Book Preorders Open! / Beauties Pageant 282

 

 

I am pleased to announce that I’ve launched book preorders in my new Shopify store! To celebrate, I’m offering a limited-time bundle: preorder the book, and receive 2 PDF patterns free right now.

 

The preorder listing has all the details—with a bunch of styled pictures of the sample quilts, taken by Melanie Zacek. (Even if you’re not in the market for a new quilt book, the pictures are spectacular and worth a look!) 

 

To take an advantage of the special offer, add the book preorder to your cart. Then, navigating to the PDF Patterns page, add 2 PDF patterns to your cart. (You must add 2.) Upon checkout, use the discount QUILTCON.

Your patterns will be available for immediate download from an email that you’ll receive momentarily (check your spam folder if it doesn’t appear in your inbox after a few minutes). The book is slated to ship at the end of April 2025 via USPS.

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I’ll be taking a deep dive into the pattern collection in the upcoming weeks, telling you more about the backstory behind each pattern. I’ve been waiting not-so-patiently to get to this point! Eep—I’m so excited to share these projects with you!

 

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I invested a lot of time and effort to assemble this collection of patterns in book form, and I wasn’t alone in the endeavor ... Gailen Runge, the creative director at C&T Publishing, helped me make this book-writing dream a reality. Moda fulfilled my fabric-y dreams by supplying so many jelly rolls and so much yardage—the samples are all the better for it. And the Warm Company shipped me a big old bolt of Warm & White. As a quilter who loves light backgrounds, that’s been my preferred batting for the past 10 years. : )

 

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• Post your finish in the linky tool. (No links to your own giveaway or linky, please!)
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• Visit and comment on other participants’ finishes.

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My Love of Hearts / Beauties Pageant 281

Picture by Melanie Zacek. Copyright 2025 C&T Publishing.

I don’t know what it is about hearts, but I love them. Perhaps they remind me of being a kid and collecting heart stickers or doodling hearts on my schoolwork? Whatever the reason, decades later hearts still make me smile.

It follows, of course, that I love heart quilts. And in a household where the only other females are Golden Retrievers, I know that any heart quilt I make is specifically for my own enjoyment. (Turns out, teenage boys aren’t big fans of heart quilts. Who knew?!)

I didn’t have the bandwidth to design or sew a new heart design for Valentine’s Day this year, but when I sat down and thought about it, I’ve designed a bunch of heart quilts already ...

There’s my Love Boldly quilt pattern, which I sewed for a QuiltCon 2020 stripes challenge ...

Then there’s the Folk Heart project I wrote about in December. This is a one-time sew for me (I won’t be writing the pattern), and I’m keeping this beauty for myself.

And remember the talk of my upcoming book release, Not-Your-Typical Jelly Roll Quilts? When I first mentioned it last September, the April 2025 release date seemed so far away. Now that we’re almost in February, April is just around the corner. I’ll be launching a series of blog posts to talk about the 14 quilts in the book, but I wanted to give you a sneak peek of two heart quilts in the collection.

Buoyant Hearts, a project with rows of hearts that bob up and down on a background of jelly roll strips, is pictured at the top of the post, and I Heart Rainbows, seen folded up below, adorns each easy-to-sew rainbow with a heart ...

Picture by Melanie Zacek. Copyright 2025 C&T Publishing.

See? Those pictures have you smiling, too, right? Are you sewing any hearts for this Valentine’s Day? I’d love to see your Valentine’s projects past and present in this week’s linky!

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• Post your finish in the linky tool. (No links to your own giveaway or linky, please!)
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• Visit and comment on other participants’ finishes.

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Sew Fresh Quilts' Giraffe Love Quilt / Beauties Pageant 280

Back in 2014 when I started From Bolt to Beauty, I discovered Sew Fresh Quilts, a blog by Lorna McMahon. Lorna started designing and selling patterns well before I did. At first, she released geometric designs but soon homed in on—and found her groove with—animal designs. Truly, she’s made quilts of any and every creature you’d encounter in your house, out in the wild, or at the zoo.

When it came time to sew something for a giraffe-loving new mom, I went to Sew Fresh Quilts and found many options. There were rainbow giraffes lined up in a row, a sweet giraffe family of three, a giraffe with his zebra buddy, and four others.

I decided on Giraffe Love, a whole-composition design of three giraffes munching on leaves. I think I fell in love with this pattern because it strays from my usual white or light-colored background, which isn’t a wise choice for a baby quilt that’s going to see its share of spills. Plus, I couldn’t resist the combination of yellow giraffes on a background of gradient blues. The foreground colors really pop!

I modified the pattern because I didn’t have the required six shades of blue in my stash and wanted to avoid horizontal seam lines that were necessary when sewing with six blues but not with the four I used. (Yes, I like to complicate projects whenever I can!) I really like how it came out.

This was the first pattern of Lorna’s that I’ve sewn. I was thankful for the many diagrams—it’s so much faster for my brain to process illustrations rather than written instructions.

Sewing this design reminded me of my own Ridiculously Easy Jelly Roll Quilt, a pattern that’s assembled in columns. (Giraffe Love is sewn in rows.) As with Ridiculously Easy, Giraffe Love’s simple construction doesn’t mean you can sew on autopilot. I was using my backup sewing machine at the time and didn’t check my quarter-inch seam allowance. When it came time to sew the rows together, I found discrepancies that required some seam ripping, even quilt-top surgery at times. All of that was my issue, not the pattern’s.

Now I just need to find time to quilt this beauty! Any suggestions on a quilting design? I’m planning on quilting this myself with my walking foot on my domestic machine. Thanks in advance!

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The pageant rules are simple:

• Post your finish in the linky tool. (No links to your own giveaway or linky, please!)
• Point your readers back here with a text link or use the button above.
• Visit and comment on other participants’ finishes.

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Use It or Lose It: Cirrus Solids / Beauties Pageant 279

My love affair with Cirrus Solids started back in 2021 when I made my Quilt Buzz Bingo project. I wanted a special solid to sash my blocks, and these yarn-dyed wovens are a little heavier than—and have more personality than—regular quilting cottons.

The color and texture of Cirrus Solids in Ocean, a deep blue, transformed my blocks. Without it, my pink and green blocks looked very “modern Christmas.” The sashing erased all evidence of the holidays and replaced it with “preppy summer.” The palette makes me think of a woven button-down shirt and cutoffs, and the finished quilt is on my bed right now in an effort to inject color into my New England winter.

Ocean wasn’t the only Cirrus Solid in my stash, however: When I reorganized my stash recently, I realized I had 3-plus yards of both Limestone (a white) and Amazon (an aqua). It was time to find those beauties a purpose!

Enter Windmill Weave by Sewspicious. Although there’s something special about mixing Cirrus Solids with quilting cottons, as I did in Quilt Buzz Bingo, there’s something equally special about using solely Cirrus Solids, and I know this bold, graphic design will be striking sewn up in Limestone and Amazon.

I am two blocks into this project. Thanks to my AccuQuilt Go and strip piecing, however, the process is surprisingly fast. I have more to say about using Cirrus Solids and the pattern, but I’ll save those comments for a future update on my progress. : )

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The pageant rules are simple:

• Post your finish in the linky tool. (No links to your own giveaway or linky, please!)
• Point your readers back here with a text link or use the button above.
• Visit and comment on other participants’ finishes.

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Because People Keep Having Babies / Beauties Pageant 278

Just when I think all the babies in my life have a Michelle-made quilt, another one comes into the world!

The quilt you see here was made for the 4-month-old of a very special teacher. This project is the sixth time I’ve sewn this particular pattern. It’s Little Man, an oldie but a goodie by Camille Roskelley from her book Simplify (Stash Books, 2010). 

What makes a baby quilt pattern worthy of sewing a half-dozen times? Well, Little Man is super cute, and its fabric requirements are easily fulfilled by my stash. Although I opened a layer cake for Little Man #6, I usually cut into the suggested four fat quarters. That’s an easy bill to fill for a gal who doesn’t invest in many baby-friendly prints. 

Little Man is also a fast sew and measures in at about 40" x 50", so the recipient can use it well into his toddler years and beyond (and I can squeak by without piecing a back!). Gah—it’s the best baby quilt pattern!

My only regret with this quilt is that I didn’t get pictures of the quilted-and-bound finish. With my usual machine in the shop, my backup machine and I struggled to finish much of anything before Christmas. This beauty was completed the night before it was delivered, and it went straight from being bound by my humble backup machine to being wrapped up for gifting. To see my past versions of this pattern, including more than one I’ve dubbed a “Little Lady,” click here.

For those of you who fall in love with this project’s turtles and crabs and whales, they’re from Ahoy! by Gingiber. Could that have been Stacie Bloomfield’s first collection for Moda way back when? One way or another, the collection is long out of print. I can cut another (my seventh!) Little Man out of what remains from my layer cake, and then that will be the end of my fun with Ahoy!

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The pageant rules are simple:

• Post your finish in the linky tool. (No links to your own giveaway or linky, please!)
• Point your readers back here with a text link or use the button above.
• Visit and comment on other participants’ finishes.

You are invited to the Inlinkz link party!

Click here to enter