Megan Collins' Make Waves Quilt / Beauties Pageant 349

Early in 2026, I signed up to take part in my guild’s Secret Buddies program. The idea was simple: Pick the name of a guildmate out of a hat, spoil her throughout the year with little gifts, and then present her with a quilt in November. Participants filled out a questionnaire about their fabric, palette, and design likes and dislikes, so their Secret Buddies had a good starting point for planning and plotting. It was super fun!

I picked my friend Sarah, who loves saturated colors and modern designs, and quickly homed in on Megan Collins’ Make Waves quilt pattern. It can be hard for me, as a quilt designer in my own right, to find time to make others’ patterns. Megan’s designs are fabulous, though, and this was the perfect excuse to delve into one.

The hardest part of making the quilt was choosing the fabrics, so I started with selecting the backing fabric. Sarah loves a good Ruby Star fabric, and a stamp print from Rashida Coleman Hale’s Salutations collection, with its array of bright colors, fit the bill and gave me lots of options for the overall palette. 

Once the flimsy was done, I wavered on what to do for the quilting. When I have a quilt longarmed, I always pick the lowest value on the top as the thread color, but would an edge-to-edge panto with a cream thread detract from the high contrast between the saturated foreground colors and cream background? In the end, I was too afraid it would, so I machine-quilted along the piecing lines in matching thread colors and then hand-quilted spots in 12 weight Aurifil threads, again matching the thread to the solid it appears on.

The one issue I encountered during this process was bearding. At different points on the quilt top—but not consistently across it—bits of batting peek through the holes made by the hand quilting. At the time, I thought the issue was the batting itself. I use Warm and White for 99 percent of my projects. The Warm Company says that there in no right and wrong side to its batting, but because quilters say otherwise, I baste my projects so that the "pimples" are up and the "dimples" are down. Now I’m wondering whether my needles were the issue. I’m constantly putting down one needle and picking up another. Could a less-sharp needle be responsible for the bearding? OK, my expert friends, share your bearding-related insights in the comments.

Of course, this quilt is just half of my Secret Buddies experience! I’ll take pictures of the beauty I received and share them in a future post. : )

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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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A Colorful Stara Flimsy / Beauties Pageant 348

A friend recently asked to see the latest and greatest From Bolt to Beauty patterns, and I had to laugh. Although I released three new patterns this year (Had to Be You, Twin-Star Cabins, and Festive Flurries), a recent perusal of my fabric stash was sobering. I uncovered so many WIPs that had been out of sight and out of mind. So. Very. Many! Instead of working on new quilt patterns, I am focusing on wrapping up some of those in-process projects in the upcoming months. 

I have two flimsies in particular that I want to get going on. They are completely assembled and just need to be quilted and bound. Both of them, I think, would benefit from straight-line quilting, which means my walking foot and I need to get reacquainted.

First up is Stara, a pattern by Taralee Quiltery. You might remember this project from the spring when I had to abandon my original background fabric to avoid potential shadowing (read the post here). Ultimately, I settled on Bella Solids Gray for my background. It doesn’t create the super-high contrast that my initial white-on-white print did, but it successfully blends with the top’s rainbow of Ruby Star fabrics. 

I am really pleased with how this top came out. I especially love how the color gradient bleeds from one nine-patch to the next. I am thinking of quilting a giant X on the quilt top and then echoing the quilting in each of the four quadrants, something like this:

It’s a quilting plan I have used before, in Love Boldly ...

What do you think? If you have any thoughts on what my walking foot and I should tackle with this top, please let me know in the comments.

Also, if you, like that friend I mentioned earlier, are drawn to new patterns, fear not! There are some coming in 2027. Think cats and penguins and—gasp!—y-seams. (Trust me, machine-sewn y-seams are easier than you think and well worth the effort.) As always, you will be the first to hear about any new additions to the From Bolt to Beauty lineup!

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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

Five Little Ghosts and Friends / Beauties Pageant 347

* Download the free Five Little Ghosts and Friends expansion pack here *

Last year I sewed up a supersize version of Five Little Ghosts, the runner project from my book, Not-Your-Typical Jelly Roll Quilts, and then never posted the finish here or on social media. Now, with Halloween right around the corner, these cuties are finally getting their time in the spotlight!

The inspiration for the throw-size project was a fat quarter bundle of Lella Boutique’s Hey Boo line. I am a sucker for unexpected palettes, and the pinks and purples in Hey Boo were right up my alley. The original project calls for five jelly roll strips, a background fabric, and scraps for the ghosts’ eyes and mouths. Because I wanted to put my Hey Boo fat quarters to good use, however, I redesigned the blocks for the throw—I’m calling it a pattern "expansion pack"—to feature different fabrics. 

In usual From Bolt to Beauty fashion, the background pieces are cut to maintain the directionality of prints. In not-so-usual From Bolt to Beauty fashion, I included a thick black border to frame the colorful background fabrics and ground the quilt in general.

This beauty then got an edge-to-edge spiderweb panto (minus the spiders—for heaven’s sake, I’m not cuddling under a quilt with spiders on it!). The texture is best viewed on the back ...

I have said this before: I’m not a fan of scary Halloween. Cute Halloween, however, is something I can get behind! If you own a copy of Not-Your-Typical Jelly Roll Quilts, be sure to download your copy of the free expansion pack so you, too, can sew up a posse of 20 not-so-scary ghosts.

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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