#fox quilt

[fox-bright]

Bat block quilt top is getting there!

[kadtie]

My brother (no relation) and my friend recently found out they're going to be parents, so I've been working on a little something.

I doodled it at work real quick just to get a rough idea of a plan.

A quilted blanket with a fox in the middle (soon-to-be dad's favorite animal), mushrooms (for baby-mama) with eyes (she loooooves eye imagery) on the corners, and various meaningful symbologies between me and this baby's parents. (We all met each other at a bakery and I share a tattoo with each of them; a d20, and a frog with an eye pattern on it's back)

I drew a clearer second draft digitally for the fox to help me decide on shapes, then hand drew a pattern on grid paper and took a photo of each of the fabrics I bought to make a digital mock up to decide on color/pattern arrangement.

For the mushrooms I did a rough digital sketch to get an idea of proportions and shapes then did a grid paper pattern. I decided to do more mushrooms as well; some with eyes and some with dice, but all with orange caps. I ordered 8 inch swatches and fat quarters from spoonflower for the caps and bought the rest of my fabric from a local quilting store.

(One of the fat quarters, as you may have noticed, ended up being generative ai and I'm mad about it and can't use it, and will not be buying from spoonflower again or at least for a while in the future, but I am happy with the rest of them for this project)

Cutting the pieces out for the mushrooms took forever, but would have taken ten times longer if I didn't get a roller cutter and clear quilting ruler. This is my first quilt and I'm so glad I decided to buy them.

I sewed the top halves together

Then the bottom halves, which did involve hand stitching the edges of the veil (the thin piece at the top of the stem) because my presser foot on my machine is too big to do such tight corners, but it's fiiiiiine. Pain in the ass, but so worth it for the end result.

I then mixed and matched so that each of the (20!) mushrooms is unique. Even though each cap comes in a pair I made sure that each sister cap got a different stem.

Mushrooms finished!

I love them and I think they turned out amazing! As I was pressing each one I kept thinking each one was my favorite they all look so goooood!

Now I can start on the fox!

Updates to come.

[mamaspark]

I finished binding this sweet fox today. The backing was so soft but very stretchy. That stretchy made it a bit difficult to bind. It’s a gift for my Goddaughter and she won’t notice or care that the binding is not perfect.

[katemustsew-blog]

One from the archive. A Elizabeth Hartman fox quilt made for my mothers Christmas present. She genuinely loved it ! But now keeps going on and on about how I should sell them, bless her she really does not how much I would have to charge someone to make any kind of profit. Or the hours it takes to make one!

I'm really going to have to learn how to take better pictures. I always seem to make them more “real life” than instagram!

[fox-bright]

Recovered enough from surgery to baste the bat quilt today! Not nearly enough to quilt today, though, just spray-basting was exhausting.

[fox-bright]

I'm going to be uploading quilt photos here so that they exist somewhere other than Instagram. To that end, a Christmas-gift quilt from last year! Very simple construction, no pattern, but I had a lot of fun with the color.

(Wanjin, unlike Mira, is interested in being in every photo he can sneak into.)

[fox-bright]

I am so close to finished with this quilt. What remains now is quilting the borders, trimming and truing, making and applying the binding, cutting threads, washing.

I had to put it down for pretty much a full month, because of the surgery--I really wanted to have it to my friend before Halloween, but "before Christmas" will have to do.

[fox-bright]

Photos aren't great, but here's my kendo quilt! Fuzzy on the back and bright blue(which I have no photos of at all, it seems?) to keep me and anyone next to me warm between fighting brackets at packed martial arts tournaments where there isn't a whole lot of room to exercise and keep the muscles going. And then, of course, I haven't been able to go to a single tournament since--but someday we'll be through this pandemic.

This is Fat Quarter Shop's *very* easy pattern Jelly Roll Twist with an added simple border, done in fabrics that I spent a couple of years saving up piecemeal here and there. I found colors that were as close to shoai blue and menbuchi red as I could get. I really recommend the pattern, you can get very different looks through your fabric choices.

When I talk about The Quilt the Ghost Messed With When I Went Upstairs, that's this one.