The right thing I did was to get Harriet & Carrie Hargrave's Freshmen Year of Quilter's Academy. I've also gotten Harriet's 'Heirloom Machine Quilting', 'From Fiber to Fabric' and 'Mastering Machine Applique'. I've read the first of these so I'd know how to do the quilting for the projects in the Academy.
Now that you've got a little perspective on where I'm coming from, let me tell you about my progress so far. I've read through the entire Freshman curriculum. I've working on two quilt tops so far and have been building my fabric stash. I've also gotten some new feet for my sewing machine and other assorted tools. I'll talk about some of them in later posts.
I've started the Sampler that gets finished in Sophomore Year. I'm not a fan of blue so I changed the color scheme. Blue became green and white became cream. Here is what I have so far.
The solids are Bella Solids Moda Cactus and Fig Tree Cream. The print is Little Darlings Little Quilts Cream Floral. I am extremely impressed with how easy this was and how great it came out so far. My seams matched up perfectly and all of the measures were spot on. I use a piece of colored tape as my guide to stitch the 1/4" for the strip sets until I got a new 1/4" foot with a built-in guide.
The new foot is much easier to keep my eyes on than the tape. I'll remove the tape eventually although I can almost hear Harriet saying that I should remove it now so I don't lose focus when I'm feeding fabric.
The biggest lesson I've learned so far is to take my time and not to be afraid of using spray starch. I've never used it before and I'm really loving how it crisps everything up so that the pressing stays the way you want it. It also makes it so much easy to feed the fabric.
The picture below is of part of a quilt top I pieces. It's from 3's company with Thimbleberries fabric. It is a cheater in that the appliqued designs are printed on the fabric. I got this kit before I got Freshman Year. It will be a pretty lap quilt or wall hanging when it is complete.
This is the picture on the instruction sheet. The colors are very light and don't do the fabric justice. I'll update with more pictures as this one progresses.
For full disclosure I also bought Summer's Basket of Flowers that uses cheater fabrics too. I haven't done anything with it yet.
My other project I have started for the Freshman Year is my version of Cowboy's Corral. I had purchased a piece of Michael Miller's Global Girls. I just love the pictures but the red background I found really ugly. The girls are about 5" square so I decided to fuzzy cut them. Unfortunately, the fabric only had 49 girls so I am swapping the strip sets and girls and using 50 pieced blocks and 49 girls rather than the 49 pieced and 50 pictures in the original.
In the picture you can see my 11 stacks of 9 pieces pinned at the top and ready for piecing. I'm so excited to work on this one because a friend and co-worker recently got a job in Europe working for our home office for 2 years. I plan on giving her this quilt as a going away gift. Below you see the two fabrics I'm going to use for the borders. The red is deeper than the red on the Global Girls fabric and the black has a fine vine pattern.
For completeness, the three solids for the strip set are Bella Solids Moda Turquoise, Cheddar and Modern Leaf. The red is Full Circle Fabric Garden Barn Red and the black is Kansas Troubles Favorites Black.The color is really awful in the border fabric picture. I'm sure I'll get a better for you later.
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