We made another video tutorial! This one is for making simple grocery bags. I hope you like it! I have a bit of a cold so it slowed me down a little. I have been meaning to make myself some bags for the grocery store for ages now as the old ones I have are slowly tattering away.
So let me know what you think and let me know what you would like to see in the future.
I buy my heavyweight cotton twill tape from Twilltape.com This is an actual link to the roll of twill tape that I use. It is 1.25 inches and comes on a 72 yard roll. I use it for straps, apron ties and sometimes I even use it as binding around the top of quilted bags. It is great stuff folks.
I am very busy these days quilting. At the moment I have access to a second computerized machine. It is really ramping up my edge to edge output. I am currently accepting quilts for edge to edge treatments and edge to edge with borders. Please email me if you have some that need to be quilted quickly and professionally. I have sailed through all the Edge to edge quilts in my queue, so turn around is just the quilt ahead of it. You can see many of my Edge to edge designs on my Website TiaCurtisquilts.com
Here are a couple I quilted recently.
This first quilt is a lovely Farm Girl Vintage quilt. All these blocks are pretty small. Lori did an outstanding job on them.
She wanted wondering spirals for the center and left the border up of me.
Its hard to see in the picture, but it is a whimsical feather vine.
Lori always makes the best backs. And she always has (or all the quilts I quilt for her have had) a pieced "L" on the back as a signature. I think that is so brilliant.
This next fabulous quilt is a Charming Log Cabin Block quilt by Barbara Eikmeier. She is teaching this fabulous block technique at Meadows Quilt shop tomorrow. I am going to take the class. I have a million charm packs laying around and I must learn this.
Again, it is hard to see, but there is a Modern Snail edge to edge in the center and I did a Baby Welsh Arc border. I think it is super cute and really fun to quilt.
And Finally I quilted this big star quilt. I needed another edge to edge quilt to try quilting on, and I had no more customer quilts left so I ripped this one out really fast. It is a big (I think around 80 inches) I will bind it and have it listed in my shop at some point in time. I really wanted to use the new Cotton+Steel Strawberries print before it sold out of my Shop. Sadly it is all gone now.
OK, That is it. Send me your quilts! My machines are hungry!
Hi there! Welcome to the first block of the Kansas City Modern Quilt Guild Block of Every Other Month. For our first block we will begin with a classic. The 30 inch Lone Star Quilt Block. I have always loved a Lone Star quilt. They look so complicated and for ages I was intimidated by all the perfectly pieced diamonds. Well, folks they really aren't so hard! Let me show you some strip piecing magic and you can knock out a pile of these blocks too! I made a video tutorial on how to piece this block and to highlight the tricky bits. I know there are some sound issues, but bear with me and the next one will be better. Ask questions or make comments so I know how to improve. If you prefer to watch the tutorial on Youtube, my channel is Tia Curtis Quilts. I used to have quite a few videos, but I deleted them all because they were pretty cruddy. Next up will be wonky flying geese and a shopping bag.
Supplies:
(9) 2.5 inch WOF (Width of Fabric) strips of fabric
(4) 9.5 x 9.5 inch squares of back ground fabric.
(4) 6 7/8 x 6 7/8 inch squares of back ground fabric
Cut each square in half diagonally to equal 8 large triangles and 8 smaller triangles.
There are several ways to make these blocks. Two color blocks, 5 color blocks and 9 color blocks. Set up the strip sets as follows. I go over this in the video, but a picture helps heaps I think.
For a 2 color block choose a good contrasting pair. You will need 5 darks and 4 lights Set up the three strip sets like the picture above.
dark light dark
light dark light
dark light dark
For the 5 color block choose light, medium and dark fabrics. You will need 2 mediums, 4 lights (2 different prints) and 3 darks. For this one the pink/lavender fabric are my lights and the aqua/periwinkle are my mediums. If this is the type block you would like to make set the strip sets up as follows.
medium light dark
light dark light
dark light medium
Finally the 9 color star. Choose nine different colors. Sort them into light, medium and dark. You will need 4 lights, 2 mediums and 3 darks. Set them up like above with the mediums as the center and star tips.
Medium light dark
light dark light
dark light medium
This is another picture that may be helpful. Sort your 8 star points into two sets of 4. Set up both right and left pointing star points. You need both directions to make an eight pointed star.
Watch the video for answers to your questions and feel free to ask questions either here or on youtube. I will answer as I can.
Since I am making the time to blog, I wanted to show you my newest obsession. Face Quilts! I took a workshop with the one and only Melissa Averinos when she came to Kansas City Modern Quilt Guild back in October. It was one of the best workshops I have ever participated in. If you get the chance to take a workshop with her, do it! Melissa taught us the basics of drawing faces and then how she cuts shapes for eyes, nose, mouth and eye brows. Then she turned us loose. It was so fun, so very very different from what I normally do that I felt so refreshed! Well, I left the workshop with 2 lady faces and a cat face, but I was a little lost about what to do next. I mean, I knew the next step was to quilt them, but there are so many tiny pieces. This is all raw edge and glue stick (glue stick is my newest favorite sewing notion) so it was going to take some serious custom quilting to tack everything down. I hung them up on my design wall and did a bunch of quilts. Well, then I got an email from Melissa and she wanted to know if I wanted to put a face in her book? Uhhhh....Yep. She is writing a book!!!! Yay! And of course I wanted to submit a face or two to her book. No problem.
At this point I decided I needed to finish them. I still didn't want to quilt them though.....until my eyes landed on the chore my daughter was working on. I hired her to tidy up my studio and there was this crazy piece of tutu toile. That netting stuff. It was leftover from some sort of art project and was splattered with glitter paint. I had a stroke of epiphany! The netting would hold all those little bits down! OMG folks. This was a game changer. It became so darn fun to quilt these ladies that I would make them while the Statler quilted edge to edge quilts. When I would get enough faces glued down I would load up a quilt back, lay down some batting, next comes the face quilts and finally the netting. Then I quilted them with straight lines. They still needed more so I changed out the thread to black and used the black like shading. That was the magic for me. The netting gives the quilts the best feel and heaviness. Very arty.
I love these faces and my husband totally makes fun of my crazy band I am making in the basement. So far the ladies are stacking up in the studio with no real plan after being quilted. All I know is that I have many more planned in my future. So so fun.
One of my quilt guild members let me know that I have not blogged since early December. I have been pretty busy folks.
I have been good. Quilting away as usual. Something so very exciting is also happening and I can't talk about it, so I have just tried to hide from the internet so I am not tempted to spill the beans. I figure if I am busy working I won't be tempted to overshare. Below are some of the custom quilts I have gotten to work on.
This first one is Merrie's. She wanted something different in each row and a different design in each triangle. This was super fun to quilt. Doing the same stuff gets rather boring sometimes. It was a fun challenge. She really likes pebbles so I did them in the most visible spot.
I used a gold thread to do the quilting.
This was a really cool one I custom quilted for Taylor. The blue part is water and the stained glass is breaking off into the water.
Taylor wanted it to look shattered.
And the water to look somewhat like map contour lines. I felt it should have a little bit of swirl.
Next up is Vivika's Quilt. Isn't this cute. I wasn't sure if it was "Oh, Boy" you had a male baby...or "Oh Boy" we are totally lost. I figured map contours would work in both situations. My boys love maps and maps help when you are lost.
Someday I will do a whole cloth quilt with just this map contour lines. It is really the best texture.
Here is Stephanie's quilt. This was another really wonderful quilt to quilt. I used Wool batting to make the quilting pop. Wool is the best batting.
So pretty. I used a ton of different color thread on this one too. I think that actually took the longest with this one. Changing out the threads between each block.
This back is so awesome! I even managed to match up the centers of the top and the back. Yay!
This lovely one is from Mary. We decided on lots of straight lines inside the blocks. Again I used wool batting. Let me tell you that wool batting and shot cottons = fantastic. I think I used 15 different threads on this one. I am getting good at the thread change.
