Carter's Cards

Saturday, September 21, 2013

Purple!

This quilt was made from a gorgeous jelly roll from my sister - gorgeous purples and greens. I picked out a simple jelly roll pattern and whipped this up pretty quickly. I tried my hand at machine quilting it, using straight lines. I especially love the border quilting, which has straight parallel lines, except for the small strippy sections in each border strip where the quilting goes perpendicular to the rest of the border quilting. Nothing fancy, but pretty to look at.

Christmas Quilt

I was inspired to try my hand at a scrappy Trip Around the World quilt in a Christmas theme. I got all the fabrics at a local secondhand craft store. People donate their unused craft items (scrapbooking paper, rubber stamps, dollhouse furniture, unfinished wood pieces, patterns, fabric, etc.) to this store. It is run by all volunteers in the town, and they sell everything very inexpensively. The money goes to support senior citizen transportation in their town. Crafters get to purge their old stash, crafters get to buy stuff to build up their stash at a good price, and seniors get some help - everybody wins. This was inspired by Bonnie Hunter's blog. http://quiltville.blogspot.com/2005/06/scrappy-trips-around-world.html

Great lap quilt for December and beyond.

Quilting Passion

I have switched my main interest in paper crafting to quilting. I love quilting in part for one of the reasons I love paper crafting - color. I am always interested in seeing how different colors and shades of colors go together. About 4 years ago I started quilting, and I have been learning a lot as I go. The following pictures are some of the quilts I have made in 2013.

Fun with colors - unnamed quilt (I am terrible at coming up with names. Just ask my cats. Boring names, poor babies.)
I saw this quilt on a blog and fell in love with it. I must say, orange and yellowish orange are not in my list of favorite colors, and I don't ever gravitate toward them. But something about this quilt really grabbed my attention. I saved the blog entry in my favorites and would go back and look at it often. Eventually I bought the same fabrics and decided to make the same quilt. I did not use a pattern, but it was pretty simple to reconstruct. I even copied the blogger's straight line quilting on it, since I am not good at free motion quilting at this point, and straight lines are best for me to work with. The fabric on the front is all from the Simply Color line by V and Co., whose blog I stole this quilt from.
Here is her blog: http://www.vanessachristenson.com/2013/04/v-and-co-reverse-hopscotch-done.html

For the back, I decided to play with my growing collection of gray fabrics. I was going to make a quilt using different shades of gray and black fabrics, but how many lap quilts does one person need? So I figured I could piece the backing and the quilt can be reversible. Since I had lots of leftover squares from the front of the quilt, and the colors all looked so good with grays, I incorporated them into the backing as well.

Thursday, August 9, 2012

Fun cards

I am working my way through the July kit by Simon Says Stamps. This kit has some fun papers and a nice set of stamps. I've been adding a few of my own embellishments like the fun twine.

Wednesday, August 8, 2012

More sweet cards from SSS June kit

Here are some more card I made with the Simon Says Stamp June kit. There isn't much left of this kit now, just some odds and ends and strips of paper. I really enjoyed this kit and look forward to digging into the July and August kits.

The idea for the first card above was shamelessly CASEd from a card made by Kristina Werner on the Simon Says Stamp blog. (Her card is in the top row, second from the right.)

On the bottom of the stamped birdcage are some crystals. I dabbed them with dots of Star Dust Stickles which came in the kit. (It doesn't show up well in the scan.)