What I have been working on this week

I picked up the "Sparkle Plenty" pattern by Loft Creations in June at the City Quilter shop in NYC. I think this is a record for me - I don't usually make quilt tops very quickly after getting a pattern (I tend to mull my fabric choices quite a while). But I really liked the colors on the sample picture of the pattern so I went with very similar colors. The black was taken from my stash. About half of the colors are from a package of Kaffe 5 inch squares I bought at the Vermont Quilt Festival at the end of June and the rest came from my 5 inch square collection. 
It is more of a large wall hanging size, so I am contemplating either adding borders, just keep expanding the pattern, or a combination of the two. 

Another Quilt Finished!

At the same time I picked up my summer quilt from the long-arm quilter's I also picked up this one. I finished putting on the binding last week.
All of the material for this quilt, except the outside border, was from my stash of fabrics. The main part of the quilt is primarily reproduction fabrics that I inherited from Cheryl Patch.  

The pattern for this quilt is called "Value Dance"  and the Quilt Tutorial can be found on the Stitched in Color blog by Rachel Hauser. 

When Gina and I started quilting together 10 years ago we would pick a pattern and each do our own version of the quilt. Over the years we moved away from doing that as we got busy with making gifts and other individual patterns we were interested in. This past January Gina suggested we work on the same pattern again. I had found this pattern in my quilt blog roaming and we both liked the the simplicity (it uses only 2 different quilt blocks) and how the look of the quilt could be very different based on color and placement.

My New Summer Quilt

 I bought the batik fabrics for this quilt as a kit in Paducah,KY at the AQS show two years ago. I pieced most of it at a retreat last fall. Because of the bright colors I decided to make it a warm weather quilt. It is backed with flannel, but it does not have any batting. I got it back from the long-arm quilter yesterday and instead of doing a traditional binding I trimmed the back an inch longer than the quilt top and just double folded the back edges over to the front of the quilt and stitched it down using a machine blanket stitch.