Stripping for charity

I have a new quilt to share today, this one I made at the guild charity sew day.  We all whipped up quilts using Cluck Cluck Sew's free Strip & Flip pattern/tutorial.  This entire quilt (including binding) took 8 hours to sew... I know because I did it all at the event.

I believe that nearly all of the fabric for this quilt was donated to Bay Area Modern by Julie of the Intrepid Thread.  Thank you, Julie!  I opted for a hopefully boy-friendly selection of colors and fabrics and was definitely working outside of my comfort zone there, but I love the combination. 

My takeaway from making this quilt is that the pattern shows best if you arrange your strips in a gradient of some sort.  With a random placement, it's not immediately obvious that the center strip is intentionally flipped and some of the pattern's magic is lost. 

I had a leftover stack of strips that made it onto the back of the quilt, and finished it all with evenly spaced vertical quilting and a pieced binding:

This quilt joined the guild charity pile for Project Night-Night.  We had a goal for 2012 of (I believe) making 40 charity quilts, and we donated one hundred and one quilts this month.  Whoa guys!  That is crazy awesome and I hope that we can keep it up next year. 

Pillow Talk

The ninth round of Pillow Talk Swap is currently wrapping up, with packages still winging back and forth internationally.  Luckily for me, both my send and receive packages have already arrived  This round I made for Nannette, who likes birds, bright colors, and fabulous quilting.  An awesome match for me, since I like... birds, bright colors, and fabulous quilting!  Way to go, swap mamas - picking what to make for her was easy-peasy. 

I made half-square triangles for one side and arranged them into a fancy star pattern that I drafted:

But a few bird fabrics isn't quite enough, so I drafted a paper pieced bird for the other side and framed it out into a pineapple block: 

If anyone is interested, I can post the "pattern" for this bird, but let me warn you that it's not very professionally drafted!  People who sell paper piecing patterns design carefully and smartly so that their block is easy to assemble.  Mine has to be put together in several pieces and also requires that some areas be pre-sewn before adding them to the paper pattern. 

And for me?  I received a gorgeous pillow (on the right) from Lori H. Designs, which beautifully matches the pillow that I got from Julie a few months back (on the left) and is so exactly what I wanted.  She even used a geometry print that I recently fell in love with for the background.  Basically, it's perfect!  Thank you so much, Lori. 

So many pillows were lovely this round, so check out the Flickr group if you need some awesome pillowy inspiration.