Honeysweet stars quilt

I wanted to do a post on the quilt in my main title blog photo. It was a quilt i made with a fabric i really loved and worked on slowly to make something i really would love. I love giving quilts as presents for new babies and birthday presents and more recently as wedding gifts but i wanted to make something for my husband and I that we could really appreciate and enjoy so i decided to use a figtree fabric by Joanna Figueroa for Moda called Honeysweet. I love how modern yet classic her fabrics are and how every single one of her collections that comes out are gorgeous. (Im currently in love with her Somerset fabric and am working on a log cabin quilt with Ivory as the solid but thats another blog post.) I love watching and learning from Missouri Star quilt company tutorials. I watched Jenny Doan's tutorial on The Big Star quilt and that is how i made the center of this quilt. The link for that tutorial is here: The Big Star Quilt

I used that same tutorial for the small stars but i used charm pack 5 inch squares instead of the layer cake squares to make those and the when the block was complete it came out to about 10 inches so i was able to pair them up with the layer cake squares with a 2.5 inch white sashing in-between each block. The only place i did not use sashing was on the sides of the big star block. A small star block, layer cake square (10inch), and 3 (2.5 inch) sashing strips equal the length and width of the big star block.

I bordered the quilt with a 5 inch strip all the way around. The only place where the border is different is on the left and right sides i used strips of 3 by 10 inch strips sewn together to equal the length of the quilt and 2x10 inch strips sewn together to equal the length of the quilt side by side before i added the 5 inch border all the way around. The shams are the 10 inch star blocks bordered by 2.5 inch white strips and then bordered again by 2.5inch pattern strips with matching 2.5 by 2.5 inch square cornerstones. Its been about a year since i finished this quilt and the shams so i cannot remember the dimensions of the rest of the white fabric and the additional red border on the shams, but i did use the sham pillowcase tutorial by the crafty gemini. I measured what the star and the two sashing pieces equalled minus the finished size of standard sham to figure out the rest. Here is the link to the craft gemini's tutorial which was very helpful! Craft Gemini: How to Make a Pillow Sham

That is all that i can think of, overall with the precuts it was a pretty simple quilt to make, the stars can just be time consuming but they come out to be very pretty. Thanks for reading!

~Jaclyn 

Heirloom quilting: T-shirt quilts!

So, I have started 2015 with several new quilting projects and always with new ideas in my head for gifts and new quilts way before I have even finished the first project! I  currently working on 3 t-shirt quilts for 3 lovely girls that were supposed to be Christmas presents but better late than never! Two of the tops have been cut and pieced but I want to add borders to them to outline the character of the shirts and give a little extra length to the quilts. The third one is cut and patiently waiting to be pieced together. I have never done a quilting project that wasn't very straight forward with rows and columns and lining them up ever so neatly, but this project is certainly not straightforward! I wanted the t-shirt quilts to be very eclectic and because there are so many different sized logos on each shirt it just worked out best to do it this way, plus I found a great mathematical template already laid out for me while I was browsing Pinterest. The link to that diagram is below. T-shirt quilt math
Here was the first t-shirt quilt, my tester so to speak before I found the lovely math equation that was done for me.

Then, once i found the math already done for me the second quilt turned out a little more eclectic. I also found that with each quilt a certain color became dominant so i used that guidance for picking a matching border that would really make the quilt pop. For the first quilt pink, hearts, and zebras reigned supreme so i found a border that incorporated those colors and the loves of the future quilt owner.

For the second quilt red became the dominant color so i used a red border with a Morrocan accent which tied the colors together.