A Few Things To Show Off

I still have the same thing going on my design wall. The 3" nine patches set with browns and yellows.  I have made very little progress there.  I've just been making more nine patches. There are about 100 more to work with now but far from enough.

I did however, finish my "Easy Street" mystery quilt top that was designed by Bonnie Hunter. You can find the directions to that quilt here .  It did seem like I was never going to get this one to the flimsy stage.  But I took to work on at our sew-in day so I was able to get most of the blocks finished there in marathon fashion.

As can be seen, I used orange, green and purple for my main colors.  It is not one of my favorites but it did turn out alright.  She may have called it Easy Street but there are still a lot of pieces that went into this quilt.

Here is a close up of a section of the quilt top.

I also want to show off the Super Mario Brothers quilt I made for Zach.  Hopefully you can see in the picture how the top three blocks are larger that the other 12.  I, of course, wanted my quilt to look different than everyone else's quilt.  In hind sight that may not have been the best idea.  Since, Mario and Luigi are so large and go right to the edge, when this lays on the bed, they hang over the side.   The other blocks do too.  But it seems to distort them more.  And I'm probably the only one who would even worry or think about that.

 I don't know why I thought this quilt was so huge.  It's just a normal queen size. It's about 92 long by 82 wide.  I probably felt it was larger than normal because it is so heavy with all of those seams.

Forgive my ignorance of ALL things Super Mario.  Luckily I was able to go back to the website that tells all of the characters names.  Top left is Mario himself. In the top middle is Piranha Plant.  On the bottom left is a Treasure Chest. The brown guy is Goomba.

Top right is Luigi. (On my quilt the only thing different about Mario and Luigi is the direction they face and the color of their shirts.) The red thing is called Shy Guy. And on the right is a Cloud.

Here on the top left is a Pipe block. The orange thing is Spiny Shell.  On the bottom left is Mushroom.  And of course that's a Star.

This picture has a turtle called Koopa Troopa.  A Question Mark block.  The bottom left is a Fire Flower.  And the bottom right is a Turtle Shell block.

And there you have it.  If you want to make your own Super Mario quilt I suggest you just Google that very thing.  That's what I did.  The first site that was very helpful to me was Cut To Pieces .
She actually did a sew-a-long for her quilt.  On that site you can find most of the blocks I have here.  As for the other blocks I just looked around the web and found the rest. 

This quilt has quite a bit of color. And of course, you could make it as colorful as you want.  But I must say it was a very tedious quilt to make since it is nothing but squares and matching seams.  I do love how the sashing turned out.  And if you'll biggy size the pictures you can see that I put long strips next to my colorful sashing.  That way I didn't have to match those seams. You'll also be able to see that I quilted it using a cross hatch pattern.  I used a variegated gray and black thread.

On to the next project.

Happy sewing,

Julie

Hi Cathy

My sister Cathy informed me last Saturday exactly how long it had been since I wrote a post.  Too long, I guess.  Anyway, I have a hundred excuses but none of them are any good.  My last post I said I would put pictures up of my finished baby quilt for Allison and the finished Mario Brothers quilt for Zach.  Well, it's not going to happen today.  I have been having camera troubles for one thing. I am hoping that they have worked themselves out and that I can get more pictures.  As for the Mario quilt I still have not been able to lay the whole quilt out anywhere in my house and get a decent picture.

In the mean time I'll show you what I have been doing with my leader/ender nine patches.

Here is a small portion of what I'm working on.  I had over 250 3" nine patches made which seemed like a lot at the time they were counted so I started making 4" stars.  Well, when I decided to use this setting it became very apparent that 250 is not even close.  I think it will take over 400.  In addition to the 400 plus nine patches it will take almost that many hour glass blocks too.  That will make the quilt 81" x 81".   I have not decided what if any border it will have. 

This is a close up of one of the blocks.  I decided to put this together as blocks and not just as rows.  Trying to layout all of those little 3" blocks into rows of 27 would have made me crazy.  So far I have 39 of the 9" blocks done and have made enough of the sashing blocks to figure out that this layout will work for me.  In the picture above you can see the nine patch layout and right next to it is the sashing block which only takes two hour glass and 1 nine patch units.  I like how the hour glass setting gives it a second design with a star.  That star does/will get lost in the quilt as a whole though as you can see in the top picture.  So this would be great with the blocks laid out with a solid sashing between them.  The solid sashing is just not what I want for this quilt.

This Saturday Jennifer and I will be going to our sew-along group.  I'm hoping to make some more progress on this quilt and maybe break out the Easy Street blocks from Bonnie Hunter's mystery.  I seem to have lost interest in it.  No telling why.  I like the colors and the pattern but I sure didn't hesitate to put it aside and get started on this.

Anyway.  Have a great day.  Happy sewing.

Julie