Holy cow, I forgot I had a blog! Ok, that's a lie...I am fully aware that I have a blog and that I haven't posted anything for months. True confession: I have a love hate relationship with blogging. It takes me HOURS to choose and edit pictures and prep a post. I'm just slow like that. So if too much time passes between posts, it starts to feel like housework...the longer I wait to do it, the less I want to do it. The nice thing about housework is that the piles of dishes and laundry just keep getting higher until you finally have to force yourself to do them. Not so with blogging! :) And sad to say, after all this time slacking, I don't exactly have a huge stack of quilts waiting to be featured. I have just been playing the last few months and doing a lot of quilt planning, but not a lot of finishing. And so of course now I have like 5 quilts I want to make in the next six weeks (we all know that won't really be happening). Oh well. On to the most recent quilt!

This quilt started as many of my quilts do, with an email from a friend or family member about a wedding or baby shower. This one was for my cousin Natalie, who is getting married in a couple months. I knew I wouldn't be attending the shower since I live in another state, but with wedding colors and a deadline, I impulse bought fabric the same day I got the email. I have been wanting to make a purple and green quilt forever, so I definitely had fun shopping! :)

The wedding colors were eggplant, lavender, olive and charcoal. Several of the eggplant fabrics are from lines by V and Co. - Simply Color and Simply Style. The green dot print is an Amy Butler and the rest is stuff I had in my stash. I couldn't find charcoal fabrics I loved, so I decided to use a white text print (never done that before) and this adorable bird cage fabric that I bought at Joann years ago. I must say that one of the fabrics in the quilt was new to me...I had never bought the brand before. I won't call it out by name (it was NOT the one from Joann), but it was awful to work with. It was very tightly woven so it was unforgiving! Every time I had to sew it to the other pieces, I couldn't get it to match up as well. Guess I won't be buying anymore of that!  

The adorable bird cage fabric...by Heidi Grace

I used my Alex's Wedding Quilt Pattern for this one...'cause it's super fast. But funny enough, I can't seem to follow a pattern...I always end up changing something! On this one I swapped the spots of a couple of the pieces for aesthetic reasons, and had to make a couple of the blocks out of two fabrics instead of one because I didn't have enough fabric. I cut and pieced this whole thing in about 4 hours total...not bad considering I made a couple of mistakes I had to fix (measure TWICE, cut once).

For the back, I decided to piece it using some solids I had with a bit of the leftover fabric from the front. I really love the way this one turned out. And I just barely had enough fabric for it!

For the quilting, I went with a fast, fun pantograph. This one is by the talented Anne Bright. It's called wonderland. I bound it in the matching purple solid. 

I sent the quilt to my sister to take to the shower last weekend and my cousin loved it! :) So glad! More quilts to come soon hopefully! Also going to make a 2015 calendar today since Zazzle is having a 60% sale through tomorrow (11/11/14). I didn't even come close to making enough quilts to fill a whole calendar this year, so I think I'm going to use a few pictures from this year and the rest from last year...nobody got last year's calendar but me and 2 other people. They don't have a lot of sales on calendars in January-March and I was too cheap to buy them full price! :)