Blogger’s Quilt Festival | Tu-Na Quilts, Travels, and Eats

I’m taking time off from photographing all the loot from my 2017 Quilt MN Shop Hop to enter the Blogger’s Quilt Festival.

I made this little mini as part of a blog hop in March.

This mini quilt is 16.5″ square. The lighthouse quilt, between the two saguaros, is only 4 inches square and contains 47 pieces. I quilted sun rays using my domestic sewing machine.

I was even lucky to find some fabric with cacti when I was in Tucson last winter and used it for the back.

I wanted to show off this quilt one more time because I am pretty pleased about that little mini in the mini.

This little mini took me longer to make than the bigger mini in which I put this piece. So far, no one has linked any quilts on the Festival this small.

When I read that it was time to enter the Blogger’s Quilt Festival, I thought you might like to see it again and see how I embellished those saguaros.

I added some tiny flower buttons and two barrel beads that I found at the thrift shop.

You’ll see the simple pattern that I started with, find out more info about this mini including my thoughts behind turning the clothesline posts into Saguaros, and get the links to the patterns on my post here.

If you’d like to see many great quilts on display without leaving your home, please visit Amy’s Creative Side. We’ll be linking up quilts all week so do take some time to see some quilty inspiration.

Quilt Stats:

Size: 16.5″ square

Fabric: The top is pieced with 100% cotton scraps I had on hand. The 100% cotton backing fabric was new but I don’t have the manufacturer info.

Batting: Warm and Natural

Quilted by: Myself using Aurifil thread

Welcome visitors!

If you are stopping by from the Blogger’s Quilt Festival, welcome to my journey where I blog about the things I love to do: quilting, traveling, and eating (cooking and baking actually but that didn’t sound as good in the title). I recently returned from a 10 day trip around Minnesota shopping 66 quilt shops and blogging about it. I hope you’ll check out some of those posts. The post giving you a sneak peak at all the loot I bought is here and contains links to the others which includes a featured shop each day. If you enjoyed what you read, I hope you’ll stop back again. To make it easy, please follow me; you’ll find a number of ways on my sidebar: email, WordPress, Bloglovin and Facebook.

What I Learned Today:

I have a lot of loot to photograph, organize, and find places to store. It’s time to move it out of the guest room.
I miss seeing this little mini. It’s at our other house.
As the weather turns colder, our thoughts about our other house in Arizona increase.

Question: What have you been working on this week? I’m getting caught up with my bee blocks, working on the next block for the I Wish You a Merry Quilt-A-Long as well as making blocks one and two that I am behind on, and photographing and writing the loot posts. I also want to get a good start on my Art with Fiber project that is due in October. So much to do, so little time.

Thanks for stopping by and do come again.

Karen, Tu-Na Quilts

Linking to:

Quilt Blogger’s Festival at Amy’s Creative Side

Main Crush Monday at Cooking Up Quilts

Monday Making at Love Laugh Quilt

Linky Tuesday at Free Motion by the River

Let’s Bee Social at Sew Fresh Quilts

You may recall that I entered two quilts in the Blogger’s Quilt Festival in September. I wrote about the Little House Quilt here and the Plus Quilt here. While both of those quilts received votes neither received enough to win in their categories.

The Plus Quilt received 34 votes. That’s more than just my family and friends voting for it and so I thank you so very much. All of the quilts that were entered were gorgeous and I spent many hours looking at them and reading the posts.

While my quilts didn’t get enough votes to win a prize, I did win something for leaving a comment on Amy’s Creative Side blog. Thanks, Amy! She notified me of the win and then I proceeded to forget all about it. I was full-swing into the apple harvest (read about that here) and had other things on my mind. Three weeks later, I found this in my mailbox.

Next Steps in Machine Quilting: Free-Motion & Walking-Foot Designs by Natalia Bonner

I haven’t had much time to read it (we are still drying apples and making lots of apple dishes and desserts) but it looks incredible and I know I will use it a lot when I quilt. The book includes many diagrams of how to sew the various patterns and I can’t wait to have time to practice some of them.

It was even autographed by the author!

I have Natalia’s previous book, Beginner’s Guide to Free-Motion Quilting, and found it to be interesting and helpful when I was quilting the giraffe quilts. This new book will surely raise the bar (or should I say “raise the presser foot”) for me as a quilter!

What I Learned Today:

I like reading quilting books just as much as my husband likes to read his sci-fi paperbacks.
Sometimes being forgetful is exciting as it gave me this nice surprise.

Question: Do you read quilting books just for fun or do you read them to learn to do?

Linking to Sew Fresh Quilts, Can I Get a Whoop Whoop? and Finished or Not Friday (buttons on the side bar)