Sunrise Quilt Studio

The Hawaiian Quilt top is complete! This is a "big block" quilt pattern by Debbie Bowles. It went together quickly. I made 30 18 inch blocks set 5 x 6 then added a 3 inch outer border. The white fabric is a tone-on-tone that I purchased at a local fabric shop. The remaining fabrics were the ones I purchased in Oahu. The finished quilt size is 96 x 108 inches. I am playing around with quilting designs at this point in time. Hopefully I will get this quilt on the machine next week. In the meantime, I finished a Double Wedding Ring quilt. This was a large top that was given to me by a friend. Her mother had hand pieced this top. It was in good shape and almost perfectly square. I did a lot of ruler work on this top which slowed down the quilting process, but it was worth it.

We returned from a trip to Hawaii two weeks ago. Before leaving the islands, I had to shop for Hawaiian print fabrics. I found Fabric Mart and spent almost 2 hours in this warehouse-style store shopping for fabrics. There were so many to choose from that I had trouble narrowing it down! With my husbands help I narrowed it down to 8 fabrics. The photo above shows 5 of them. The 3 bottom prints are Hawaiian prints, the top 2 are a hand-dyed and a batik. I chose the fabrics to coordinate together with the idea of making a quilt. Now to get the courage to cut into them! I am thinking a big block quilt and am looking at different patterns. I haven't decided on a design yet, but then I am in the middle of a different quilting project at the moment. A double wedding ring is on the machine.

Planners have been a part of my life for a very long time. When I was working in a management position planners were essential to keep me on track with all the meetings I had to attend and all the interviews I conducted. My life was very fast-paced and chaotic and the timed planner was what kept me sane! Last year with the cancer diagnosis and going through chemotherapy, I used my calendar in my phone to keep up with all the surgeries, treatments, labs, and doctor appointments. I needed the reminders the phone sent me to help me get to where I needed to be each day. This year things are much calmer and slower paced. I don't need a timed planner. I still used my phone to schedule appointments, but fortunately I don't have near as many as I did last year. This year I bought a Happy Planner to help me with my work and home life. Even though I am not as busy, I find that I have problems remembering things if I don't write them down. It's a side affect of the chemot

I recently published a video on my You Tube channel about making computer generated quilt labels similar to those pictured above. I am pretty diligent about labeling my quilts - now! I wasn't always. But I started to realized that with purchasing so many unfinished quilt tops that I didn't have a way to find the stories or the makers behind these quilts, that my quilts would be the same. So I now do my best to attach a label to each quilt I complete shortly after it is finished. Computer printed labels was a great time saver for me. If I don't have much information to put into a label, I can get 4 labels to a sheet of computer printer fabric. If I have a long story to put into a label, I can get 2 to a sheet. Sometimes I only have text on the label, but I am getting to where I add clipart to fancy it up a bit. With all the quilts that I own, it gets confusing at times as to the names of each one and when they were completed. With the labels attached, there isn't

After spending 6 weeks quilting the Cat's Cradle Quilt, I needed a fairly quick project just for fun. This Morning Glory quilt was the one I chose. It is a 1930s top with irregular edges. I bought this top about 3 years ago at a flea market. It was on display outdoors tossed over the back of a chair and it had been raining the night before. Half of the quilt was dragging in a mud puddle. I purchased the top, took it home and washed and dried it and put it in storage. I have some plastic storage boxes that I store my quilt projects in until they are completed. The quilting is simple on this quilt. It is continuous curve around the rectangles and triangles that make up the circles of the blocks, and straight line quilting in the hexagons. It took some work to figure out a path for continuous quilting, but once I figured it out, the quilting went fairly quickly. The binding that I originally thought would be a huge undertaking was actually not a problem at all. I cut the bin

It took quite some time, but I finally finished the Cat's Cradle Quilt. I like how replacing the borders made such a difference in the quilt. It was one that would have been completely disassembled and remade with only the pieced blocks if I hadn't experimented on ways to keep this quilt intact as much as possible and still have been able to quilt it. The Grunge fabric for the outer border was a near perfect replacement for the original fabric. I don't think I could have gotten any closer to the original color. This is one quilt I will be keeping. When I put as much time and energy into a quilt as I did this one, I cherish it. Here is one of the videos I posted on You Tube about this quilt. Check out my channel to see more quilting videos at Sunrise Quilt Studio

I had an unexpected day off from my day job on Thursday so, I decided to spend it quilting. The Cat's Cradle quilt is still on my longarm machine and I really needed some extra hours to spend quilting it. I spent about 30 minutes cleaning out a bookcase of old quilting magazines that I hadn't looked at in over a year. Then on to the Cat's Cradle quilt. The outer border was still not completed, so I focused on that. I had to redraw the design on the lower portion of the border because I had missed my target points in a large section of the design and the cross-hatching would have been way off if I didn't fix it. That took over an hour to redrawn the design. Then it was break time. A cup of coffee, lunch, and time spent with my daughter and our dog made the 90 minute break go by fast. Another 2 hours of quilting and the border was done. This is one border design that I won't do for some time. It is soooo time consuming! It's beautiful, but time consuming.

I have been working on this vintage Cat's Cradle quilt top for several weeks now. When I purchased it I didn't realize how badly out of square it was. Most vintage tops are not square, so I was expecting an issue with squaring up the top, but not to the extent that this top was. Above is the "after" picture. After I spent hours desperately trying to quilt this top "as is" and making it square in the quilting process. I finally gave up and decided it needed to be deconstructed in order to be saved. Luckily, I only had to remove the borders to get it back to square. It is my opinion that this top was left to hang somewhere for years after it was made! Maybe on a hanger, but most likely the center of the quilt was pulled through a decorative hanger and mounted on a wall as a decoration. The reason I think this is because the center of the quilt is faded and it measured 10 inches wider and longer through the middle of the quilt than the edges at it's