Category: Quilting and Sewing

It’s always fun to see what fabric different people are looking forward to before it’s released, and Summersville was on my sister’s short list of must-haves.

I saw this on Lu Summer’s blog and decided to try it for her birthday.


After several weeks of two minutes here and five minutes there (mostly in the car) I’d filled in enough of the print to try my idea.

So here it is, my “Summersville in Color” pillow.


I haven’t done a project like this in a long time, and when I finished it I was giddy!  The embroidery, the yellow fabric, the aqua pom pom trim, all of it makes me smile.




For the back I decided on a simple envelope closure so I could leave the selvage on the fabric.  I thought Kristen would like seeing that.




If there is a place like  Summersville for my family, I think we would all say Newport Beach, California.  It’s where we vacationed when I was a child because my Grandpa lived there, and we’ve taken our children there as well.  There’s a house in the embroidery that’s similar in color to my Grandpa’s house, and all the bright colors remind me of the colorful old beach houses we love to look at when we’re on walks.

This was a really fun project to work on, made more fun by anticipating my sister’s happiness when she saw it.


I wasn’t disappointed.  As cute as the pillow looks on my front porch, it will look even better in her living room, where she has yellow stripes on her curtains and an aqua ceiling in the kitchen.  Happy (late) birthday, Kris!


Jennifer

I wasn’t supposed to buy any new fabric this year.  Well, I did really well for a while and then I guess I quit doing really well because I just bought this pretty little stack of fabric.  It’s called Vintage Summer by Little Yellow Bicycle for Blend Fabrics.  It’s kind of my style and yet it’s not, but I like it.  I’ve learned that I like a lot of large scale prints but then I struggle to cut into them and actually use them because I feel like I need to do the perfect thing with that large print.  I don’t know if I’m just getting smarter or if more fabric designs are getting smaller, but I’m trying to avoid the larger prints (because I still have plenty of them) and watch for the smaller ones that look great when they’re cut into small pieces.

I also shouldn’t start another quilt top until I’ve dealt with all my projects that need finishing, but for some reason I started reading about string quilts the other day and I got the idea in my head that I NEED to try it.  If I’m ever going to make that selvage quilt I’ve been saving strips for then I’ll have to learn paper piecing anyway.  Then I poked around and found this one over at Film In the Fridge and I was sold.  Just enough order in that quilt for me to jump in.

So in the only quiet 30 minutes of my Mother’s Day, I went to my sewing machine and made my first ever paper pieced string quilt block.  My kids were shocked that I was sewing fabric to a piece of paper, but I was excited.  Learning something new beats a nap any day!

So the Vintage Summer prints were immediately cut into (big deal for me!) instead of waiting around for the “perfect project” and here’s my first block:


The fabric is the perfect scale for a quilt like this and I’m happy with my decision.  Paper piecing has always sounded tedious but I quite enjoyed this experiment.    I love the white with the prints, and I’m following Ashley’s pdf  chart for it.


I really love those little strips of white in there.  They look so cool and they’re something I’ve always been intimidated by.

Honestly, I might not touch my sewing machine again until June, but it sure was fun to experiment for a little while!

HH