Halo Progress, Welcome Home Kit NewFO, and A Creative Tangent with the PhotoSketcher App

Hey there, quilty peeps!  Hope you are enjoying a wonderful Memorial Day weekend if you're in the United States, and I hope the weather is nicer where you are than it is in Charlotte, North Carolina right now.  Rain, rain, and more rain!  Good thing I have a bright and cheerful project on my design wall since the view outside my window is so drab and dreary.  

Halo Blocks Still In Progress

This is a Jen Kingwell pattern that is suitable for either hand or machine piecing.  The pattern is found in Kingwell's Jenny From One Block pattern booklet and you can find that on Amazon here (this post contains affiliate links).  

I'm fascinated by the way Kingwell organizes her seemingly random scrappy compositions so studying the way she alternates between "organized chaos" vs careful control within the same quilt is my primary fascination with this project.  The curved piecing challenge is just the icing on the cake.  In Kingwell's version of this quilt, most blocks are totally scrappy except for three blocks that are created with all one fabric for the backgrounds, all one fabric for the rings, and all one fabric for the triangles surrounding the center square.  Whereas the circles at the block intersections predominate throughout most of her quilt, those three blocks that have planned matching fabrics pop out as squares that help your eye travel across the surface of the quilt.  Here's one of my blocks that I'm hoping will function that way in my version of Halo:

One of My Favorite Recently Finished Halo Blocks

The dark pink arcs were cut from one of the Tilda fabrics in the fat eighth precut pack that started me off on this tangent.  The rest of the fabrics in this block are treasures from my stash.

My Summertime Blues: Nanette's Stunning Blue Medallion Surprise Quilt

Good Morning, my lovelies!   Today I have a special treat for you -- a deep dive visual feast on an original medallion quilt designed and pieced by my client Nanette.  You can read all about Nanette's journey with this quilt, originally named with the working title My Surprise, then My Summertime Blues, and finally Blue Medallion Surprise, on Nanette's blog here.

Heather E2E Stitched in 40 wt Cotton King Tut Thread, Baby Moses

I know there will be at least three readers asking me where they can get a pattern for this gorgeous quilt.  There isn't any pattern available, though, as Nanette just began by making the center star and then came up with ideas for the borders one by one until her quilt had reached the size she wanted and felt finished.  This quilt is her totally original design.  I think she did an amazing job with both the design as well as the precision patchwork piecing.  Like all of Nanette's quilt tops, this one lay totally flat like a bed sheet, no lumps or bumps or unplanned fullness, with seam allowances neatly pressed to the side and those pinwheel intersections spiraled to lay nice and flat, too.  It feels like a treat when a quilt top arrives from Nanette, being able to see her work up close in real life after seeing those quilts come together virtually on her blog!

Nanette's 80 x 80 My Summertime Blues or Blue Medallion Surprise

And here's another surprise for y'all (NOT!) -- we're going to talk about THREAD again today!  Mwahahaha!!  😂😂😂.   Looking at the above photo of Nanette's quilt, the most important consideration to me as I was making quilting decisions was that the overall focus and impact of the finished quilt needed to be about the spectacular patchwork design.  

Quilt Finishes for Mike, Kim, Jane, and Carrie + Halo Progress

Happy Sunday and Happy Spring!  I have four clients' quilts to share with you today and then I'll wrap up with a couple photos of how my Jen Kingwell Halo Quilt is coming along.  Lots of ground to cover and I know you're all here for the eye candy anyway, so I'll try to keep my comments brief!

Mike's Thank-You Quilt: Cherrywood 9-Patch with Amoeba Quilting

Detail of Amoeba Quilting on Cherrywood 9-Patch Quilt

This first quilt I'm sharing began as a very traditional pieced top that was donated to our guild from the estate of a former guild member.  The quilt top and backing are all Cherrywood hand dyed fabrics, with a suede-like look and rich but muted colors (this post contains affiliate links).  The Cherrywood hand-dyed fabrics are fabulous; I've heard of this line but never worked with them before.  I love how understated they are, and the quilt top reminded me of Amish quilts.  I could have played that up by quilting a traditional feather design in an inconspicuous blending thread.

However...  I was asked to quilt this top so that it can be gifted to Mike, the young man who sets up the room for our monthly meetings at the Tyvola Senior Center and stays late on the first Wednesday each month for our meetings.  Mike doesn't give off an Amish vibe!  Given free reign, I choose Karlee Porter's Amoeba edge-to-edge quilting to inject some youthful, modern energy into this quilt.  I love it and I hope Mike will enjoy it, too!

60 x 60 Cherrywood Quilt for Mike

Not sure what batting is in this quilt as it was provided to me along with the quilt top.  I used King Tut 40 wt variegated cotton thread in Saint George for this quilt, with shades of caramel and rusty coral that were perfectly matched to the Cherrywood fabrics and the matte luster of cotton that I am loving lately.

Halo Blocks, Quilty Hearts for Olivia, and Quilty Friends Who Lead Us Into (NewFO) Temptation

Hey there, quilty peeps!  In the ten days since I last posted about this project, I have completed exactly FOUR more Halo quilt blocks.  Don't let my slow progress discourage you from attempting this pattern, though -- I've also quilted three pretty intense quilts for clients, prepared music and sang at a funeral, and drove up to the mountains to visit my son in the past 10 days.  I am fitting these blocks in here and there when I have time, not at all chained to the sewing machine for hours at a time.  You can read more about this project and find links to the Jen Kingwell pattern, templates, and other must-haves for making this quilt in my previous post here.

My Latest Favorite Halo Block

Since this quilt will be a gift for my mother-in-law, I'm thinking about her favorite colors (light pink, medium pink, and hot pink!) as I'm picking out the fabrics for each block.  Looking at the ten blocks I've finished so far on my design wall, I don't know if there's ENOUGH pink?  😂

10 Halo Blocks Down, 26 Blocks (Plus Border Blocks) to Go

One thing that really helped me make some progress was packing up my machine and prepped block pieces and taking the project "on the road" to the Charlotte Quilters Guild's monthly Sit & Sew.  

Ramona's Pineapple Log Cabin, Betsy's Sea Glass Pinwheels + Pesky Little Halo Curves

Good morning and happy April, quilters!  I hope everyone who was celebrating enjoyed a wonderful Easter or Passover last week.  The Spring weather has arrived in Charlotte and there is a little gold butterfly fluttering around in the sunshine outside my window as I'm writing this.  It's so hard to stay inside and get work done on a day like today!  Of course, it helps when the work that keeps me indoors is as beautiful as Ramona's pineapple log cabin quilt!

Ramona's Pineapple Log Cabin with Radiance E2E, Glide Thread in Sea Foam

I just love her watery blue and green batik fabrics against that crisp white background, and the skinny sashing with sapphire sashing posts is absolute genius.  It's a beautiful variation on the traditional pineapple log cabin that also eliminates having to match up all those seams when the blocks are sewn together.  Brilliant!  

Ramona's 95 x 95 Pineapple Log Cabin Quilt

We used Hobbs Tuscany 80/20 Cotton/Wool batting for Ramona's quilt, a luxury all-natural alternative to the more common 80/20 cotton/poly blend batting (this post contains affiliate links).  The Cotton/Wool blend has a little more loft, a little less weight, and breathes better than a cotton/poly blend.  

Halo Quilt Value Study: Making a Messy Start

Happy Weekend, quilters!  I have an itty bitty amount of progress on my new Halo quilt to share with you today.  For those who missed my earlier post about this NewFO project, Halo is a Jen Kingwell pattern that can be found in her Jenny From One Block pattern booklet, available on Amazon here (this post contains affiliate links).

Unsewn Halo Blocks On My Design Wall

For the last couple of weeks, I've been working on cutting out shapes and rearranging them on my design wall without any sewing.  When I searched #haloquilt on Instagram, I found lots of different versions of this quilt, in all kinds of colorways.  What struck me immediately was that it's the muddled values in Jen Kingwell's original version that drew me in, the way that her "halo rings" appear to come forward in some places and recede in others, creating an illusion of depth.  Other quilters have made some very striking and modern versions of this quilt by increasing the value contrast, limiting the color palette, or restricting themselves to solids, but I was really intrigued by the way Jen broke the conventional "quilt police" rules about value and contrast in her quilt, creating something that feels fresh and modern but also somehow nostalgic and vintage.  I want to recreate that in my version of the quilt.

Jen Kingwell's 66 x 66 Halo Quilt

I printed a full page, grayscale photo of Jen's quilt and taped it up above my cutting table so I can refer to it as I'm chopping up my fabric pieces:

Grayscale Photo of Jen Kingwell's Halo Quilt

It's so much easier to see what's going on with value when you take color out of the equation!  

Feathers Four Ways: Quilts for Janita, Paula, Mildred + Nanette

Happy Weekend, fellow quilt lovers!  I have been finishing a lot more quilts than blog posts over the past few months and it has created a backlog of unshared photos on my camera roll.  Today I'm sharing four different clients' quilts that I quilted with four different allover feather quilting designs, with a brief discussion of how the design, thread, and batting choices were selected for each quilt.  Here's a quick glimpse of the four quilts I'll be talking about today, made by my clients Janita, Paula, Mildred, and Nanette, and quilted by Yours Truly:

Clockwise from Top Left: Feathers and Pearls I, Angel Wings, Abundant Feathers, Fast Feathers

Janita's Flying Geese Sampler: Abundant Feathers

Janita chose the Abundant Feathers quilting design for her cheerful flying geese sampler quilt (I don't have the name of her quilt pattern but if anyone recognizes it, please let me know and I'll update the post accordingly).  I just love the playful energy of her color palette of red, pink and aqua against a crisp white background!

Janita's 70 x 87 Flying Geese Sampler with Abundant Feathers E2E

Abundant Feathers is a very versatile design that looks good on a lot of different quilts from modern to traditional or reproduction quilts.  There is extensive backtracking/overstitching in this design, which is why I recommended lightweight So Fine 50 wt matte polyester quilting thread in Pearl (this post contains affiliate links).  With a thin thread like So Fine, your eye isn't drawn to the double-stitched quilting lines, and on a quilt like this one that has high contrast between the background and pieced block fabrics, skinny So Fine thread will seem to "take on" the color of the fabric it's stitching across, appearing like a pale pink against the red fabric and pale blue against the aqua.  A thicker white or cream thread would not have blended into the darker fabrics that way.  We wanted to keep the focus on the variety of pieced blocks and fabrics in Janita's sampler quilt, with the feather quilting playing more of a supporting role.  One more thing to notice about Abundant Feathers is how evenly spaced the quilting is across the surface of the quilt with this design, compared to some of the other feather designs we'll be looking at in today's post.  That's something to think about when choosing between similar quilting designs, whether you prefer a balanced overall texture like Abundant Feathers or whether you want to see some variety between the more open feather parts of a design verses the denser details of pearls, echoes, etc.  

Another Fresh Start On My Horizon: A Halo Quilt for Marlies

 Good morning, quilters!  Despite waking up to a muddy, rainy day here in Charlotte, I am in a sunshine mood today.  I think I may have finally figured out how to get my blog posts to automatically email to all of you wonderful people who have signed up for my email subscription!  Woo hoo!  Any of you who are not signed up for email but would like to be, just scroll to the bottom of my web site to find the signup box.  In case anyone else out there has been having a similar problem, here are the boring technical details: The RSS feed generator I'd been using successfully with that free email subscription service for years (can't even remember the name of it now!) and then with MailChimp created an RSS feed with slightly different tag names than the ones my new SendinBlue service is looking for when it checks my blog for new content.  The tags that were incorrect were "Published" instead of "pubDate" and "Content" instead of "Description," and SendinBlue's tech support identified that problem for me and directed me to a different website that would generate a new RSS feed with the universal RSS tags that their robots look for when they check my site for a new blog post.  The reason those awful blank emails were going out with just a header, a post title, and a footer, with no photos and no text, is that the SendinBlue robots were finding a new blog post title but couldn't "see" any of the text or photos when it wasn't associated with the tag name "Description" that they were looking for.  Clear as mud, right?  Anyway, I've been going back and forth with tech support about this and pulling my hair out over it for three months now, so it will be a huge relief to me if it's finally fixed.  The test email that I sent to myself last night came through correctly, so fingers crossed that THIS blog post shows up in everyone's inbox complete with text and photos, too!

But no one came here to talk about RSS feeds and computer bots, did they?  

Another NewFO for Rebecca: Halo Quilt by Jen Kingwell

I know I just posted last week about starting a new challenge project (the upcoming Star Upon Stars QAL from Laundry Basket Quilts), but the fabric and templates haven't shown up in my mailbox yet and the quilt along doesn't kick off until the middle of next week.  Meanwhile, my restless heart fell under the spell of a more intermediate quilt that will go together faster for me, one that involves curved piecing that I enjoy and find satisfying.  This is all the fault of my client Megan, by the way, because she's going to be starting this quilt in a class at the Quilt Patch shop in Matthews at the end of March and she tempted me with photos of a quilt that is way too adorable to refuse.  I'm also blaming Teresa, the Quilt Temptress who is teaching this class and who has been sharing photos of the gorgeous Halo quilt she made as a sample!  Teresa's class is already full and has a wait list, but I have a feeling she'll be teaching it again in the future.  As for me, I have a constitutional inability to follow directions anyway, so I'll be diving in on this one totally unsupervised.

Halo Pattern, Templates, and Tilda Pie In the Sky Fabric Bundles

If you're local to the Charlotte area and you'd like to make a Halo quilt of your own, Quilt Patch Fabrics in Matthews has both the Jenny From One Block pattern booklet and the optional acrylic template set for sale in their shop.  I purchased my Halo pattern booklet and my Tilda Pie In the Sky fabrics from the fabulous Flash Sew and Quilt shop in Naples, Florida while I was there visiting my in-laws, and I'll be making my Halo quilt as a gift for my mother-in-law Marlies.  

A Color Plan and Fabric Shopping for Stars Upon Stars + TODAY is the Last Day of the Carolina Lily Quilt Show!

Good morning, quilt lovers!  Just a quick post from me this morning before I dash off to the Union County Agricultural Center because our Carolina Lily Quilt Show opened yesterday and TODAY IS THE LAST DAY!  The show is open until 4 PM with 200+ quilts to see, a full vendor mall with all of the area's best quilt shops and sewing machine dealers gathered on one place for convenient shopping (with show specials), and a boutique of handmade gift items for sale.  Four of the six personal quilts I entered are sporting ribbons and several of my clients' quilts ribboned as well (more about that in my next post, I promise).  I hope to see you there!

And now, the real focus of today's post -- I made some decisions and did some online shopping a couple days ago, and THIS QUILT IS HAPPENING, YOU GUYS!!!  I'm so excited!

Star Upon Stars Quilt: Decisions Made, Fabrics Ordered!

I wrote about this antique 19th century quilt back in November of last year (you'll find that blog post here) and how I was considering it as a new challenge project for myself in 2023.  Well, Edyta Sitar recently announced that she is starting a QAL (Quilt-Along) for Star Upon Stars on March 15th with weekly blog posts and videos on her YouTube channel.  

Edyta is Doing a Star Upon Stars QAL in March!!!

The QAL will run for just three weeks, covering the three components of the quilt: the diamond pieced center stars, the smaller Lemoyne stars, and the sashing.  (No, I don't think anyone is going to finish the entire quilt during the three week QAL!). In her intro video for the QAL Edyta suggested that anyone who is worried that this quilt might be too difficult for them should just try making one sample block in the QAL and if they don't want to continue, that can become a pillow cover or a small wallhanging.  She also announced that she has a new template set available for this pattern, including one template for the exact size that each of the eight multi-diamond star segments is supposed to finish, which perked my ears right up -- in Jan Krentz's book Lone Star Quilts and Beyond, she recommends making a template for the desired finished size of those units out of template plastic.  The idea is to check each of those units after piecing them and correct any discrepancies before sewing them together.  You can find the template set and pattern for this quilt on Laundry Basket Quilts' web site here if you'd like to join me in this madness!

Original 67 x 74 Star Upon Stars Quilt (left) with My Fabric Picks (right)

One of the reasons I was vacillating about this quilt is that I was undecided about whether I'd attempt a faithful recreation of the original or reinterpret the quilt in a modern palette of solids, which would tone down the visual busyness and show off my piecing skills better (prints tend to camouflage seam lines).  I was also on the fence about the size of the quilt, because 67" x 74" is too small for a modern bed but this is way to elaborate to be a couch throw for the dog to curl up in (sorry, Samwise!).  

In the photo above, the original quilt made in 1846 is on the left, and you can see the contents of my shopping cart from Laundry Basket Quilts on the right.  

Jane's Floating Triangles + Charlotte QUILT SHOW This Weekend!

Good morning, my quilty-loves!  Since many of you may be experiencing Modern Quilts Withdrawal Syndrome now that QuiltCon has wrapped up, I thought I'd share Jane's Floating Triangles quilt with you to make that modern quilting magic last a little longer.  Also, I just finished it a few days ago and I am so excited about how it turned out.

Jane's 43 x 55 Floating Triangles with Spiral 3A Quilting

I stitched Donna Kleinke's Spiral 3A design on Jane's quilt, a design we selected to play up the feeling that the pieced triangles are swirling around in constant motion.  I am always on the lookout for digital quilting designs like this one that are unusual and that can create a custom quilted look when paired with the right quilt top.  I am just delighted with how this turned out for Jane.  

Quilters Dream Bamboo/Silk/Cotton blend batting was used for this quilt (this post contains affiliate links).  I chose lightweight So Fine thread in Blizzard to ensure that areas of overstitching remain inconspicuous and to maintain the uninterrupted color of Jane's saturated Grunge fabrics (skinny threads tend to take on the color of the fabric, so the bright white So Fine thread appears to be orange, yellow or pink where it crosses over colored fabrics.  Thicker white thread would create more visibly white lines of stitching across those fabrics).

Spiral 3A Design Stitched in So Fine Thread, Color Blizzard

Nanette's Brinton Hall Quilt + Charlotte Quilters Guild Happenings

Hello, Happy February, and Happy Belated Valentine's Day!  The quilt I'm sharing today was meticulously pieced by my client Nanette of Do It Right Quilter and you can read about her journey making Brinton Hall on her quilting blog here.  Check out the fabulous English paper pieced central portion of the quilt, featuring larger scale Asian floral print fabrics framed by hand stitched hexagons in glowing batik fabrics:

Detail of Baptist Fan Quilting on Nanette's Brinton Hall Quilt

The Brinton Hall Quilt is a pattern by Leigh Latimore that is based on an historic antique quilt made by Anna Brereton between 1803-1805.  Patterns for making the quilt were published in Quiltmania magazine issues #107 and #108 in 2015, and you can still purchase those back issues (either digital or print versions) from Quiltmania's web site here if you're interested in making your own version of Brinton Hall.  This is one of those quilts that can take on radically different personalities depending on the fabric prints and color palette selections.  Doesn't this look like a FUN project?  This is one of the chief dangers of professional long arm quilting -- I keep getting all of these gorgeous quilts from my clients and I think I wanna make THIS one and THIS one and THIS one..  😍

Nanette's 77 x 77 Brinton Hall Quilt with Baptist Fan Quilting

So, let's talk about the quilting!  

Star of North Carolina: AccuQuilt vs. Electric Quilt Software

Happy Friday, Quilty Peeps!  I took a little design detour yesterday, playing around with a historical quilt block called Star of North Carolina in an updated color scheme of Kona Solid fabrics.

My 58 x 74 Star of NC Design, Using 8 Inch Blocks

I became aware of this block recently when AccuQuilt reintroduced their limited edition 12" North Carolina Star BOB (Block On Board) die as a permanent offering.  "Block On Board" (BOB) refers to AccuQuilt dies that are designed to cut all of the shapes needed for a particular quilt block with a single pass through the die cutting machine.  (By the way, all of AccuQuilt's BOB dies are on sale 20% off, now through January 30th.  This post contains affiliate links).

AccuQuilt's 12 Inch North Carolina Star BOB Die

Barbara Brackman's definitive reference book, the Encyclopedia of Pieced Quilt Patterns, 3rd Ed., identifies this as Block #473 in the Ladies' Art Company Catalog that was published from 1889 through the 1970s.  

Nanette's Globetrotting Quilt + My Newest Favorite Quilting Thread

 Hello, my lovelies!  Have you missed me?  I've been less motivated to write blog posts lately because I switched email subscriptions providers at the end of December (no more flying MailChimp monkeys) and still have not figured out how to get blog posts automatically sent via email with my service provider.  And knowing that the folks who subscribe to get my blog posts sent by email are the ones most interested in what I have to show and tell, and those people will most likely not be seeing the posts I'm writing now is discouraging!  (If a tree falls down on the Internet and no one is watching, does it still make a sound?). I hate wasting perfectly good quilting time on troubleshooting tech problems!!  But the upside to that is that I have been doing a lot of quilting while I've been sulking about my tech woes, so I do have a few things to share today.  

Nanette's Globetrotting Quilt with Aurifil Forty3

First, I have to share the gorgeous quilt I just finished long arm quilting for my client Nanette of Do It Right Quilter.  I used a new thread for the first time (well, new to me -- I think it's been out for about 5 years or so), Aurifil Forty3 long arm quilting cotton, and I am in love with it!

Detail of Feather Garden E2E Stitched in Aurifil Forty3 Light Robin's Egg

I wish I could capture in photos what I'm seeing in person.  First off, the color was an absolute perfect match to the lightest blue fabric in Nanette's quilt.  For this quilt, I wanted a thread that was simultaneously going to blend in like a chameleon to let Nanette's exquisite piecing and beautiful fabrics shine, but also needed that thread to have some presence so that we could actually see the elegant Feather Garden quilting design even though the thread was color-matched to "disappear" on this predominantly blue quilt.  Aurifil Forty3 is beefier than their 40 wt 2-ply thread that comes on green cones; Forty3 is a stronger 40 wt 3-ply thread that comes on big cones and is designed specifically for the demands of high speed long arm quilting machines.  The color saturation, luster of the thread, and its softness remind me of cotton embroidery floss, and I think it's this thread's softness that I like most of all, because of how it bends in and out of the quilt sandwich to form stitches that look more like a dashed line of tiny, perfect hand stitches than like machine quilting.  I mean, this is definitely machine quilting, but I kept doing double-takes and imagining that I was seeing hand quilting stitches coming out of my long arm.  

If you have a long arm and you want to give Aurifil Forty3 a try, you may have difficulty finding it locally but the Fat Quarter Shop stocks it here (this post contains affiliate links).  Just a word of warning: this thread kicked out more lint than any other thread I've quilted with, and I had to stop and clean the hook race and bobbin case out midway through every single bobbin in addition to cleaning thoroughly with every bobbin change.    For me personally, I am willing to deal with lint when the tradeoff is gorgeous stitches that make the quilting sing.

Nanette's Globetrotting Quilt, 62 x 62

But I am getting ahead of myself!  Back to Nanette's quilt!  This 62" x 62" beauty is a BOM (Block of the Month) design by Pat Sloan called Globetrotting, and as of this writing in 2023, the pattern is still available on Pat's website for FREE here.  Nanette started this quilt in March of 2014 and finished her quilt top in September of that year, and you can read about the changes she made to the pattern and how she used EQ7 software to preview her fabric choices on her blog in this post.   Shortly after completing this quilt top, which she'd originally planned to quilt herself, life threw Nanette and her husband some nasty curve balls that sapped a lot of her creative energy for big endeavors and she found more solace in piecing and appliqué than in quilting and finishing for the next few years.  This resulted in the accumulation of a LOT of gorgeous quilt tops needing quilting, more than Nanette felt like she could handle, so she shipped twelve of them to lucky me for long arming. 💕

Vintage Little Boy's Britches for Bobbie + Brandon's Breeches (Just for Fun!)

Hello, my lovelies!  Now that I've wrapped up both of my Christmas quilt projects, I've resumed working on my FrankenWhiggish Rose needle turn appliqué project and I'm continuing to weigh my options for a new machine piecing project.  At the moment, I'm feeling wickedly inspired by a vintage hand pieced quilt top that my client Bobbie rescued from abuse and neglect and brought to me recently for longarm quilting.

Rescued and Redeemed: Bobbie's Vintage Little Boy's Britches Quilt

98 x 98 Little Boy's Britches (Vintage) with Basketweave E2E

Bobbie isn't a quilter; she's an interior designer who loves and appreciates vintage quilts.  When she spied this quilt top in a secondhand shop, she says it was black with filth and they were using it to wrap motor parts in or something like that!  Can you imagine anyone doing that to a quilt top that somebody spent hours and hours piecing by hand?!  I feel like the cops ought to have been called, or Social Services, or at least the Quilt Police!  

Mary's Lumen Quilt, Jingle Binding + A Little Red Hen Named Zojirushi

Happy New Year, Y'all!  I can't believe I haven't posted anything since before Christmas.  Meanwhile, my camera roll has been filling up with quilt photos and my brain has been cluttering up with everything I wanted to say about all of those quilts, so here we are.  I considered writing a big reflection post rehashing the highs and lows of 2022.  I thought about doing a New Year's Resolution post, or one that plans out all the quilts I'll work on this year...  Remember the three Sarah Fielke BOM projects I was going to make in 2022?  👀   Hah!  Still haven't started any of them!  

So instead of dour reflecting on goals not accomplished or fantasizing about plans soon abandoned, I'm going to just plant myself here in this moment of this day and see what happens next.

And now, without further ado, the quilt I've selected to share with you to kick off the new year:

Mary's Spectacular Lumen Quilt

Mary's 60 x 60 Lumen Quilt with Celestial Spark Clam E2E Quilting

This quilt was made by my client Mary whom many of you know via her blog, Quilting is In My Blood.  I chose to share it today for several reasons: It reminds me of fireworks exploding in the night sky to welcome the New Year.  It's gorgeous.  And finally, Mary is on my mind right now because I've got her three temperature quilts scheduled for quilting this week!  Can't wait!

Mary used the Lumen Quilt foundation paper piecing pattern by Nydia Kehnle and Alison Glass, which you can find on Etsy here (this post contains affiliate links).  This is such a gorgeous minimalist design, and IF I was making a grand list of quilts to make this year, I would probably put this one on the list.  The pattern is for a throw sized quilt, but it could easily be enlarged to bed size by making more blocks.  Another interesting thing about this quilt is that this is the second Lumen quilt Mary has made, using the same fabrics as her first one!  In 2019, Mary made a Lumen quilt as a gift for her stepdaughter and she liked the quilt so much that she decided to make another one to keep for herself.