A quilt for a sailor

Robin and I have been working hard on a quilt for her brother (my cousin) Ron. He is in the Navy and is on his way home from his latest deployment to Afghanistan. He has been deployed seven times to different parts of the world, including Somalia and multiple trips to Afghanistan.

Our grandma made him a Milky Way quilt (friendship stars and four patches) in shades of blue as a high school graduation gift. He took that quilt with him on every deployment until the year that it was stolen from him on the ship.  It was very sad to hear that the quilt our grandma worked so hard on was gone. She is getting older and can't make a new quilt for him, so Robin and I decided to make one.

I found a more modern way to layout friendship stars on the wonderful blog, Fresh Lemons Quilts. We chose three batik fabrics, two black and one blue, and used Kona Medium Gray for the negative space and quilt back. We added in my scraps of the beautiful Alexander Henry Regent Skull. I used it to back this quilt for my brother, and we used almost every bit of what remained in my stash for Ron's quilt.
We spent a few weeks sewing together many, many half square triangles and then spent hours and hours squaring them up. We laid the quilt out on my studio floor last Sunday, it took quite a while. It felt like a game of Tetris, trying to figure out where everything fit and make sure that all of our points were facing the right way. 

Laying out all the stars

During the week I pieced together a few sections of the quilt, and Robin made the last half square triangles and star centers that we needed to complete the top and add a few stars to the back of the quilt.

a small section that I completed during the week

On Friday night Robin came over to my house around 10 p.m. (after I finished babysitting for a friend) and we started sewing. I continued piecing the top together and she put together two clumps of stars for the back of the quilt and finished the quilt back with Kona Medium Gray.

Stars on the back of the quilt

We like to listen to a podcast or a stand up comedy special while we sew and here is a list of everything we listened to Friday night.

Paul Mooney: It's the End of the World
Paul Mooney: Analyzing White America
Brian Regan: The Epitome of Hyperbole
Jim Gaffigan: Beyond the Pale
Nick Swardson: Seriously, Who Farted?
John Pinette: I'm Starvin'
The Hangover
Daniel Tosh: Happy Thoughts

If that seems like a lot to listen to in one night, that is because we sewed this quilt until 8:00 a.m. on Saturday morning! There was no time for sleep, we showered and gathered up our things and headed off to start the quilting process.

I'm quilting this with straight lines on the long arm machine.

We pay by the hour to rent time on a long arm quilting machine at a woman's house. She is there to help us thread the machine, help us fix any mistakes and answer any questions we have. But we are getting better at figuring out how to fix our own mistakes and help each other get the quilting finished.

partially quilted

Robin and I decided to quilt this with straight lines. The spaces between the lines vary in width, from a half inch (Robin's favorite) to an inch and a half. I like the dense quilting too, but it makes the process take longer.
I had the job of quilting and Robin was there to tie off my threads and pin down some rebellious seams that weren't ironed completely flat.

The quilt back

I wish I had more of this Regent Skull fabric

I am linking up to this fun festival on Canoe Ridge Creations.

Donation quilt for silent auction

Recently, Robin and I spent an afternoon with one of our cousins and we all worked on this quilt. It came together pretty quickly with three of us sewing, pinning and ironing seams while listening to one of my favorite weekly podcasts, Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me!
We decided to make this University of Texas quilt and donate it to the silent auction that is a part of this year's Relay for Life.

We sewed the top together using a disappearing nine patch method in three fabrics, burnt orange UT fabric, a solid white and a solid black fabric. We backed it with a marbled black fabric.

Robin quilted this on the long arm machine using a free hand meandering stitch with burnt orange thread.

The silent auction will be held this Sunday, April 1st from 5:30 to 8:30 p.m. The event will be at Playland Skate Center at 8822 McCann Dr. There will be food and drinks for sale, roller skating, and lots of great items to bid on in the silent auction.
One of my teammates, Debra King-Isaacs has donated a stretched canvas painting, titled Clara.
The Austin Modern Quilt Guild also donated a quilt, I helped to organize that project and quilted it on the long arm last Saturday.

My team, Goertz Family Ties, will be there selling water bottles. The proceeds from our water sales and the sale of our donated items goes toward our team fundraising total. Grab your roller skates and come out to support our team and the American Cancer Society!

 

W.i.P Wednesday 12, making slow progress

I have so many things going on in my life right now that I find it difficult to work on my many quilting and sewing projects. I did manage to get a few things done this week, so I'll show you what I have been working on.

I joined a Color Wheel Swap within the Austin Modern Quilt Guild, and I chose to contribute the green and blue-green colorway. These are my two fabrics, I cut 56 five inch squares out of the green fabric, now I just need to cut out my blue-green squares and I will be ready to trade these for 112 squares of different fabrics that represent the entire color wheel. I am thinking about cutting the squares even smaller and making a postage stamp quilt, but I haven't decided for sure yet.

Color Wheel Swap

Some progress has been made on this secret quilt for a family member. I still don't have any blocks sewn together, but I put some more of these strips together and I should be ready to cut them soon.

gift for a family member

My family is participating in The American Cancer Society's Relay for Life event on April 27th. Our team name is Goertz Family Ties, so I am appliqueing ties to t-shirts and they will say Goertz on the back. I added a button to my blog; if you want to make a donation to our team to help the American Cancer Society beat cancer and create more birthdays, click the button on the top right of this page and donate to our team. Thanks for your support!

Goertz Family Ties, team t-shirts for Relay for Life

There is a new fabric store open in Austin and I agreed to make a sample quilt to hang in the shop. These are my fabrics and the pattern, now I just have to get started on it. 

Sample quilt for Remnants: Fiber [Culture]

The Kickstarter widget on the right side of my blog provides you with an opportunity to support this new fabric store in the Austin area. Click on the widget to learn more about Jessica and her plans for the store. She needs more help reaching her fundraising goal!

This is the quilt that Robin and I are working on together. This is for a family member who is on tour in Afghanistan with the Navy right now. These are three and a half inch half square triangles, I am really excited to see it progress and start becoming an actual quilt top rather than a bunch of pieces of fabric.
Can you see my Alexander Henry Regent Skull there in the middle? Oh, how I wish we had more of this for the quilt, I pulled every little piece that I had in my stash, and I hope that it will be enough for the quilt. We searched all over the internet and in stores around town, but haven't been able to find any of this popular fabric for sale.

another gift for a family member

Part of Relay for Life is a Silent Auction. It is being held on Sunday, April 1st at Playland Skate Center in Austin from 5:30-8:30 p.m. There will be many great items to bid on in the auction, including this University of Texas at Austin quilt that Robin and I made with our cousin Sarah. It is 64 by 50 inches and has a dense, all over meander quilting pattern in burnt orange thread.

UT donation quilt

I am also working with the Austin Modern Quilt Guild to finish up a quilt that our members made for the silent auction. I am sewing the binding down this week, and I will post pictures of that soon.

I am linking up with Freshly Pieced and Lily's Quilts today.

Thanks for stopping by! Feel free to follow my blog and check back soon to see what I am working on!

I was featured on the AMQG blog!

The Austin Modern Quilt Guild is featuring a member each month to help fellow guild members (and the general public) learn more about each other as a person and as a quilter.

This month I am so excited to be the guild member in the spotlight. Head over to the Austin Modern Quilt Guild blog to read the article about me and what led me to try my hand at quilting in 2009.

Feel free to comment here or over on that blog post. I really appreciate all the kind comments I have received about the article so far.

Also, this weekend is going to be a weekend full of sewing and spending time with family; so I will have lots of pictures of quilts next week. Today I will show you a quick project that I worked on while visiting Aunt M and the rest of my dad's family in Fort Worth two weekends ago.

These sun visor covers were easy to make for my Honda, and now that old brittle batting in my visor can stop raining down on me every time I pull it down to block the sun.

Linking up with Freshly Pieced.

Happy Wednesday!

Handmade Artists Market during SXSW

 I will be selling here on Saturday, March 17th, with lots of other great vendors. Stop by and visit us!

W.i.P Wednesday 11, A Little Relief

I am so happy to be finished with this T-shirt quilt! I sewed it together two Fridays ago from 9 pm to 6:30 am Saturday morning. I slept for two hours and then got up to go rent time on the long arm machine so I could quilt it. It turned out really nice and my client likes it a lot. She gave it to her husband as a late birthday and Valentine's Day gift. I have two more T-shirt quilts to start soon. I am giving myself a week or two off from this type of quilt first. I need a break!

My cousin and I are working on a quilt for her brother. I have more half square triangles sewn and cut, but I need to square them up. There are so many that I am not looking forward to it, and I have less than half the HSTs that will make up the entire quilt top! Robin has the rest of them, I wish we were a bit further along on this project.

Here is another block for the Austin Modern Quilt Guild Block Swap. I am hoping to make a donation block this weekend.
The quilt guild is having our March meeting in a brand new Austin fabric shop, remnants:fiber[culture], owned by fellow guild member Jessica Sloan. On the right side of my page I posted a widget for her Kickstarter fund, please consider donating a few dollars to help her with some special plans she has for decorating the shop.

My family is participating in Relay for Life this year in south Austin. Robin, our cousin Sarah, and I are making this University of Texas Quilt for the Relay Silent Auction.This is half of the top, there will be two more rows of five blocks. I have a black Moda marble for the backing, and solid black for the binding.
You can donate to our team by clicking here. The money helps the American Cancer Society in their quest to create less cancer and more birthdays.

Here is the beginning of a quilt for a family member. I am using Kona solids, Lagoon and Robin's Egg. I don't want to say much more than that, except that I need to cut these strips apart but I have to buy the right ruler first.

I wish I had gotten more accomplished over the last week, but the only thing on my calender for Sunday is a family lunch and then I hope to sew all afternoon! It has been nice to take a little break after finishing the T-shirt quilt and I have so many meetings and events scheduled that it is hard to get much finished during the week.

I am linking up with Freshly Pieced, head that way and check out some other great blogs!

Also linking up with Manic Monday on the blog Sew Happy Geek.

W.i.P. Wednesday 10

Hello! Wednesday again! This keeps sneaking up on me; I took some photos last night, but I should of done it during the day. These photos aren't great.
Regardless, I have been very busy and I have a lot to show you. I just had a four day weekend which was really great. I spent most of my time working on this t-shirt quilt. I will be quilting it on Saturday. There is still a lot of work to do, I may have a late night Friday night, but it will get done. It is becoming more of a horizontal layout than I intended, I may have to take those four big pieces on the right side and line them up in a horizontal row at the bottom to create a more vertical layout.

custom order t-shirt quilt

Every so often I needed a break from this quilt, so I worked on a few other things this weekend. These are some half square triangles for my cousin's quilt that I mentioned last week. Robin and I created a layout with 90 friendship stars, which means we have to sew 180 pairs of squares and then cut them in to 360 half square triangles. So far I have sewn and cut 20 squares, and squared up two HSTs. So...there is a long way to go!

half square triangles for Ron's quilt

I also worked a little more on this Lego bag. These strips for the outside of the bag have been sewn together in groups of four, leaving me with 10 big pieces. There is still a lot of work to do on this.

Lego bag

Here is the mess next to my computer desk as I work on Robin's Save the Date cards for her September wedding. I got my desk for free (found it next to the dumpster!) and I am thinking about buying a new one from Ikea with some of my birthday money. This desk is big enough for my computer and nothing else. I don't have room to write or even set my printer. The printer lives in the closet and I get it out and set it up on the floor when I need it. I think I am overdue for a new desk.

working on Save the Date cards

I ordered this coral stamp from Stamp Out Online, an Etsy shop that was incredibly helpful and accommodating while working with me to get the coral looking just right for the wedding stationery. The shop has several great stamps and can create custom orders. I plan to order a stamp from their girly business section soon.

second draft of STDs

Recently, I joined the Scrap Attack, hosted by Stitched in Color. There I read about this scrappy piecing method. I tried it out last Wednesday and came up with this ten by ten inch block. I will eventually contribute it to the Austin Modern Quilt Guild's Block Swap, but I need to make it bigger. I really like this method and how crazy the block turns out. I pulled out scraps randomly and only paid attention to not having the same color next to each other. I plan to make more of these scrappy blocks using a monochromatic color palette.

Scraptacular block

Here is my sister's table topper. I pieced the back over the weekend without planning it out, I just added fabric until it was big enough. I am still thinking about how to quilt this and whether or not I will add heat resistant batting to it.

Christmas table topper

I am linking up today with Freshly Pieced. Stop by and take a look at some other crafty blogs!

Linking up at Jay Bird Quilts for Scrappy Sunday. I am so excited about the scrappy block that I made, and I am going to use this link up opportunity as a motivation to continue building those scrappy blocks.

I am also linking up with Lynne at Lily's Quilts. Click the button and support a few other small blogs with views and comments. If you find something that you love, become a follower!