The Quilted Snail: April 2023

Wednesday, April 19, 2023

"Say What?" Blog Hop - My Day

This month I'm participating in the "Say What?" blog hop. The prompt we were given for this hop were as follows:

"We have all heard that our quilts speak to us, so just what are they saying?"

Share a story or show a project or technique that you can't believe you tried. Or post about a quilty word project.

Here are the bloggers who are posting their projects today:

Wednesday April 19

Quilting Gail

Voormans Quilts

Quilted Delights

The Quilted Snail (me!)

Ms P Designs USA

Kathy's Kwilts and More

Last year I had seen a tutorial posted on Instagram here Pieced Circle Tutorial for an easy way of sewing pieced circles in a quilt block. The method looked easy, so despite the fact that I've long sworn I wouldn't do pieced curves in my quilting (pieced enough curves when I was making clothes!) - note....that was wouldn't, not couldn't....LOL, I decided to try the method in the tutorial. These blocks were the first ones that I made with the tutorial

I wanted to expand on the technique and decided to make one large center medallion type block for the center of the quilt with multiple circles. This is the result of my experimenting. And yes, the circles are pieced and overlapping. =)

And here are the small blocks and medallion that I have made so far. I still need more blocks, but I need to decide on what size quilt I want to make (thinking large lap quilt), and then decide on layout.

Many years ago I was in a heart block swap with a a small group of quilt friends that I was a part of at that time. One of my dearest friends made this beautifully embroidered block for me as a part of that swap. Unfortunately, like so many of my swap blocks this has been sitting in a tote with the other blocks I received from that swap. With part of the challenge for this blog hop being about words in your quilting, I decided it was time to pull this out and finish it up.

Backing for the wall-hanging was from a piece of linen sent to me by the same friend who had made the block. Seemed appropriate to use it here.

Gratitudes:

1. For the procedure planned for my dad has been cancelled.

2. for the great group of people that I work with.

Saturday, April 15, 2023

ScrapHappy April 2023

Lots of little things done this month. First though, a bit of humor - as I was going through a basket of scraps left from various projects I was going through for a different project when this velvet sleeve came to light.........only I have absolutely no idea where it came from or when. All I know is I haven't worked with it anytime in recent history.....lol.

Repair work has started on this antique quilt. Well, more accurately I should say I've picked it up again. The quilt was made by my great-grandma on my mom's side, quilted by her and one of her daughter's, my great-aunt, and of course I'm repairing it. So 3 generations of my family will have worked on it. when the repairs are done it will be going to the cousin who remembers her mom helping to quilt it.

I have 5 of the Sunbonnet Sue blocks to repair (and that doesn't count the sashing or cornerstones yet to repair). The two shown are just the first two. Dresses only on these two were in shreds.

Dresses and bonnets from reproduction 30's print remnants from my stash.

This little piece was finished from precut pieces. It finished at 6".

This mini wall-hanging was completed. The top was a long-time UFO from a CQ swap that I had been a part of with 3 other friends. All fabrics in it were either scraps or remnants.

And a bunch of quilted postcards were made over the course of a month. Fabrics, trims, and the fusible pellon were all from scraps from my stash.

Strings that had been purchased were the basis for the fronts of these two. UFO cross-stitch pieces were added to the fronts of them.

Postcards that had been started before I moved back to Arizona from TX were embellished with scrap laces and salvaged flowers from the years I worked at Joann's.

More postcards made with scraps, a UFO cross-stitch piece from years ago, the one on the right was from a UFO strip from a quilting friend.

Final two postcards made. Top one embellished with what should have been a package decoration. Bottom one embellished with another UFO cross-stitch piece.

I used quilt labels for the backs of several of the postcards that finished at 4" by 6" in size. Since I always mail my postcards in envelopes due to the 3D embellishments these add a touch of whimsy to the side where I'll write a note.