Up to Recently

Thank you all for your amazing discussion on my most recent post. I absolutely loved the support and all of the comments you left, and can't wait to see where this discussion leads to next. I'm pondering over a few things, but for now, back to fun quilty stuff :) I recently made a quilt from Nancy Purvis' book Quilting From Every Angle* (Anything with an asterisk in this post is an Amazon Affiliate link, but only because I think this book is freaking awesome. Full disclosure at bottom of the site.).

~~~Sidenote: Now, I'm quite the awkward fangirl. I routinely make a fool of myself over people I look up to. I don't mind admitting it! It's pretty hilarious how awkward I can be....but, more of those stories later. Back to me fangirling over Nancy's work.~~~

Having been a follower of Owen's Olivia for quite awhile, I got SUPER pumped when she casually mentioned she was working on a book. I dug through my email, figured out her full name (yes I'm a creepy stalker, sorry!) and religiously searched her name on Amazon. On a weekly basis.

After a few months, I decided I was being ridiculous and just emailed her. (The, uhm, normal thing to do, right??) She gave me an estimated publication month, and so I was able to chill out on my frantic Amazon searching for awhile. But I still did all the other fangirl things, like freak out in excitement when the Amazon listing did show up, freak out in excitement when the "Look Inside!" option became available, freak out in excitement about everything in general. I'm pretty cool ;) AND you guys I got the FIRST signed copy from her!!!!!

I wasn't kidding when I said fangirl.

Anyway, my recent works show a strong influence derived (ahem.....) from Nancy's work. Let's just say I'm a bit head over heels with her quilts. Soooo, I was pretty pumped to make the Mesa quilt. I made it a bit smaller - both for the sake of time (baby came early!) and to make it more of a crib size. I used a Caroyln Friedlander white on white print, and a wonderful aqua double gauze. It's shiftier to work with than traditional quilting cotton, and gives a much more organic, imperfectly pieced look to the quilt - something I love to see in others' work, but struggle to have in my own, as a type A person. I also used a variegated purl cotton thread to hand "quilt" inside the white triangles. (I say "quilt" because I'm horrible at handquilting - horrible!!!! - so I just stitched through the quilt top before I actually created the quilt sandwich. So it gives a similar look, but was much easier to accomplish.)

Their nursery has an "arctic animals" theme, and I was really excited to try to make something polar looking. My friend was also creating a color scheme around a painting she had - light blues, grays, and purples - so I was really exciting about the second double gauze fabric I used for the backing. I loooove the way it turned out - icy but cute! - and it was really exciting to be able to walk it right into their home and place it in the crib.

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