Bali Pops Precuts and Bali Breezes Quilt Pattern

Years ago, I had a quilt plan in my head that called for a LOT of different fabrics. I thought that the best/easiest way to get the fabric variety I needed would be to use precut strips, and I purchased a bunch of different Hoffman Bali Pops from the Fat Quarter Shop, and found one “locally” at the Army Arts and Crafts shop in Germany. If you’ve been around a while, you may remember this post, in which Crazy Accuracy Freak Girl had conniptions over the state of those precut strips. They were crooked and cut off grain, and I couldn’t see how you could use those strips for anything that required any accuracy at all.

I heard from both Hoffman and Fat Quarter Shop about that blog post, and there were offers to replace and/or refund the costs of the bundles which was lovely of them obviously. I never bothered with that since I’d have had to mail them back to the States from Germany, and I didn’t plan on using them right then in the end anyway.

Fast forward to December of last year. The folks at Hoffman Fabrics wrote to tell me that the Bali Pops are now cut with a laser-guided fabric cutter, and they asked if I’d like to try the new strips in a project. I chose the Hoffman Bali Pops in the Gemstone colorway, and got to work designing! Continue reading

First Quilt Finish of 2015: Softly Spoken

This one is in the “Thank Goodness it’s Finally Finished” category! I started this quilt in September, 2013, hoping for something easy and quick, and it was neither. It’s not that the piecing is complex (it’s not) or that any of the construction was terribly difficult (it wasn’t), but it turned into much more of a “thing” than I’d anticipated.

It’s modern-ish. That’s part of the problem, at least for me. It’s outside a number of my boxes, one of them being that I work well from a pattern or at the very least a definite plan, and this quilt had no pattern and only a very vague plan. Rather than purchase anything, I used some Quilter’s Dream batting that I had (which I’m just going to note again that I really don’t like), and between the weight of the quilt and backing and the weight of the batting, this quilt was a total bear to push through the machine for quilting. Then I couldn’t resist complicating things with embroidery, and that takes a while. And yes, all of this is self-inflicted! Continue reading

Moda Bake Shop Boxes=Cute Overload

Remember these?

Moda Bake Shop Box with mini honey buns

I got these from my Moda rep (the lovely Kim, whose daughter is also a rep) at Quilt Market in October. They are just too cute to actually use for anything, so they sit in their little box on my sewing table with my bunny from Build-a-Bear, and a lovely framed antique stencil that was used by young French ladies to stencil their undergarments for their trousseaus (a gift from Kimberly that she found at the quilt show in St. Marie aux Mines last year). Continue reading