Winners and Some Groovy FMQ

Important business first.  I'd like to welcome all of the new followers who joined during the blog hop - hope you enjoy reading along!  The winner of the birthday giveaway Twenty-Three charm pack is Debra Lee and the winner of the Celebrations sushi roll is Deb.  No, I wasn't going through choosing people with similar names, Random.org somehow managed to do that work for me! :)  Thanks to everyone who entered and I hope you had a great time on the blog hop!

I've been really busy hand sewing lately - today or tomorrow I will be dropping off my two quilts for the Three Rivers Quilt show, so I had to get sleeves on them and get them all de-linted/-haired/-threaded.  I made the mistake of making my first sleeve totally flat.  Bad idea.  It makes the top of my quilt look all bendy and funny.  Luckily some friends gave me some advice and I ended up making the second one in the vein of this D-Sleeve Tutorial from Tallgrass Prairie Studio.  My hands are cramping up after all that hand sewing!

My absolute favorite thing from this past week was finishing up the FMQ on my Groove quilt.  I decided to go back to my original thought of doing "organic, wavy lines" and tried that out over the final section of the quilt.  I loooooove it!

Quilting finished!  Finally!

Now to continue attaching the binding...  Oh and never again will I get hasty and decide I'm done before I'm actually done and then have to quilt with it already trimmed with the binding on.  Getting around the edges was soooo difficult!  There was basically nothing to hold on to.  But it's so busy, nobody will ever notice :)

After finishing that up, I'm feeling pretty confident in my FMQ skills.  I recently basted my Parking Lights quilt from last summer and will be quilting up that beast soon.  That was going to be my entry for Quilt Con.  Ooops.  Maybe for 2015!

Linking up with FMQ Friday! 

-Melissa

Blog Hop with Giveaways

Spring is just around the corner - it's time to get ready with the Beat the Winter Blues Blog Hop Party with Giveaways!  I'm giving away something that will prepare you for next winter.  A Princess Mirah Designs Sushi Roll in Celebrations!

It's a batik roll with 24 strips (2.5" wide) with various red, green, and gold designs.  Combine this with some solids and you can make a really stunning holiday quilt.  Or take out the yellow/gold/green strips and use them in a springy project!

Be sure to check out the blog hop and enter some of the other giveaways!

To enter the giveaway, just leave a comment below.  Followers of my blog get a bonus entry - just leave a separate comment letting me know you follow (through Google or RSS or whatever).  The giveaway will be open through noon eastern on Friday, March 15 and is open to everyone, US and international.  I will pick a comment at random.  Please be sure to leave an e-mail address if your profile is set to "no reply".  Good luck!

-Melissa

TRQ and Some FMQ

Right before the deadline, I submitted my first ever quilt show entry to the Three Rivers Quilt Show.  I put in two quilts: Charming Stars and City of Bridges.  This week, I got a letter in the mail that they were both accepted!!

This is the first time I ever submitted anything for a show and it's a good feeling to get in.  Fellow Pittsburgh-based quilter/blogger Michelle from My Life As Michelle also has a quilt in the TRQ show!  And I'm super thankful that she can pick my quilts up for me after the show because I'm supposed to be in two OTHER places at that exact same time.  Thanks Michelle!  She's also going to be showing one of her provocative pin-up girl quilts in Boston this month.

And this morning I got the Designer Bump (it's like the Colbert Bump, only for fabric-related blog posts haha) when Kate Spain shared my Honey Honey quilt blog post on Facebook!  Thanks Kate!

My other excitement from this past week is that I'm finally getting to be decent at FMQ!  I've been slowly (very very slowly) working on my Groove quilt.  As the wonderful Leah Day suggested, I got a thread stand.  Suddenly my tension seems to be mostly in check.  I was really on a roll but then I ran out of thread in the correct colors...

You can see the orange pebble quilting, the yellow fan/paisly type quilting, the green is a swirl that I'm not crazy about and haven't mastered, and the blue is a loopy design.

See how crummy the tension was on the back before?  It's really obvious with the light yellow thread on the blue.  Yuck!

Through a combination of practice, different brand of thread, and a thread stand, my tension is SO much more balanced, as you can see in the loopy blue design above.

I'm really excited to finish this up and see how it looks after it is washed :)

Linking up with FMQ Friday - hop over and take a look at Leah Day's gorgeous quilt.  I can't even imagine how tedious it must be to do alllll that stitching!  But it's so worth the results.

-Melissa