WIP Wednesday: Guest-hosted by Rebecca

Hi there! My name is Rebecca and I blog over at Pieces and Cream. I’m delighted to be guest posting at Freshly Pieced for WIP Wednesday. Lee and I are friends from the Milwaukee Modern Quilt Guild.

I live in Wauwatosa, a suburb of Milwaukee, Wisconsin. I mostly spend my time tending to my two sons under 4 and trying to be a good wife. I teach science at a small college part-time and in my leisure time I sing at my church, ride my bicycle and make things, mostly quilts. 

Summers in Wisconsin are very short, therefore we cram all our festivals and fairs into about 3 months. That means I’ve been outside enjoying the weather, have all sorts of things in progress and am way behind on BOM’s and QAL’s. Oh well, got to enjoy the sun whilst we can.

I’ve been working on this quilt for a year because it’s been put on the back burner a lot. I thought summer was a good time to bring it back out and finish it. Some of you may remember the Dead Simple QAL at Lily’s Quilts. The idea was to learn how to use a color palate, then match up the colors to a fabric color palate, such as Kona Cotton Solids. I wasn’t overly excited about the finished top, which is probably why it stayed a WIP for so long. Well now that it’s quilted, I totally love it again. I tried “organic straight line” quilting and it really added a ton to the finished quilt. I am half done with the binding and hopefully will have it finished by next week.

 

I am a huge Malka Dubrawsky fan and used her Stitched in Color line to make her Whirligig quilt from her book Fresh Quilting. I recently basted this quilt and have decided it will be used to teach myself to free-motion quilt. You’ve probably seen that Angela Walters wrote a book called Free Motion Quilting. I picked up a copy after seeing a review and it’s got awesome pictures that will really help me visualize how to start/stop and which direction to go while quilting. I’ve just got to get over my fears and try it!! This might remain a WIP while I give myself breaks from tackling such a huge new skill.

Another project that is going to take me a long time is a hexagon quilt. I FINALLY cut into my Echo by Lotta Jansdotter and what better way to show off the large-scale prints than with 6.5” hexagons right? Even though I won’t be hand piecing these together, I have to cut out around 150 whole and 50 half hexagons. That’s going to take me forever, making it another one of those projects that remains a WIP for several months. If I try to do this all at once, I’ll go crazy. I’ve been drooling over hexagon quilts and Echo for a long time so this quilt will be well worth the wait.

Besides some bee blocks, the only other WIP that I have lying around that I haven’t made progress on is the BOM over at Sew Mama Sew. I’ve got 3 blocks done and have 3 more cut out. Even though I totally love my fabric choices, I always forget about this before making plans for another quilt. Speaking of that, there are no lack of plans for more quilts and there really never are enough hours in the day, especially hours spent quilting! I bet most of you can relate.

Now it’s your turn to link up. Here are the rules:

1. Link up any post from the past week that features at least one unfinished work-in-progress (WIP)
2. Somewhere in your post, link back here to my blog. (Or grab my WIP Wednesday button for your sidebar.)
3. Comment on at least a few of the other links—because what fun is a linky party without comments?