RAINBOW STARS AND ZIG ZAGS BY REBECCA LATHAM

 FROM CONCEPT

TO COMPLETION

Twelve years ago, back in 2002, I went to a quilt show and bought some fabric. Now, I've bought a lot of fabric, but I usually know what I'm going to make with it and when I'm going to make it. This was the first time I just fell in love with some fabric and bought it on a whim. I guess I've learned my lesson, because I've never done it again! Anyway, here is what I bought way back around the turn of the century:

 

This picture shows four identical bundles of twelve Fossil Fern fabrics in rainbow colors, arranged so that you can see all the colors. I only bought one bundle.

 

 

 

 

I found this Laurel Burch fabric, which is called, "Cats in Jungle". I thought it would work well with the rainbow fabrics, and I was not sure how much to buy, so I bought four yards.

The other fabric I used was Kona White. No picture of that fabric, because, well, it's plain white fabric.

 

 

I always planned to make a kid's quilt out of this collection, and, last week, I pulled the fabric out and started browsing through Pinterest to get ideas. I saw the quilt below, designed by Gerri Robinson, and liked the idea of having rows of different blocks that looked good together, rather than just one block throughout.

 

I think this quilt is rectangular, but I wanted a square quilt. I made a couple of other changes as well, like using different colors for the centers and points of the stars, and using more colors for the stars and chevrons. Where Gerri chose not to have a border on her quilt, I used the Cats in Jungle fabric to make a 3.75" border. I used the same fabric for the binding and the backing, Warm and White 100% cotton batting, and white King Tut 100% Egyptian cotton quilting thread. 

 

 

 

Most of the time, I seem to gravitate to scrappy quilts, ones where I tend to make one block at a time. This time, I was able to do a lot of chain piecing, because many of the blocks were identical. That was fun for a change!

With the piecing done, I started to choose a quilting design from the ones I already own, but the idea I had was for something swirly or loopy, and nothing I had quite fit the bill. I went to Urban Elementz and popped for a new design called "Outside In". It turned out perfect! It was so fun to quilt, especially watching the pattern develop over all the brilliant colors. Here are a few photos of the quilt on the frame of my Tin Lizzie Ansley 26 long arm quilting machine:

 

Now that the binding is done, the quilt is ready to be posted to my Etsy shop. I had so much fun designing and creating this quilt. I would love to keep it for myself, but the quilts around here are starting to pile up, as you can imagine. The joy was in the journey for me, but this fantastic kid quilt's journey will not be over until it finds a loving home! Thanks for visiting today, and I'll leave you with a few photos of the quilt. 

UPDATE: This quilt did not sell on Etsy, and it is now hanging on the wall in my quilting room.

SCRAPPY APPLES BY REBECCA LATHAM

 

I just finished a project!  From start to finish, I guess it was a little less than a week in the making.  I'm calling it "Scrappy Apples" because it is made from my stash of scraps left over from other quilts, and the quilting design is apples and leaves.

I made this Sixteen Patch quilt for a dear friend that I have never met. That's right - we met on the internet and became friends in real life. We live in different parts of the country, so we have never met in person, but we speak on the phone and text often.

My friend's name is Karen, and the quilt is on its way to her, and she has no idea it is coming. I can't wait to hear from her when it arrives!

 

When I first started designing the quilt with my quilt software, I envisioned the blocks set side by side. But after I made several of them, I reconsidered and changed the setting to "on point" with setting squares in between.

I always appreciate the opportunity to use the new design wall that Bill and I made a few months ago. It is insulation board with cotton batting glued to it. The blocks just stick to it naturally and you can rearrange to your heart's content. Here is where I kept playing with the color placement until I was happy with it.

 

With the top completed, it was ready for the longarm quilting machine. I was going to do an edge to edge quilting design, but with the large white setting squares, I could not resist the urge to treat each block separately and use the "Apple Orchard" set that I purchased in from Urban Elementz that is all different shapes of apples and leaves. This is Block One, in progress, which is a square design.

 

 

Block Two is a circular shape with just leaves, and I used it in the sixteen patch blocks. I had so much fun with these blocks, because the swirlies placed themselves on four of the small colored blocks. What a crazy random happenstance!

 

 

 

 

 

The photo above shows how the quilt top, quilt backing and quilt batting are loaded on the long arm machine. I took this picture after I had only been quilting for about an hour. I worked on this all day, and it took over eight hours to finish!

 

 

 

 

This motif is Triangle One, and is specially designed just for triangle patches in the quilt.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Triangle Two is a different design, leaves without an apple, that I used in the smaller four corner setting triangles. I used a leaf pattern for the small border, and it is also just leaves with no apples. This was not part of the apples set, but had similar shaped leaves and worked very nicely.

 

 

Because the borders can only be worked from side to side, doing a border like this necessitates taking the quilt off the frame, turning it, and reattaching it to do the last two borders.

 

Originally, I planned on using a printed fabric for the quilt backing, but decided to use white. First of all, I had a lot of this fabric on hand that I had purchased at Hancock's of Paducah a few years ago. It is 100% cotton, of course, and it is a soft as butter! So I knew that it would make a soft and comfortable backing. Secondly, and maybe more importantly, I wanted a back that would show off the quilting. Mission accomplished! A printed backing would have looked pretty, but the quilting would not have shown up as much.

 

 

 

Here is the finished quilt, ready to be delivered to Karen. I really enjoyed working on it, and hope that I have the chance to make something like this again soon.

I really need to use up some more of my scraps!

FRACTURED SQUARES BY ANDREA CAIN

 

 

My friend and customer, Andrea, dropped off a quilt yesterday, and I started quilting right away. The backing was Minky, which is a slightly furry fabric that makes a really soft and warm quilt back.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Andrea picked out the quilting design called "Holly's Hearts" by Urban Elementz and it looks really great on the quilt!

 

 

 

 

Andrea decided on white thread for the top and a variegated thread in pastels for the back. The Minky is so fluffy that you can barely see the thread itself, although the pattern really stands out!

This quilt measures 60" by 60" and the fee for the quilting was less than $60.  What a deal! If you are interested in having a quilt professionally quilted by me, click here for the details.

SCRAP JAR BY REBECCA LATHAM

 

I have been wanting to make a scrap quilt forever! I've been buying fabric and quilting since the 1990s, so you can imagine the amount of stash I have. I've been looking at scrappy quilts to find a pattern I liked, and I came across this one that I found at A Little Bit Biased. As you can see, it is finished and ready to be listed for sale at my new Etsy shop.

 

The reason I put off making a scrappy quilt was that the directions usually start out with "Cut out 578 2 inch squares." Oh, my! I could not imagine doing it! But I liked this quilt so much that I dragged out my bins of fabric and started cutting out 2" squares for the nine and sixteen patches, and larger squares for the star points and background. It took a few days, and I was very methodical (obsessive) about the colors I chose.

 

The picture to the right is the stacks of all the colored squares I cut out. Each small stack is 4 squares of that color, and I did nine stacks of blue, nine stacks of yellow, etc., so altogether, there are 312 of the 2" squares, and 80 of the larger squares. And this does not count the white squares that I cut out for the background. So, all together, I cut out 624 of the smaller squares and 160 of the larger squares, plus sashing, so the grand total was around 900 pieces. Whew!

 

So many steps went in to piecing the blocks, including making all the half-square triangle blocks for the start points. The picture above shows the 160 blocks I made for the star points, which then had to be pressed and trimmed to the right size, as show by the pink ones on the right. I really wish I had kept track of the hours I spent making this quilt. It has to be over one hundred!

 

 

 

 

 

This little pile is just the 16th of an inch that I trimmed off of each edge to make the blocks come out perfect!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

After all that cutting and sorting colors into order, it was such a rush to finally make the first block! I won't even go into any detail about how I arranged the colors, but suffice to say that the colors are in a certain order, and there is no block where a color is repeated, or near a like color in a block next to it in the quilt. I have heard other quilters say that, when they make a scrappy quilt, they put all the pieces in a bag and choose them at random, but I am too obsessive for that!

 

 

It was fun doing the sashing, too, and I put it together as I went so that I could be sure there were no like colors touching in the sashing, either!

 

 

Many hours and many days later, the quilt was ready to go on my Tin Lizzie Ansel 26 long arm quilting machine. I chose a digital quilting pattern called "Feathers Around" and I love the way it came out! I did the pattern a little bit smaller than I usually do for my quilts, because I wanted it to have a more old time-y look. I quilted it with white thread. The backing for the quilt is white, too. I love the way you can see the quilting on the back.

 

 

All that was left to do was bind the quilt, and after considering a white binding, I decided to piece the binding using a lot of the fabrics I used in the quilt top. Every 12", the binding changes to another color.

This quilt is done and ready for a loving home! It measures 57" x 70" and would be a great quilt for a child or an adult that likes a little whimsy in their life! Click here to see the quilt and buy it!

I have the next quilt in my mind already and have purchased fabric for it, so please favorite me on Etsy so you can see my creations as they get listed!

MY NEW ETSY SHOP

Over a year ago, I got the idea to open an online shop on Etsy to sell quilts and other handmade items. I made some quilts to sell, and stopped at Hancock's at Paducah to buy fabric for a sweet little jewelry holder that I wanted to make.

 

I bought enough fabric to make 60 of these items and started sewing. Many, many days later, I was finished, but never pulled the trigger on the Etsy shop. I sold a few of the pouches at a flea market last year, but the rest have been set aside for the day that I might get around to opening my shop.

Well, today was that day, and my shop is open! So far, only the jewelry holders are listed, but after Thanksgiving, I plan on doing my photography and listing my quilts.

You can visit my shop by clicking here. There are nine different colors to choose from.

I told my sister, Diane, about my new shop and she posted it on her Facebook timeline, and a few minutes later, I had my first sale!  I'm very excited! 

LITTLE QUILT BY REBECCA LATHAM

I saw a quilt that was similar to this on Pinterest, and I had the day off today, so I decided to make a little quilt out of some of my stash.  It took me all day, and I quilted it on my Pfaff domestic machine, not on the long arm.  I think it came out pretty cute!

DECEMBER 2012 QUILT

21" X 21" 

 

 

SUNSET ON THE CORAL SEA BY REBECCA LATHAM

 

My original idea for this quilt was to make it in all blues, greens and teals. But when I went to the quilt shop and saw all the beautiful batik fabrics, I decided to use more colors. I asked the store clerk to cut 1/8 yard of every batik in the store! I brought them home, folded each piece into a small square and laid them out on the floor. My husband, Bill, and I kept rearranging the squares until we were happy with the colors. I paper-pieced the blocks, and after I assembled them, I decided to add the piano keys border. I quilted it with an original design on my Gammill Classic long arm quilting machine, which I owned from 2001 to 2004. This quilt won second place in the 2003 Heritage Quilters Guild Bi-Annual Quilt Show in the "Large Quilts" class. It now has a place of honor on a prominent wall in my living room.

I call it "Sunset on the Coral Sea." The coral is in the center, the beach is on the bottom left, the waves are crashing in from the right bottom corner, the waning sunset is on the top right and the night sky is coming in at the top left.