Giveaway Time - a Moon Shine Aurifil Box!

Hey y'all! How's it going? It's been a little while since we've done a giveaway and I thought, since Fat Quarter Shop is celebrating their 11th anniversary, that now seemed like the perfect time!

This time around I'm giving away something a little different and I really hope you like it...

Ohhhh, what could this be?! Why, it's one of the brand-spanking new Aurifil thread boxes designed to coordinate with Tula Pink's not-yet-released Moon Shine collection.  This particular box is the Dandelion colourway but threads to coordinate with Moon Shine are also available in the Meadow and Strawberry colourways. I was lucky enough to receive a few fat quarters of this new collection while I was at Quilt Market, and let me tell you, it is gorgeous!

This awesome little box contains 10 spools (220 yards each) of Aurifil 50wt. cotton thread - isn't it pretty? If I had any disposable income right now, I would be buying one of each of these little boxes for myself - totally jealous! And just in case you wanted to see a little more about the thread (and other Tula awesomeness), FQS shot this little video with Tula at Quilt Market.

To celebrate their anniversary, FQS is offering a shipping sale, so if there's anything over there that you want, I say hop to it now!

Now I bet you want to know how to enter the giveaway right? Well, here ya go!

You have two chances but please be sure to leave separate comments for each entry. Here's what you've got to do:

1. Leave a comment letting me know what your favourite 

collection from FQS' Coming Soon section is.

2. Leave another comment if you are a follower of my blog.

That's it! Two easy-peasy ways to enter! I will close the comments in a week (June 25th) and announce the winner here on the blog. International entries are, as always, welcome! Also, please remember that I have comment moderation enabled so if you don't see your comment right away it just means that I haven't had the chance to approve it yet (duplicate comments will be deleted).

Good luck everyone!!

*the giveaway is now closed*

Go Fish, Sully!

Hey y'all! How's everyone doing? I have been a busy bee working on some new patterns, applying for jobs, and getting ready for Sewing Summit (wait... I don't think I've mentioned here that I'm going to Sewing Summit - well I am! Hurray!!). I've actually made a number of things in the past little bit - went through a somewhat abnormal spurt of sewing energy there - and I'm going to share one of them today (the rest will come later, don't you worry).

Our friends Kyle and Danielle had a beautiful baby boy a few months ago; his name is Sullivan (yep, we now how two Sullivans in our lives) and he is a real charmer. Now of course he needed a quilt, right? Yep, right! I finished this quilt last week and we took it over while having dinner with them this past weekend. They loved it - phew!

I ended up going for a pretty simple square-in-square design for this one - well, other than the centre square which is a rectangle-in-square! All of the centre squares of each block and the fussy cut print in the centre are from the (original) Storyboek collection by Jay-Cyn Designs for Birch Fabric; I really wanted to use as much of each little scene as possible without cutting them up too much.

I am so in love with that little scene in the middle there - I love the windmill, and the little boy fishing, and the whale is just fantastic!! With the exception of the green solid (which is from FreeSpirit) all of the surrounding prints are from the Oliver + S City Weekend collection for Moda. I really wanted to use some cheerful and simple prints for around the centre blocks, and this really just seemed to fit the bill!

This is the back!! For this pieced back I just took six City Weekend fat quarters and stitched them together - I think it's fun. The binding is the same yellow micro dot from the centre block on the front and is my favourite print from this line; this print is one that I really wish I had more of, I think I'm down to a little bit less than half a yard now.

Go Fish, Sully!

For Sullivan
Finished Quilt: 36x36"

Completed: September 14, 2012

Tal's Habitat of Love

So my friends Jackie and Ben (who both attended "library school" and worked with me) had a little baby boy at the end of November. His name is Tallis - Tal for short - and I finally got to meet him tonight! Knowing that he was coming along I started thinking about making a quilt to welcome him to the world; initially I started with working out a design (as I usually do) but that just was not working, so I jumped to thinking about fabric instead. Originally I thought that I would use "typical boy" colours and go with lots of blues and greens, maybe mixed with some grey, but then I decided to be a little more adventurous and settled on using pieces from Habitat by Jay McCarroll which had been sent to me by Free Spirit for the MQG challenge.

This is what I came up with! I went for a modified plus design that integrated various shades of grey - in this case Kona Charcoal, Coal, and Medium Grey - and also negative space. I could have made a standard plus quilt just using the Habitat fabrics, but I really wanted to do something different that was maybe more unexpected.

I took this little quilt (hmmm, forgot to measure it but I'd say it's about 42x47" or so) over tonight and I am so glad that Jackie and Ben liked it! Considering the fact that Ben mentioned awhile ago that his favourite quilt I've made was Sullivan's Steps, I was little worried that there might be too much pink (although I don't subscribe to the notion that boys can't have pink) or modern-ness for them, but it all worked out since they thought it was a-okay.

I used 100% unbleached, organic cotton for the batting, and quilted it with straight lines on the diagonal. The binding is also Kona Medium Grey. The backing is a solid piece of Kona Stone and I cut a label from the yard I had printed through Spoonflower to label it with.

This is one of the quilts that I mentioned in my last post was finished in November, so I am also super-glad that I finally got around to taking pictures of it before giving it away! Let me just say that working full-time during the winter means that it is dark when I leave for work and dark when I get home - not so good for picture taking! I'm hoping that in this new year I can be more organized with getting pictures done on the weekends, as long as the weather agrees with me that is!