Mellow Yellow

Every time I say the name of this quilt and fabric collection, I cannot help but start humming the song "They call me mellow yellow . . . that's right." The quilt is designed, the fabric is in, and now I need to make a sample quilt. Boy is the fabric gorgeous--the yellow is truly yellow--like crayon yellow. For a free pattern, visit the Exclusively Quilters website. That will also take you to a link for the kit.

Okay, so I haven't posted in a while. But that's because I have been madly working on several projects. Finishing some, beginning others, and just letter some ideas percolate for a while. Here's how the butterfly wallhanging came out. Look for the pattern in a spring issue of The Quilter Magazine. I'll let you know the exact issue when I get word.

"Thrilled" is how I felt when I saw one of my quilts "Oak Leaves" in the latest edition of The Quilter Magazine. I designed it especially for a grouping of hand dyed fabrics I had been tinkering with for a while. Hand appliqueing the blocks and border took an even longer while, as did the quilting. This is one of those quilts I'm not going to part with for some time.

New Fabrics for Spring

One of the new spring lines, Urban Rhapsody, arrived recently and I've been busy working on some new designs. Here's what I'm planning to make. Let's see how it goes. You know how sometimes you get started on a project and then it seems to take on a life of its own . . .

Pandas

When Exclusively Quilters asked me to design a quilt using one of their new lines, Giant Pandas, I was somewhat apprehensive. The line featured a rather large panel of pandas, and I had never really made a "panel" quilt before. After tinkering with several designs on EQ6, I had a few things to send them--none of which I was very thrilled with. Neither were they. In the meantime, I had designed a much larger quilt than what they wanted, so I just said "what the heck" and sent off that larger quilt design. Well, sometimes, another set of eyes, another perspective, another designer can suggest just the thing to make a design work. A crop here. A shift there. A change in measurements. Voila! Magic! Giant Pandas is my first quilt design employing a panel.

And for those of you who may be interested in making a panda quilt of your own, I am currently taking pre-orders on the kits for this 40" x 48" wall hanging at my website nancyrinkdesigns.com.

By the way, thanks Deb, for all of your suggestions!

"Flower Power?" (aka "The Westminster Project) Quilt

The quilting is complete and the binding is finally stitched down. Now all it needs is a label. And so begins the process of selecting a name. "The Westminster Project", as it had been dubbed while in progress, will simply not do. The name is too sterile, too empty, too nondescript.

Oliver, my clever husband, says the quilt looks like a 1960s throwback with its funky bold colors and large floral print. Of course I was but a small child in the '60s, so who am I to judge whether "Flower Power" is a name appropriate for this quilt that features a Kaffe Fassett floral print in the outer border, and other more subdued Kaffe Fassett prints, along with other fabrics manufactured by the Westminster Fabric Company, in the blocks and inner borders. So what do you think? Is "Flower Power" it? If you have any other clever name ideas, please, please weigh in!

The Westminster Project, continued. . .

The blocks are fused and the satin stitching complete. Prior to this project, I did not have much experience at satin stitching. I can most definitely see that my last blocks are much better than my first. The stitching is smoother around rounded edges and crisper at corners. I thought about taking the stitching out of some of the first blocks I made, but, trust me, that was a fleeting thought that I batted away much like one bats flies away from a picnic feast. What the worst and most tedious part of the Westminster Project (so far) was tearing away all of the stabilizer. I had stabilizer shrapnel scattered all over my sewing room. And before long there was stabilizer all over the house because it hitchhiked on my dog, Daisy, who likes to hang out in my sewing room. Next step: assembling the alternate blocks.