Vivian is a Grandma!

Lovely Vivian Love, who did the breathtaking freehand quilting for "Piece, Love, Twilight", our gift to Stephenie Meyer, became a grandma yesterday morning! Little baby boy Jay was born 3 weeks early in Utah Dec 30th at 2:22 am coming in at 7lbs 4oz. You can follow the link to her blog, Quilts with Love, as I'm sure the proud grandma will be posting pictures there soon. CONGRATS Vivian and the entire Love and Barnes families!

A Twilight Banner by Elizabeth

I love post-and-tell and even though I've shown you my other blocks like these, I'd still like to share because this is a and different project and it is fun to have these all in one place. As I've been working on my twin Mystery Quilt blocks, specifically the book covers, I have also made a third set of book cover blocks to put together in a little banner as a Christmas gift for a non-quilting TwilighMOMS friend. I've had to keep it under wraps, but as she's unwrapped her gift I can share now.

The Twilight Book Cover, designed by Cat. It is enlarged to 120% to make a 6" block. The fabrics in the apple were from Iris and the hands are the favorite iridescent sparkle fabrics in white and cream from JoAnn's. The black swirl in the background is also from JoAnn's. It is a little difficult to see here, and you'll get a better look at it in the other blocks. The apple stem is hand satin stitch. This is the third Forbidden Fruit block I've made.

The New Moon Book Cover, designed by Cat and enlarged to 120%. The red fabric is the same as in the apple, from Iris, and the few pieces of dark burgundy are from Wanda. Thanks girls! The white is Snow Fairy Frost and the green in the stem is a marble print that I used for the stem and leaves in the proposal block in the New Moon Quilt. This is the eighth Broken Petals block I've made, one trial block at 100%, four blocks at 80% for the SM Quilt and three at this size.

The Eclipse Book Cover. I did this the same way I did the ribbon on the SM quilt, using the actual book as the model for it. I even used a left-over piece of ribbon from the SM quilt. In addition to the ribbon in the SM quilt and this block, I've made two other 6" ribbon blocks.

Cat's Breaking Dawn cover, enlarged to 120%. Although all of Cat's patterns are fun to do, this one was particularly fun for me, though I'm not sure why. I just really enjoyed doing it. The chessboard squares are Natural Fairy Frost (a favorite!) and I traced the chess pieces directly off the book cover. The chess pieces are made from the same pattern I used for the SM quilt, and did them at the same time. The queen is Snow Fairy Frost and the pawn is Red Fairy Frost. I've done three of these blocks.

The picture is a little distorted, but here is the finished banner, which I named Twilight. I should have called it Twilight Obsession, but didn't think of it until too late. Angie did a beautiful job machine quilting it for me. Thanks so much, Angie! We're already in cahoots for her to do the quilting on another project, a High School Musical Quilt for my daughter. The banner idea was Iris'. We were talking about our mystery quilts and how to fit in the book covers. She only included the Twilight Book Cover in her mystery quilt and at the time I was debating about using her awesome placement idea or putting each of the book covers in the four corners of the quilt. She said that she was going to make a book-cover only hanging, either in a banner, like this, or with two covers in the top row and two covers in the bottom row. I filed that idea away and thought it might be a great gift for a fellow Twilight lover.

The red fabric is left over from the Stephenie Meyer quilt. The borders around the 6" book cover blocks are 2" and the black borders are 4", I think. I worked this one out as I went, something I don't usually do, and I didn't write it down for future reference. Oops! I like to have a layout marked to scale on grid paper so I can make sure everything fits. This seemed like a straightforward design, so I worked out the details as I went. When I bound it, I included loops for hanging. The loops lay flat against the back of the banner, so if she wants to use it as a table runner, she won't have a problem hiding them. I brought in extra lighting to try to get a good picture, but the contrast between the black and white confuses the camera and so it is difficult to get a picture that isn't really dark. If you want to see a bigger view of it, just click on the picture.

Angie did a great job with the quilting. She did accent quilting around each of the Book Cover pieces. Then in the borders, she used a really fantastic sort of filigree pattern. It is very striking. Here is a close-up of that (click on the picture for an even bigger view).

She quilted in a complimenting pattern in the red frames around each block. Here is a close-up of one side (again, click on it for a bigger view):

This is what it looks like all the way around. The photo isn't the best (I was in a hurry to get it in the mail and only took one picture of the frames), but I hope you can see how cool the design looks around the blocks. You can also see the accent stitching that she did on the book cover elements in this block.

The quilting really makes this runner spectacular. Thanks for a great job, Angie!

Twas The Night Before Christmas - Twilight Quilters style

Twas day turned to Twilight and all through the threads,
not one quilter TM was ready for bed,
Our clothes were all laid out with care,
in hopes that we'd slip out to New Moon knowing Edward would be there.
Hurrying and gathering our kerchiefs and caps,
last on our mind was a long winters nap.
When out in the driveway there arose such a clatter,
the neighbors came out to see what was the matter.
And what to our wondering eyes did appear,
but a shiny silver Volvo to take us there!
With a handsome hunk driver so lively and quick,
we knew it a moment it wasn't St. Nick!

More rapid than eagles the vampires they came,
And our driver hummed and called them by name,
Carlisle and Esme, Rosalie and Emmet, and Alice and Jasper will meet us in minutes,
Away from the porch and away from the wall,
They'll all be at the theater in the mall!

"As dry leaves that before the wild hurricane fly",
It felt as though the Volvo would take to the sky
So away we went and away we flew,
With the car full of quilting friends, and well you know who!
And then in a twinkling we heard a sound,
The prancing and pawing of a wolf around,
I opened the window and put out my head,
Poor Jacob was running alongside with dread,

Edward was dressed in designer wear,
And so would his family when we got there,
A ring box for Bella he held in his pocket back,
Meanwhile Jacob was concentrating on his pack.

Once at the theater the Volvo came to a stop,
He parked where he wanted and just hissed at the cop,
We all got out just in time to see,
As he stood in the forest asking Bella his wife to be.

Back to the car with no driver so quick,
We saw immediately we'd been tricked,
No Volvo anywhere, just the family car in site,
With a ticket on the windshield, oh that's a big bite!

We sprang to grab the ticket with a naughty whistle,
This was a thud in our hearts, not the down of a thistle,
But we exclaimed as we drove out of site,
Merry Christmas to all and to all a New Moon night!

~ by Wanda, 2009

New Moon Quilt: The Flight Home

I believe some of this was posted previously but lost in the unfortunate incident we had in Oct. Anyway, here is The Flight Home block I created for the New Moon quilt. I started with the La Push: First Beach block designed by our wonderful Cat Magraith and avaliable at sewhooked.org under guest designers. Cat, thank you for bringing a little bit of magic into my life with all these fantastic PP patterns! And thank you Jennifer for your great website chock full of PP goodies!!!

Then I found this cute Airplane pattern available at Paper Panache. I actually have a degree in Aeronautical Engineering, and while it's true what they say, use it or loose it....I still get a thrill at seeing airplanes, so this one was a fun piecing! I loaded it up with 3 shades of gray/white, all sparkly since it's still high up in the air where the sun could be hitting it above the cloud cover!

I used 3 different tree patterns: The Carlson Pine from Forest Quilting is the tall guy. I just extended the trunk a bit. The two medium bushier trees come from a book I have, "Paper Piecing the Seasons" by Liz Schwartz. It's one of those books that was a gift 10 years ago and I'm not crazy about much in it, but it surprisingly has turned up a couple of good nuggets! The smallest tree was a share by Angie, I believe. It is from 365 Foundation Quilt Blocks by Linda Causee.

Then it was on to the signs. My vision when I signed up for this block was always to have an airplane coming down between La Push and Forks, to show Bella being caught in the middle of her "two good things". But originally I wanted the two signs to be right next to each other under the plane. Well, after I pieced the tall tree I realized I wanted to make it taller, so I just added to the trunk. But then that looked bad, so I decided that I'd relocate the Forks signs to cover it up, and also I didn't really want to cover up half of the smaller tree! I grabbed photos of the two signs from online, resized them, and raw edge, machine stitch appliqued them on. Not crazy about how the Forks sign turned out (I really wanted to use that green star fabric, because it reminds me of Charlie, but overall just not happy with fabric choices), but really like my La Push one. Although the tree behind it bugs me, came out crooked. :(


One last note. The whole thing was a mish-mash of components to begin with, and then I ran into a little problem after I'd completed La Push, the airplane and two trees. I realized I was running out of sky fabric, quick! I didn't want to re-do everything, so my solution was more mish-mash! I actually took apart one of the trees to salvage some of the sky, used a grayer batik to make the right third look like a storm was coming in from the east, and frugally finished piecing the rest. I even dug into my trash for scraps I'd previously thrown away just to crazy piece some of the sections under the airplane! I wasn't even sure if I'd be able to join up La Push with the rest of it! I guess that quote is true, "when life throws you scraps, make a quilt" ! =)