Quilt Reveal: Scrappy Cat Collage Mini Quilt

 I am continuing to make progress on each of my quilts fifteen minutes a day. It is a lot of fun to pull out the old projects and make some progress on them, but it is hard to put them away when the fifteen minutes is over. I've been really good about staying organized and putting the projects back to make room for the next projects. I think they will be easier to bring them back out again in 2024 to get them finished off.

Here's a quilt I finished.

This quilt was started in September 2019. I wanted to make another fabric collage quilt, so I collaged a bunch of little strips of fabric on some fusible. There is a link here with a mini tutorial.  I cut out some animal shapes and even eventually finished a camel and a giraffe quilt out of this one sheet of fused fabric.

This month, I am bringing out each of my old works in process and I quilted the scrappy cat  as one of the projects on my Youtube channel, Quilt and Color. 

I only did the quilting on the video, but since I was so close to the finish, I added the words and the binding after the video was over. This quilt wasn't on my list of quilts in progress because it was a scrap from the camel quilt, and not technically its own project, but I am counting it anyway. Like I did last time for the giraffe, I will add it with the start date of the camel quilt and the current end date.

 Circle Block 280

 

On another day, I worked on the Quilty 365 quilt. Since I have been showing closeups on this blog, I wanted to make sure I included them here. This one uses the background fabric from the Portraits quilt. The red is from Boundless, the blues are from Seaglass rooftops, the blue on the right and the orange are from Rey and the Death Star.

 Circle Block 281

  

This one uses the red and blue from Rey and the Death Star, the blue from Seaglass Rooftops and the green is from the Olympics quilt.

Circle Block 282

This one uses the green from Olympics, the background snake fabric is from the Portraits quilt, the light green is from the backing of Zou the Elephant.

 Circle Block 283

The red fabric is from the binding of Boundless quilt

 

Quilt Reveal: I've Got Your Back

In September of 2019, I posted a tutorial of how to make some fabric collage animals. I made several different animals for the tutorial. I wasn't sure whether I would make separate quilts or make one big menagerie quilt, so I added it to my list as one quilt. This means that I am breaking each animal off the menagerie quilt as I make a small quilt.

In December, I showed you Stand Tall giraffe. (More on that quilt below).

 

Today, I have the I've Got Your Back camel. I made the camel to accompany the llama. As I cut out the camel, I realized I had a lot of scrap collage left, so I also cut out other animals, including the giraffe. The giraffe got finished before the camel. That happens a lot here at the High Road. Quilts are finished out of order from their start date.

 Just like the giraffe, the camel quilt has words on it, which is then the name of the quilt.

 This piece was a sample I made to test out my machine after it came back from the hospital. It was gone for a long time and the repair was pricey so I wanted to make sure it worked right. It does.

I added a button for the eye. It is one of the many buttons on the shirts I used for the Blue Shirts Quilt. I really like this fabric to represent sand.

 Update on the Giraffe Quilt

I wanted to show you that I did add a tail on the giraffe before the end of the year. I also made sure he had two back legs.

 

Stand Tall is now complete.

2023: More Finishes Than Starts

 

I am going to try to have more finishes than starts again this year. I didn't manage to finish the camel last year, but it helps me get off to a good start this year.

Quilt Reveal: Stand Tall

 In September of 2019, I posted a tutorial of how to make some fabric collage animals. I made several different animals for the tutorial. When I put them away, I hadn't decided whether to put them all together in one quilt, or to make lots of little quilts. 

 

After all, how  meta is making a collage of blocks that are made with collage of fabrics. That would be fun, but that would require figuring how to join different size blocks and make them look cohesive. Also since the collaged animals will use a lot of quilting, and I wasn't thinking about doing a lot of quilting in the background, I am not sure whether the inconsistent quilting will cause any trouble.

Making them into individual quilts would be great to give me a head start on the small quilt of the month.

 

As we come to the end of 2022, I was thinking about the end of the year post.

Although I didn't have any rules for the year, I did have an idea that I could have more finishes than starts. A low key, low pressure goal. I just had to finish one more quilt than I started. How easy is that?

Earlier in the year, I had even pulled out some almost finished quilts that should have helped me reach the goal early so I could skate free the rest of the year. Well, as you can see, I haven't pulled it off yet. It is fine, since I started a big time, intensive quilt, I can forgive myself for reaching my goal. But still, I still have to admit defeat. I haven't had much success this year in quilting for 15 minutes a day. So a win on the quilting front would be nice.

I looked in the Cave of Wonder for quilts that would be quick to finish. Not a big, lap quilt, but a really small one. I pulled out the box of collage animals to see if I could make some more progress on them. And as you can tell by the pictures, a small quilt won out and here is the result. I quilted the markings on the giraffe and added a bead for the eye before binding it. I might add a three-dimensional tail but I am calling it finished it for now.

I Llike You a Llot Llama

We interrupt regularly scheduled programming to bring you a very special Llama. I took a vacation from my vacation. I was running around thinking about all the things I wanted to get done before I went back to work, and decided I was going to take a pure vacation day that didn't entail getting ready to go back to work.

I watched this video.



I looked at my trash can. You know how I have been making circles out of my fabric trash. Well I can make other things besides circles too.  It's strange that the colors washed out in these photos since I did take the quilts outside to photograph them and it is bright outside. (edited to add: I took new pictures which are slightly better and replaced some of the old ones.]

The fabric scraps were mostly used as is, straight out of the fabric trash can, although I did have to make some skinnier. I didn't make sure they were all the same size.  I used double-side fusible web (Steam a Seam2) instead of liquid glue to  hold down the fabric scraps, and used a stick glue to help hold down the pieces that overlapped.

Then I cut out the shapes and fused them to the background.

Then I stitched the strips down. For this quilt, I used the wavy line stitch on my machine to avoid having to change feet. Then I added decorative stitches.

I birthed the quilt and then I stitched around the shapes with dark thread and added the words and ribbon. It was a lot of fun.

Those of you who know me are probably wondering why I used a llama instead of an elephant. "Don't you know you can use any shape with this technique?"

Way ahead of you. In fact, I finished the elephant before the llama, only because I had to piece the batting for the llama. I used scraps for everything - including the design, the background, the backing, and the batting. The size of the pieces were dictated by the size of the scraps.

The thread was new. This technique takes several feet changes, but by the time I got to the llama, I became more economical.

The circle was surprisingly in the right place to be an eye.

The border ribbon is made out of jute and polyester. I thought it worked well with the elephant.

Both of these were a lot of fun to make.

Linked to:
Off the Wall Friday 
Friday Foto Fun 
Oh Scrap! 
Moving It Forward Monday - these quilts were a brief respite from making the Sweet Land of Liberty and the Colonial Bricks quilts.
Monday Making