Pageant Highlight Reel / Beauties Pageant 28

As you are reading this, quilty friends, I am at an indoor water park with two little boys. It’s back-to-back days of splashing in the wave pool and going down the slides and trying to keep track of my kids. (So not exaggerating on that last point.) At the moment, I am likely anticipating the need for a nap when I get home and preparing myself for an evening on the couch instead of a productive session at my sewing machine.

I may be running around with the boys, but I still have sewing on my mind, including these projects from past Beauties Pageants ...

Lisa linked up this Bloem Basket from an Instagram sew-along. I love how she took the opportunity to use a large-scale print on the exterior—pretty!

Alice used an online tutorial to make up her Octopus’s Garden quilt. Look at that strong geometry and bold palette!

And Bernie, of Needle and Foot, made this version of Meadow Mist Designs’ Flock of Geese pattern. Be still my geese-loving heart!

If you have a recent finish to share, I hope you’ll include it in this week’s pageant ...

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

Sew. That. Stash!

 

Dear readers, I am dropping in today with a quick post about a recent triumph: I completed 11 Jane Market Bags for my kids’ end-of-year teacher gifts and can check something off my Finish-A-Long Q1 list!

To be more specific ... I finished these 11 bags months before school’s end. I even made a 12th bag for my niece, part of Operation: Like My Dog. And what’s more thrilling is that I used 11 yards of stash to do it!

Full disclosure: I did have to buy an additional 6 yards, but that’s a pitfall of stashing for quilt making and then sewing bags. I needed bigger cuts than I usually have on hand. Still, I used twice as much fabric than I bought, and that’s saying something.

I have made this pattern many, many times before. For real. Type “Jane” into the search box on the right to read more about my past versions.

OK, now off to bind a quilt and post another finish before the first quarter of 2019 becomes the second. Wish me luck!

Linking up to Let’s Bee Social ...

Let’s Be Honest / Beauties Pageant 27

Bernie, over at Needle and Foot, recently asked her readers to get honest for a moment. In a social media world where quilters curate their Instagram feeds and post finish after finish on blogs or Facebook pages, it’s easy to think, I don’t measure up. But is anyone’s social media presence an accurate portrayal of reality? We all make mistakes. Perhaps our interactions online would be richer if we owned up to them.

My pillow-y finish from last week is a perfect example ...

The wrench in the works here was the quilting. Originally, I was going to quilt simply—just along each side of the seams—but after I did that I kept quilting. And the more I quilted, the more I realized how difficult and time-consuming it would be to rip out those stitches, and I kept quilting anyway. In the end, I matchstick-quilted the entire front of the pillow, and although it looked lovely, I had a problem: The dense quilting affected the drape and fit of the pillow over the 18-inch pillow form I had purchased. I subsequently concocted and implemented various solutions ...

First, I basted around the pillow to gauge how the pillow form would fit in the pillow as is. There was bulk—a lot of bulk.

So I increased the seam allowance, thinking that would be the solution. (It was not.)

My pillow at this point was looking floppy, especially at the corners. I like my pillows nice and chubby.

So I took the rather drastic step of tapering in all four corners, a tip I had read long ago over at Granny Maud’s Girl.

This was the outcome of my seam-allowance fudging and corner trimming ...

The project now had 12 sides and was rectangular-ish! But I finished it off anyway and bound the edges ...

In the end, I think the pillow is fine. The process didn’t go as I anticipated and the final product is different from what my original vision, but live and learn, right?

To add your latest finish to the latest Beauties Pageant—all imperfections accepted and applauded!—click the link below.

Please note: InLinkz now requires a login for all photo-based link parties. I know that’s a pain. My apologies for the inconvenience!

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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