Fox in a Box

Posted on May 15, 2015 by ArtistDoris

Trina and I designed this quilt in 2013, published the pattern, and it’s been a best seller! I’m sharing it here again as my entry in the Spring 2015 Bloggers Quilt Festival.

There is an applique and a non-applique version. I’m kind of partial to those cute little foxes on the applique version…

FIAB FullSHot Quilted2

Fox in a Box made with no applique:

Trina did a wonderful job on the quilting of this one, a combination of straight-line quilting, pebble quilting and shadow spirals…

In designing this pattern, we worked out two methods of making no-waste (or LOW-waste) flying geese; through trial and error, but the methods in the pattern work our lickety-split!

Our little fox friend peeking out from his Fox and Geese Block, isn’t he adorable?

And his little friend gazing up at him from another block:

FIAB Fox 1 Detail

The two quilts side-by-side on my (apparently not-so-straight) fence:

The pattern is available here.

Happy Quilting! …and do come visit again

Doris (& Trina)

After the Rain

Posted on May 6, 2013 by ArtistDoris

This finish has been a long time coming, that’s for certain. I’ve participated in at least five Virtual Quilting Bees; a group of 12 participants, duration one year, each quilter is assigned a month to send out fabric and request a block to be made for them. I even led two years of One Block Over, a Bee I created. This is the first finished quilt from any of my Bees…

In July 2011, I requested Love in a Mist blocks (tutorial link from here) and I sent squares pre-cut from my scrap basket. I think I got all but one block back, and I made a few more to have enough for the quilt. My friend, and business partner, Trina quilted it and returned it to me prior to moving in March, and it got set aside. Yesterday, I finally got around to binding it:

I’m calling it After the Rain (the rainbow, the spectrum of colors, Love in a Mist is the block name…). The quilting is fabulous, as usual… (hey, look! PURPLE! I scrounged like crazy to come up with enough purple scraps for one block!)

The backing fabric has been in my stash since roughly 2007, it’s Petal Power by Maggie & Sharon for Moda. I had several colorways of this, but about 4 yards of this magenta pink color. The full back:

For the inner border I sewed strips of scraps together and made a spectrum strip about 2″ wide around the blocks, and also added a wide strip to the back:

I added a fun Alexander Henry print called “bobby pins” for the outer border, adds to the rainbow of colors but still “reads as” white from a distance:

12″ finished block, the quilt is roughly twin size…

(Don’t let the greenery in that photo fool you, it was covered in snow yesterday morning!)

I love several things about this quilt. Every time I look at it, a different fabric or print catches my eye, and I’m reminded of the project I made out of that fabric, or of my beloved Gramma B (some of her fabric scraps went into this quilt!), or who I gave the quilt to that I made from that collection, or of friendships with long distance quilters. This one is destined to be favorite…

Makes me want to get moving on putting together my other Bee quilts!

Have you ever been in a Virtual Bee?

Did you get all of the blocks requested?

Have you finished your quilt?

Peace, Love and Understanding

Posted on January 29, 2013 by ArtistDoris

(I couldn’t resist, I’m a bit of an Elvis fanatic).

It’s my day to share my version of Rene’s Peace Quilt Pattern!

Rene is one of my Grubers Retreat buddies, she lives in Florida, and spends time in the Montana mountains, where I suspect she travels to just to get awesome quilt photo backdrops. Seriously, though, she is a genuine and generous friend ~ and as it turns out, a pretty good pattern writer!

Rene showed her first Peace Sign quilt in April 2010 when she revealed the finish of Feeling Groovy:

I love how the purple background fabric sets off the spectrum of pinwheel colors!

The pattern is written for three sizes, with the pinwheel blocks adding another design option. I made the Baby size (30″ x 30″) and decided to make my background the stand-out fabric (“Peace Flowers” by Michael Miller), which in turn, makes the aqua blue Kona Cotton peace sign POP! (sorry, we still have Winter grey skies in Iowa, so these are the best photos I could get with my Ott-Lite straining to provide some “sun light”).

I added two borders, the first one a 2 1/2″ border of the background fabric, and a border of aqua blue. The verse is a Walt Whitman quote, I was inspired to add it after seeing this:

from here.

Eventually, I think this quilt top needs some utility quilting, perle cotton style; and I know a girl who would love this, so I may add some blocks and make it into a twin size quilt. Stay tuned, it remains to be seen.

The pattern is laid out in vertical strips, and provides very clear, easy-to-follow diagrams for piecing it together. I cut it out and pieced it together in one day.

Rene has generously offered to give a PDF copy of the Peace Quilt Pattern to one of you lovely readers! Just leave me a comment before Friday, February 1st ~ if you were to make a Peace Sign Quilt, what fabrics or colors would you use?

UPDATE: The winner of the pattern is comment #3, MarthaB!

Don’t forget to visit the other blogs celebrating this Pattern Party:

Monday, January 21 – Katie at KT Quilts

Tuesday, January 22 – Michele at Nostalgic Cafe

Wednesday, January 23 – Cindy at Live a Colorful Life

Thursday, January 24 – Michelle at Frustrated Quilter

Friday, January 25 – Stephanie at Peas in a Pod

Monday, January 28 – Terri at Terri’s Notebook

Today – Me–here at Made by a Brunnette

Wednesday, January 30 – Mary at Mary on Lake Pulaski

Thursday, January 31 – Shelly at Prairie Moon Quilts

Friday, February 1 – Visit Rene’ at Rene’ Creates (http://www.renecreates.com for a give away!

*one more note: All of the fabrics came from my stash and scrap basket:

Stash Stats year-to-date:

Acquired — .75 yards

Used — 8.49 yards

-7.74 yards

What a Tangled Web We Weave – Spiderweb Block Tutorial

Posted on October 30, 2012 by ArtistDoris

BLOGTOBERFEST, Day 31

Today is the last day of Blogtoberfest, and my day on the Wicked Blog Hop. Also joining in on Bloggers Quilt Festival with this fun Halloween quilt!

My “wicked” quilt block is the spiderweb block used to make my What a Tangled Web We Weave quilt, which received an honorable mention in the Des Moines Area Quilters Guild show this October.

The finished size of the quilt is Twin Size, and it takes 20 spiderweb blocks. Here it is spread out on our Queen Size bed:

To make the blocks:

Cut randomly sized strips of fabric across grain by width of fabric (wof) and sew into strip sets at least 6 1/2 ” wide. (for one block you will need 1 or 2 strip sets, for the Twin size quilt you will need 18-20 strip sets)
Using a 60-degree ruler, cut alternating triangles from your strips sets in this fashion:

From background fabric, cut one 5 7/8″ square, cut in half diagonally into two half-square B triangles.
Also, from background fabric cut two A template pieces, and two Ar (A-Reverse) template pieces. Template is provided here: SpiderwebTemplate
Add a B triangle to the flat end of two of your strip wedges, and add two A triangles and two Ar triangles to the flat ends of your other strip wedges like this:
Sew three wedge pieces together to create half a block; repeat:
Join your two half block pieces together and then square your block:

I fussy cut the inner border from a stripe fabric, it reads “Halloween” over and over…

And the outer border is an Alexander Henry fabric (from 2006, I think) called “Halloween Lane”. And the backing is another fun Alexander Henry print called “Unhappy Hour”…

Trina’s long arm quilting made the quilt…the spider web details are fantastic, and I adore the cluster of spiders in the square areas of the background:

Thanks for stopping, I’d love to hear your comments on my quilt… and please go pay a visit to these Wicked Bloggers and see what they have to share today:

Beaquilter
Fun Thread Designs

Stitch, Stitch, Stitch

Made By A Brunnette (Me!)

Buttons And Butterflies

Rosemary – That Other Blog
The Fuzzy Hat Quilter
Sew We Quilt

That business of the Pattern Business

Posted on October 19, 2012 by ArtistDoris

Blogtoberfest, Day 19

Next week is International Quilt Market in Houston, Texas. Row House Creations, (that’s me and my partner, Trina) regrettably, will not be attending even though a few of our quilts did make the trip.

You may remember we attended Spring Quilt Market to introduce ourselves to distributors, make contacts with fabric manufacturers, and research the possibility of one day having our own booth at Quilt Market (still a dream at this point!). It was a very worthwhile trip, and the contacts we made led to some great opportunities and increased pattern sales.

These days, we are tweaking our third pattern for *hopefully* a late October/early November release. In the meantime, we have made several different examples of both One Big Cabin, and Modern Fortune.

After seeing the pillow I made for my niece, using the owl applique from One Big Cabin, we wanted to make a feminine version of the entire quilt. So I selected these fabrics from my stash:

and made this quilt (not yet quilted when I took this photo):

But, that didn’t really give us the fun, atypically colored critters we were going for, so we made yet another girl-y version:

Final shot of this to come; but Trina quilted it in the eleventh hour last week and shipped these sweet little critters off to be displayed at Market in Houston!

We’ve made several different versions of Modern Fortune over the past 4-6 weeks as well. This one is very close to our cover quilt, and is available as a kit from Quilting Connection in Ames, Iowa (follow the link to contact them to order a kit):

Here it is on my design wall, before it was quilted:

and this one is hanging as shop sample at Quilts and Other Notions, in Creston, Iowa. It is also available as a kit, made from the collection, Puttin’ on the Ritz by Bunny Hill Designs. (Again, contact the shop directly to order this kit):

Our baby size of this pattern creates it’s own “scrappy” binding from the fat quarters you use for your blocks–a nice bonus:

The version we made to send to Houston is a completely different look, in bold blues and yellows, it is a vibrant quilt (again, shown here prior to being quilted):

I showed you a twin sized version last week, that hung in our guild show at the AQS Show in Des Moines, Iowa, October 3-6, 2012, here is another shot of it with one of the baby quilts from our pattern cover photo:

While we are looking forward to being able to make some quilts that are not One Big Cabin or Modern Fortune variations, it has been fun to see these quilts come together in different colors, styles and manifestations. (Secretly, we hope that we are not the only pattern designers making 6-10 versions of every.single.quilt.) Are we? If we are, we probably don’t want to know.

This was a fun surprise… it’s One Big Cabin made by our first customer to purchase a pattern, Linda Brandhagen (made for a grandson, I believe). She emailed this photo to share with us–isn’t it adorable? Thanks, Linda!

If you have purchased (or won!) a copy of any of our patterns, and made something from it, please share it with us in our flickr group. We LOVE seeing them made up by other quilters!

To purchase either pattern online (in print or digital format) visit our shop.

Hocus Pocus-ville

Posted on October 5, 2012 by ArtistDoris

BLOGTOBERFEST: Day 5

This is a pattern I’ve had and been anxious to make up for some time now. Its a pattern by Crabapple Hill; they design amazing hand embroidery patterns, made into tea towels, pillows, or in this case, a quilt.

I don’t intend to make the full quilt, as I want a wallhanging. I made just four of the embroideries (I’ll come clean, my Mom actually did the majority of the stitching for me because she was needing a handwork project and I didn’t have the extra time, myself–so I passed the traced blocks onto her to complete for me). Mom’s hand aren’t as steady as they once were, but she still does beautiful handwork. Together, we made the Pumpkin Patch:

Hagatha’s Laundry:

La Witch Boutique:

and Morgana’s Apothecary:

I’m still deciding on a setting for my blocks, and I may embroider a tree or something to balance them off in the center, eventually. Here is a very un-glamorous, mish-mash of the four blocks hanging together on my design wall:

I’m very happy with the tone-on-tone print I chose for the background, I like it much better than the solid ivory the sample is made with. The details drawn into this pattern are amusing and very clever–click on my photos enlarge them and read the little signs, etc. on the “witchy” businesses… Hoping to have a finish before this Halloween, but time will tell…

made by a brunnette

Tag Archives: quilt