Quilting and Stuff by Knitnoid

Category Archives: Blogger's Quilt Festival

My Favorite Quilt – Bloggers Quilt Festival

October 29, 2010 12:36 am ⋅

Amy over at AmysCreativeSide.com is hosting the Blogger’s Quilt Festival October 29th – November 5th.  This is the second time I’ve participated.  Last fall I showed the  Blue Applecore quilt I gave my husband.   This year I’m entering “Music Lessons” – another quilt I’ve made for my husband.

This quilt started off with a casual purchase “oh, look music fabric” and an innocent remark by my husband.  “Wouldn’t it be cool to make a quilt with nothing but music fabric – just a single repeat of each fabric?”

It was the Spring of 2003 and I was still a machine knitter and a want-to-be-quilter.  I had quilt patterns and magazines, and a little bit of cotton fabric, but I hadn’t really been bit by the “Quilt Pox’.  In fact I purchased my first music FQs the Spring of 2003 in at Silks & More Fine Fabrics – now Appletree Quilting Center in Columbia, Missouri, while I was making arrangements for a statewide gathering of Bond Machine Knitters.

Isn’t it funny how we can remember where we purchased some of our fabric.  Or is it just me?

Anyway I showed the fabric to my husband and the comment about a quilt and the idea for a music quilt was born.  Although I didn’t like his idea of chunk of fabric – I wanted to piece something.

Over the next five years I began to collect music themed fabric.  It was given to me my by my mom and friends.  I bought music fabric on-line that I couldn’t find locally.  Since I didn’t have a pattern in mind, I kept collecting music themed fabric.

I think this picture was taken after I completed the quilt top.

Then one day while I was surfing the web, I spotted a picture of a quilt with lots of floral fabrics.  Each one was different and the “piecing” was done in the sashing and cornerstones.  I then had a design for my music fabric.

I started the quilt in September 2008 and finished the top the following April.  It would take until the end of the year begin quilting on it.  I needed a back!

So, I pieced the back from the “leftover” music fabric.

See that swag fabric in the middle of the back.  That’s Andover Fabrics Marching Band by Gail Kessler.  I searched the entire metro area for that fabric without success.  I found it on-line, but didn’t want to buy a border fabric without seeing it.  On the Iowa road trip (13 stores in 3 day) I found the fabric in one of the last stores we visited that weekend.

Music fabric still came into the house after the quilt top was completed.  Some of it got worked into the back of the quilt.  The top left corner is one piece and the last full square on the third row was a new fabric.

In total there are 168 different fabrics on the front of the quilt.  Two different colorways of the same print count as two. I also included a block I printed which has a scan of one of my husband’s original piano pieces on it.    The back contains at least three prints which did not make it into the front of the quilt  – two were purchased after  the top was complete, the third was the swag.

As I was finishing the quilting my husband and I started thinking about what to call the quilt.  It had been known as “the music quilt” & “music star”, but I felt the quilt needed a more significant name.  We came up with “Music Lessons”.

If you’ve gotten this far, thank you for reading. Check out other quilters’ favorite quilts over at Blogger’s Quilt Festival.

Posted in: blogger's quilt festival, music quilt

Bloggers Quilt Festival

October 16, 2009 6:37 am ⋅

Today is the official last day of the Bloggers Quilt Festival that Amy at Park City Girl is hosting. However, the links to the quilts entries will remain on her blog. Which is a good thing since there are over 650 entires and I still haven’t made it to all of them!

I want to thank everyone who has commented on my entry, and encourage everyone to check out the rest of the quilts in the show by clicking on the badge at the top of this entry.

Posted in: blogger's quilt festival

My Favorite Quilt – Quilt Festival

October 8, 2009 11:01 pm ⋅

Amy at Park City Girl is hosting the Blogger’s Quilt Festival today through Oct 16th. She asked us to post a picture of our favorite quilt and tell it’s story. Well nearly every quilt is my favorite quilt, but I could only pick one, so here is my Blue Charm Applecore quilt.


Actually, it’s my husband’s. This quilt was finished New Year’s Eve 2005. It was only 2 to 6 days late — depending on whether it was supposed to be his Christmas present or his birthday present, and that was dependent on when I finished it. Regardless, with the exception of the quilt I gave my mother for Mother’s Day 2005, it’s the quilt closest to meeting the gift giving deadline.

I’ve previously blogged about this quilt here.

My best guess is I purchased the pattern, ruler and rotary cutter (love my Ergo 2000) in October 2004 at a quilt show. It might have been the previous year. The pattern sat for a while and then late spring 2005 I got a wild idea to make this quilt for my husband in all blue fabric — at this time, no deadline had been set.

Previously I had been collecting music fabric, so now I added blue fabric to my collection each time I entered a quilt shop. I gathered fabric from my friends’ stashes. When a fabric was both blue and music themed I scored.

Part of what makes this quilt special is the time I spent collecting the fabric with my friends. My friends T & S and I took a road trip to Iowa to hit quilt shops. We left Kansas City late afternoon on Friday and then hit 11 shops over the next 2 1/2 days. By Monday, we were so exhausted, we walked into one of the last quilt shops and said “Yep, this is a quilt shop” and then left without any of us buying anything. I picked up blue and/or music themed FQs at each shop.

Surprisingly, I ended up with only a couple of duplicates fabrics.

It helped that I put together a book of my fabric before I left home. This quilt is made with 6″ circles that overlap. So, before the trip, I started cutting circles of each of my fabrics. I then scanned them 18 – 20 of them at a time, and printed off the scan so I had a record of my fabrics.


I was still collecting fabric – I wanted all 400 pieces to be unique, but impatience won out in late summer and I started it when I only had about 225 different blue fabrics. The next decision I had to make was how to arrange the pieces. I finally decided on light to dark to light. So, I took the scans I made earlier and converted them to black and white to help with value placement — then I went back and cut additional circles where I had more fabric.


The final quilt has 400 pieces in it. Not including the 400 pieces of the backing. For the backing I purchased 10 different pieces of blue flannel.


So when it came time to putting the quilt together, I had to know where in the quilt to top fabric belonged, and which piece of the back went with it and keep all 20 rows in order or the pattern (front and/or back) would be disturbed.

I ended up stringing each row together, and as I finished each step of the process, it went back on the table in the correct position.


My husband likes the quilt — It’s too warm for me with the flannel backing, not to mention it’s heavy. It think it finished about 70″ square, more or less.

Check out other quilter’s favorite quilts by clicking on the button below.

Posted in: Applecore, blogger's quilt festival