walk Among the Stars by Connie Kauffman

My quilt Walk Among the Stars has been published in the July/August 2019 issue of McCall's Quilting.

The quilt is made with fabrics from the Ditty Collection and Sprinkles from Island Batik.  The Ditty Collection is a lovely assortment of of cool- spring like colors that were fun to work with.

(Photos courtesy of McCall's Quilting)

This project was quilted by my friend Vickie Hunsberger who always does a terrific job of quilting.  I love the designs she picked for this quilt..  The magazine has three close up photos that high light the quilting.

These fabrics and magazines are in shops now- so be sure and check them out!

May- Make it Modern Island Batik Challenge

It's hard to believe it's the middle of May already.  I absolutely love Spring and have been enjoying the spring flowers, birds and all the fresh colors.  Here are a couple views from my windows in Northern Indiana.

To add to all the color explosion going on- it is time for the May Island Batik Ambassador challenge.  This month the challenge is Make it Modern with Hobbs. 

We were to incorporate one of the characteristics of modern quilts as defined by the Modern Quilt Guild- the use of bold colors and prints, high contrast and graphic areas of solid color, improvisational piecing, minimalism, and/or expansive negative space.

When I received my first Ambassador box this year I knew right away which fabrics I would use for this challenge- the Moroccan Bazaar Collection.  It is just bursting with color and I had fun pondering how I would use it for the challenge.  It also came with two coordinating fabrics.

I finally decided I wanted to do something with New York Beauty blocks to highlight the colors.

These grew into flowers with fusible appliqued leaves and stems.

Usually quilting is my least favorite part of a project, and all this background was going to need a lot of quilting!  I actually ended up having fun with the background quilting by using a variety of plastic templates from my stash and some wonderful Westalee quilting rulers.

Here are some close ups of the quilting done on my domestic machine.

And of course some beautiful Aurifil threads to quilt with.  The light  blue matched the background perfectly.

I tried Hobbs Silk batting for the first time and it quilted wonderfully.

Thanks to Island Batik, Aurifil and Hobbs for supplying the materials for this project thru the Island Batik Ambassador program.

One more time- my Eternity Garden Quilt

Trying Something New

If you have ever gone to a big quilt show- you have experienced the sometimes overwhelming feeling of SO many new projects and things to try.  One year at the quilt show in Grand Rapids Michigan I bought a pattern to make a fabric basket.  The baskets on display were beautiful and very sturdy.  I thought it would be fun to try- and maybe make a few for gifts.

The pattern is called Woven Spirals

I picked two of my Island Batik fabrics that went together nicely- much like the colors in the pattern photo.

The directions were good.  It took a very stiff interfacing that I hadn't used before, but it was easy to sew through.  You fused fabric to both sides of two pattern pieces, cut it out and added a zig zag stitch around the outside edge to finish off the edges.  You had to stitch around the outside edge two times with the zig zag stitch to make it very nice and solid.  It wasn't hard, but took a LONG time and ALOT of thread!

The end result was very nice.  It took 12 buttons to sew to the top.  It made a very nice and firm basket.  The hardest part was lining up the ends at the top evenly and stitching them down.  It took awhile and some hand sewing on my part to get it all secured.

This made a lovely basket and was an interesting technique to try.  I made it once- but didn't want to put the time and effort into making more for gifts.  This might be something you'd like to try.

The winner from my last blog post for the magazine with my pattern Popsicle pattern is OhioLori.  The magazine is on the way to her.  Congratulations Lori!