February is a SHORT Month

Designing a quilt is my favorite part. So it is no surprise that I had designed this quilt well before the beginning of the month. Well, at least I thought I had, but I'm getting ahead of the story.

I have a favorite shirt. I just know that when this shirt wears out I will be devastated. It is comfortable and stretchy, and cool. Florida is a hot state, after all. But none of those things makes it my favorite. It is a happy shirt. It has red and white and light blue and navy stripes. The color combination speaks to me and makes me very happy. I hum when I wear that shirt.

So it will be no surprise to you that I am always buying fabric in these colors. In late January, Erik took me on a quilt shop scouting tour. This is something I try to do every six months or so to get ready for my next Girl's Day Out planning session. I love bringing Erik on these trips because he has a great sense of color. It is probably the photographer in him. He found me three red FQs and two light blue and two navy blue FQs. From that little stack I envisioned a little Valentine's Day-themed wallhanging. Add a few heart embroideries and voila, I would have the next month's quilt done in no time.

And no time was the important point here...because as Erik said, every day in fact and at great length, February is a short month. He had laughed at me when I had hesitantly told him about my new year's resolution. I knew he would. He remembered the 2010 debacle. No UFO's were actually finished in my house despite the grand UFO challenge I had issued. Why ever would he believe I could actually finish 12 new quilts in 2011 when I couldn't get even 1 old one done the year before? Last year he completed his own first quilt so you would think he would get it: new quilts are easier to finish than old ones. Who knows why...but it is really true. Once momentum is lost on a project, the odds of finishing it plummets.

So I was trying to keep that momentum going and keeping it simple in design and execution was important. I started with a red, white and blue Dutchman's puzzle block. I paired it with a Pennsylvania Dutch heart and flower that I loved. I combined four of them into a very pretty quilt block, adding an applique heart into the blocks to add more color and pop.

I checked my favorite embroidery website, embroidery library, for hearts and discovered a heck of a lot of them. Boom, the quilt got bigger. It would be the theme of this quilt. As the month got shorter, the quilt got bigger. As I played with designs in EQ, I liked the look of quarter log cabins and played with them and the hearts and the Penn Dutch embroidery and the Dutch Puzzle block to create one heck of a quilt. I put my favorite romantic bible quilt in the middle "I am my beloved's, and my beloved is mine" from Song of Solomon and dedicated the quilt to my hubby. I brought the unfinished quilt to the guild meeting and realized the darn thing needed more. That amorphous more...you know it needs it but what.

More fun time playing on the computer and I came up with the final design--alternating 1/4 log cabin border followed by an appliqued swag border, followed by a paper pieced flying geese border, with a final wide plain mitered navy blue border. I hate turning edges with applique so I sat down to raw edge that swag, but I couldn't do it. It just didn't look right. Arg! Time was running out....tick, tick, tick. February is a short month.

I had never done a Dutchman's puzzle block so I thought that would be my "new" thing for this quilt, but no, it was those darn appliqued swags. I wanted my square quilt to look sort of rectangular so the top and bottom has three swags, but the sides have four. More complicated math. Thank goodness for EQ. How does anyone do without it? Can I just tell you you're nuts?

Only two more borders to go...

The paper pieced border should have been easy, but no it had to be "rectangular-looking" as well, 4 blocks top/bottom, 5 sides. TG4EQ! Of course, by now my original 6 FQs were itty bitty scraps that not even a Whoville mouse would be interested in. Time for fabric shopping...tick, tick, tick. February is a short month.

On the last day of the month, I danced around the house. No, the quilt wasn't quilted, but by then it had grown from a small wallhanging to a whopping 85 inch square. I ain't gonna try to put that in my home machine (ask me how I know). So as the last hours of the last day of the second month were waning, I busily pulled paper from my paper pieced border and dreamed of how good it was going to look when it came back from the long arm quilter. I patted myself on the back. I breathed a great big sigh of relief, because February is a short month.

And then a terrible, horrible thought occurred to me. What the heck was I going to put on the back? I didn't have any fabric big enough. Maybe I could seam all those pieces floating around and make a backing. I am an idiot. I found a Penn Dutch test block and made it the center of a giant log cabin. I repeated that process for a couple of heart embroideries I had rejected for the original quilt. I found an extra paper pieced flying geese border block and repeated the process again. Before I knew it, I had that four block wall quilt I was originally suppose to make for February. I made a special trip to the quilt shop for quilt backing on March 1.

February is a short month, but I got two quilts for the price of one!

My First Attempt

January's finished quilt at the show & tell

I am an embroidery design addict. I freely admit it. I buy too many designs that never make it into the gorgeous quilt I envisioned. So to start the year off right, I decided to take just two of those designs and make a simple four block wallhanging quilt. 

Ohio Rose

I started with two Baltimore quilt blocks from the San Francisco Stitch Co., the Ohio and Indiana Roses. I liked the two together because they were both cross designs. Ironically enough, with that huge embroidery library that I haven't stitched, these were designs I had used in a previous quilt. But I love them and they stitch out beautifully. 

Indiana Rose

My two embroidery machines are both Pfaffs, the 2170 and the Creative Vision. Both have a very large embroidery field and I love big blocks. Using my Creative Vision, I quickly appliqued 8 inch designs on a 10 inch square. Big hoops are a great time saver. Having two of the same size is even better. I just run each color stop twice, switching hoops instead of rethreading the machine. Twice the work done in half the time.


I love yellow and blue. Half of my house is decorated in those colors. My mother-in-law gave me the Eleanor Burns "True Blue" fabric collection for Christmas because it features those colors. With my color palette decided, I turned to the design work, my favorite part.


Time to fire up Electric Quilt. Sadly, I design way too many quilts that never make it out of the computer. All I needed in this case was a simple fabric frame around my embroidery blocks. Hah! Instead I ended up with a EQ file that had over 80 possible quilt combinations! (All you EQ addicts know what I'm talking about.) 

I ended up with this rough design from EQ.

After I did the design, I realized I didn't have enough of the fabrics, so there was a time out while I ordered more fabric over the internet. When it arrived, I realized I had ordered the wrong dark blue and had to visit some quilt shops to replace it. More waiting time. January was fast disappearing. 

Back of the quilt

Finally the construction was finished and I needed to do my least favorite part, quilting and binding. I had FusiBoo in my stash which is great for small wall quilts. But I didn't have enough leftover fabric for the backing. I needed to add some to the one big piece I had. So I created a quick row of 9 patches and inserted into the middle of the back. 

Detail of roses

Detail of feathers

Erik installed my fabric mover on my 2170 and I meandered around the embroidered blocks. I am not good at free motion quilting, but part of this challenge is to try new things, so I looked up some info on the web and gave it a try. My stippling turned out pretty good. So I tried a Youtube bed of roses pattern that I saw demonstrated by DayStyle Designs.com. 

She made it look so easy. It wasn't. I did finally get the hang of it, but never really liked it. So I used machine embroidery designs (from Embroidery Library) for the outer border feathers. Now that type of quilting I can do! Voila...One for 12 complete.

Quick, easy, and finished!

Introduction to the Challenge

Last year I created a challenge for my quilting guild to complete those pesky UFOs. For some the challenge helped get those projects off the shelves and onto beds and walls. Sadly, I was unable to complete any UFOs though I did make some progress.

This year I wanted to feel instant accomplishment with my New Year's challenge. I considered scrap quilts or stash busters, but I wanted something that encouraged me to try new techniques and allowed me to spend quality time with my computer doing my favorite thing, designing quilts!

So was born the Twelve 4 Twelve challenge. My goal is to complete 12 original quilts in 12 months. Where possible I wanted to use my stash and either new techniques or techniques that always inspire me such as machine embroidery or printing photographs on fabric.


Join me in my challenge or just read my reports. Either way, welcome to the Twelve 4 Twelve Challenge.