Inspiration for your next project....

Judy’s grandson designed his own quilt for Judy to make – he even helped with the fabric selection!  We think he and Judy make a great team!   

 Judy also finished the Project Tote class here at Little Quilts and this is here finished tote bag.  It’s a heavy-duty bag made from upholstery fabric and wool with a beautiful wool appliqué block in the center. 

 

The inside of the tote has as many pockets as you want to hold all your project supplies.  If you’d like a bag of your own, watch for the class on our class schedule for next year coming out next week, or order the kit or the pattern only from our website.

 

Wool Works Show and Tell - part 2

Wool Works is one of the most popular clubs at Little Quilts. It’s a great place to gather to work your wool projects…rug hooking, spinning, wool appliqué, penny rugs or anything else done with wool. There’s always lots of fun show and tell, too. We thought you might enjoy seeing what some of the group is working on.

Love this great patriotic quilt!  Sometimes we get Show & Tell not wool related – we love to see that, too! 

 

 A special rug for a new grandbaby.  And what about the backdrop. I am a sucker for a scrap quilt.  

 

Wool Works Monthly Class Show and Tell part 1

Wool Works is one of the most popular clubs at Little Quilts.  It’s a great place to gather to work your wool projects…rug hooking, spinning, wool appliqué, penny rugs or anything else done with wool.  There’s always lots of fun show and tell, too.  We thought you might enjoy seeing what some of the group is working on.

Millie is making great progress on her newest rug hooking project.

 

 Anne does a lot of braided rugs and was sharing some of her newest creations.  Isn’t the turkey just the cutest thing? Zoom in.

 

 

Patchwork of the Crosses

Merry Christmas from all of us here at Little Quilts!  

Patchwork of the Crosses blog posts will resume in two weeks - enjoy today with your family. 

OH MY Dear...!

Dorothy brought in her Dear Jane quilt that she recently finished. She came in to select the perfect binding fabric. Not sure you can see the scallop on the border. The quilt is stunning. We’ll be sending the picture to Brenda Papadakis, the designer of the “Dear Jane” quilt. She loves to see the many variations of this infamous quilt that continues to attract quilt makers around the world! Dorothy said that by the time she finished it she wanted to rename it the D--n Jane Quilt!

   

Patchwork of the Crosses

Another beautiful block to work on.  Playing with fabric is so much fun!  

These are the fabrics I used for this block.  There are so many possibilities with this fabric...be sure to send me pictures of your beautiful blocks so I can post them on our Pinterest Board for everyone to enjoy and get inspiration from!

Go to our website if you need to reorder supplies.

Tote Inspired

Diana was taking Wanda C.’s Project Tote class that was a two session class, these past two weeks. She came to the second class with the tote finished!. Diana added stitchery to both sides of the tote even though she only needed one side with a wool stitchery block. She said Wanda’s original design and directions were so well written, she went home after the first class and finished the tote! Wanda C. teaches the class and facilitates many of our Wednesday Workshops; not to be confused with our Wanda H. who teaches the Baltimore Album classes and designs our Saturday Sampler program. We’re thankful that we have the best teachers at Little Quilts!

 

Scrap Quilt Extraordinaire

Carol Ann was in Muriel’s “Scraps of Life” Class this past Fall and made this quilt for a special niece. The Christmas fabrics all came from her stash, and she sashed it with a neat stripe fabric. The quilt turned out to be queen size, almost king size. What a special gift!

 

Jo Morton Little Women Club - coming soon - Preview!

A parade of new projects from Jo Morton that will part of the Jo’s Little Women Club for 2015.  Getting excited about these!  Jo’s Little Women Club patterns are available only to club members.  Go to our website to join.

 

Strips Become Beautiful Quilts....

Joyce brought in her finished quilt from a Laundry Basket Quilts book, Friendship Strips and Scraps. She added lots of additional details. See the lady bugs on the close-up ! Great job. 

 

 

 Joyce's house quilt using Edyta’s strip method is done too!

Book available at Little Quilts!

Patchwork of the Crosses

I've got a large selection of POTC blocks done by now and I was anxious to see how they were going to look in a quilt, so I just had to start stitching some of them together. I thought you might like to see my progress!  I keep laying my blocks out, and, then, as I make new ones I keep rearranging.  But isn't that the fun of the creative process?

The big hold up for me (as you can see!) is stitching the background fabric to all the blocks.  Each block has twenty-four honeycombs which seems very doable, but then there's an equal number of background blocks and they just seem to slow down the progress.  I hope you've been diligent with adding the backgrounds as you go to keep that part of the project from becoming tedious.

Once the backgrounds are on, it's a simple matter to add them to the quilt.  I'm finding that making the little connector squares is very quick and easy and stitching the blocks together using the little sashing squares is also very quick.  As the quilt gets bigger it may be a little cumbersome, but right now it seems to go very quickly.

I've decided to begin setting my blocks four across and five down - that way I'll have a usable size quilt, but, I can easily add more blocks all around if I decide to make it bigger.  Not having to make that decision up front is one of the great advantages of English Paper Piecing!  If you've been following along since the beginning, you should have sixteen or seventeen blocks completed - almost enough to finish a twenty-block version.

I think I need to schedule another road trip - I seem to make the most progress on my blocks when I'm riding in the car.  I love the portability of English Paper Piecing!

Send pictures of your progress and I'll post them on our Pinterest Board.

If you need more paper piecing supplies, check out our website here.

Now You See It, Now You Don't

This was one of the most unusual quilts we saw at Houston.  It’s actually one quilt, but, depending which angle you look from you see different faces.  Looking at the quilt from the left you see Jackie Onassis.  Looking at the quilt straight on shows Oprah.  Looking from the right you will see Mother Theresa.  Very different and fun to see!

 

 

 

 

Star Light, Star Bright

Looking for a quick and easy Christmas idea?  We loved this star idea made from yardsticks.  If you don’t have enough yardsticks at home, we have them with the Little Quilts logo on them!

You will not believe your eyes!

Teacher of our Embroidery classes, Elisabeth Frolet just finished Wanda’s year-long Baltimore Album class and this is the beautiful result.  Elisabeth designed her own border for the quilt.  She will use a wool batting and plans to hand quilt it.  Stunning!

 

Elisabeth’s sister was visiting from France and we were so excited to meet her and see her beautiful first quilt.  What a great beginner project!

 

 

Patchwork of the Crosses

Time for another block.  I hope you all had a great Thanksgiving and are ready to get back to work!

This block is made with a great border print from French General by Moda Fabrics and a coordinating red print.

Study the block carefully...you will need to cut the inner corner honeycombs with the template points going down the center of the tan strip.  The outer corners are cut with the template points going down the side of the tan stripe - cut four and then cut four reverse.
Have fun with this block!  Send pictures of your completed blocks to littlequilts@mindspring.com.
Check out our Pinterest Board to all the beautiful blocks created by other Lucy Boston addicts!

Go to our website if you need to order more supplies.

A Flair for Fabric!



Welcome to Little Quilts!  We're so excited to participate in the "A Flair For Fabric" blog tour sponsored by Martingale.   It started on November 18 and we hope you're enjoying the "up close" look at all the creative designers in the book! 

We've been designing scrappy little quilts for more than 25 years, and designing fabric for Henry Glass for almost as many.  It's so much fun to collaborate on a book like this.   With such a wide variety of designers, the result is a book with something for everyone!   "A Flair For Fabric" is a great way to see the creative process at work. 

Our books have an  autographed book plate from all the designers, but if you'd like an autographed copy from Little Quits personalized to you, order the book from our website,  and request an autographed copy in the comment section.  We have a special price on the book, too -  just $19.95!

Remember, purchasing the book is a gift to the Red Cross...all the designers are donating their royalties to this wonderful charity that helps so many people everyday.. 

  

Our project in the book features a reproduction of something near and dear to our hearts - antique doll quilts.  We absolutely love the interplay of fabrics in these little treasures and have been inspired to replicate the balance of prints in our quilts.  Shown below, our project, "Days Gone By", is a good example of our 'make-do' strategy of design.

At Little Quilts we like to put similar but slightly different fabrics together when doing patchwork.  It lets us use up some of our stash!  Some of the fabrics in the light parts of the nine patches are not all the same fabric.  In the dark parts of the blocks they might also be a similar color, for example ...browns...but we'd use more than one brown in the block. 
We love to make up stories while doing patchwork.  Perhaps we were pretending we were a girl from the prairie working in a covered wagon on her patchwork and the lighting was not very good...so we picked up a fabric that we thought was the same, but was not exactly like the other ones.  This is the method we use while making what we call 'planned scrap quilts.'

One of the fabric styles we like to use to give our quilts a "reproduction" feel is shirtings.  We'd like to know if you have any shirtings in your fabric collection and how you're using them.  Comment below and you will be entered into a drawing for an eBook copy of "A Flair For Fabric" or a fabric bundle provided by Henry Glass.  We're also giving away a bundle of six fat quarters from our new fabric line, "A Touch of Baltimore" along with three shirting fat quarters.

Don't miss tomorrow's stop on the blog hop with Liz and Beth of Lizzie B Cre8tive.  They have a fun, whimsical style you're sure to enjoy. 

 

It's not to late to participate in the blog hop.  Here is a list of all the participants...you'll love visiting all their creative blogs!

Tuesday, November 18: Launch at Martingale’s Stitch This! blog
Wednesday, November 19: Dana Brooks
Thursday, November 20: Leanne Anderson
Friday, November 21: AllPeopleQuilt.com
Saturday, November 22: Janet Nesbitt at the Sewing Cabinet
Monday, November 24: Linda Lum DeBono
Tuesday, November 25: Anni Downs
Wednesday, November 26: Kim Diehl at the Sewing Cabinet
Friday, November 28: Jill Finley
Saturday, November 29: Amy Hamberlin
Monday, December 1: Margot Languedoc
Tuesday, December 2: Little Quilts
Wednesday, December 3: Lizzie B Cre8ive
Thursday, December 4: Heather Mulder Peterson
Friday, December 5: Jacquelynne Steves
Saturday, December 6: Wrap up at the Henry Glass blog