It’s a Show & Tell Thursday!

This morning I’m off on a journey to Storm Lake,Iowa!

I’m Spending a few HOT July Days with the Iowa Quilter’s Guild and we plan to stay OUT of the heat, stay in and SEW! We’ve got a Pineapple Blossom Workshop on Friday, a lecture and trunkshow on Friday night, and a My Blue Heaven workshop on Saturday.

I’ll be picked up about 4pm in Des Moines, and then I’ll be seeing plenty of corn Beautiful Iowa Scenery on our 170 mile drive all the way to Storm Lake!

170 miles?!? When I looked on the map, it didn’t look THAT far!

I mean, I take THIS many turns to get from my house to the grocery store…and it’s only 3.5 miles! I can already say for Iowa --- you have very straight roads, and no diagonal short cuts to get from here to there..LOL Does this remind you of your old etch-a-sketch? It does me!

Never fear, I’ll have hexagons to keep me company all the way. And lots of corn scenery to keep me company! :cD

I’m hoping the weather holds out…I just did some checking and whooooooeeee! Thunderstorms. Let’s hope everything goes well! I’ve got the trunk show quilts wrapped in plastic just in case! Looks like the rain could be the thing that breaks the heat wave that the Midwest has been dealing with this week.

So onto our Show and Tell Thursday, shall we? It’s been a while since we’ve done one of these, and I think it’s time!

Today’s special guest is Andi L!

Andi sent me a few emails with her pictures attached and they are so bright and colorful I’d just love to share them here with you.

A bit of background from Andi:

I grew up in Italy and Germany, came to the US for college and, like many others, never left :-)

I'm a working mother of two, a 9-year old boy and a 7-year old girl, and live in the suburbs of Boston.

When my first child was born, I stopped working and took up home dec sewing as a hobby (I had never seen a sewing machine before in my life). Soon after, a friend bought me a book about quilting, and after that, I was hooked. That was in 2004.

Several years and projects later, a local quilter (who was working on Cathedral Stars at the time) told me about your website. I read your Scrap Users' System and knew this was the solution I had been looking for for my scraps.

Thanks to your system, I have completed most of the mysteries you have published, all with fabrics already in my stash. I have made several of your other quilt patterns as well without buying one piece of fabric. I have applied your concept of 'if I run out of one fabric, I substitute another' to almost every quilt I have made since then. At this point, I have friends who drop off large bags of their scraps on my door step, knowing that I will find a good home for them! :-)

Here is Andi’s Christmas Lights quilt! She writes:

In your quilt, you used one red for the hourglass block and one green for the star points- I didn't have yardage, so I used scraps and strips. Believe it or not, initially I worried this might be 'too scrappy'. Then I looked at the quilt from 10 feet away and could see that it was actually very cohesive. In fact, it looked great - so, I'm glad I took the plunge and used up my green and red scraps.

Andi has been a glutton for punishement for a long time….she’s also got a gorgeous Double Delight! ((I can’t get enough pink, can you?!)) About this quilt she says:

My friend Christine and I each made this quilt. It was a lot of work, but it was soooo worth it. This quilt sits on my bed right now :-)

And here is her Oklahoma Backroads, hanging over a wall railing! What I love about scrappy multicolored quilts, is that you can pull ANY color out of the center, use that for your border, and that is the color that takes over. Did you notice how she also did her block corners in orange so that those big red squares really become a design element? Great quilt, Andi!

Andi writes:

When I laid the blocks out on my design wall, I found my eyes needed a resting point - so I made two opposing corner squares of each block from the same fabric (orange).

This is one of my favorite scrap patterns of all time! It uses EVERYTHING! This is Scrappy Trips, and if you don’t believe me that even hideous fabrics can look good….GIVE it a TRY! All of these patterns are free on my website!

Andi’s comments:

My daughter wanted me to make her a quilt and picked several strips from my 2" bin - when I sewed them together to make the first block, the combination of fabrics looked so good, I knew I had to make more blocks right away. As I kept going, no matter what fabrics I pulled, they all looked great in that block setting - I just could not go wrong! This quilt took less than a week to make, quilting and binding included. The backing was pieced out of scraps - it looks like a quilt in its own right.

How about a close up of some of Andi’s fabrics?

The more you throw in, the more you mix it up, the better it looks! Anything Goes!

Here is her wonderful Carolina Crossroads quilt! Andi says:

Once again, a lot of work, but it makes my top 3 quilts in terms of how much joy making the quilt brought me. This was a fantastic project!!!

I love the quilting on this one…and the gorgeous colors of the fabrics. It is just scrumptious! But you know how I feel about orange, right? ;cD YUMMY!

Thanks for sharing your quilts, Andi! They are terrific..((And I bet they didn’t barely make a dent in the scraps either, am I right!?))

Happy Thursday, Everyone!