Valentines Day quilts #2

As I was typing up my post about my best friends Valentines quilts, I started thinking about how we both purchase fabric at the same time that year.  I purchased a couple panels, a charm pack and a couple yards of fabric for backing and binding.  My panels also sat in a pile of unfinished projects for many years.  As I was pulling out my Valentines quilts this year to decorate, I was realizing that it is one of my largest collection of quilts.  Christmas, Fall, Halloween and the 4th of July certainly compare in the sheer volume of fabrics that are fun to buy, sew with and finished projects.  But, I think I secretly love Valentines Day the most.  Why?  Because I love bright colors.  Anything pink as well.  I am a sucker for pink.  When my husband and I were first married, I wore mostly pink.  I have tamed down so much now that I usually wear black or white with an under color.  Life just changes a person I guess.

Here are a few of the panels that I put up that I just love.  Sandy Gervais did a lot of the fabric lines that I got these panels from.  At the time it was a cheap, easy way to get a quilt up.  I now prefer actually sewing and piecing a quilt even if it means that I have a month during the year that is not as full in my quilt area as other months.

I seriously love the fabric on the edge of the 2nd panel.  I love the print, the color and how it really makes the two little love birds color just pop.

I started following canoeridgecreations on instagram a couple years ago.  I have loved watching all her posts.  She posted a free tutorial online that I immediately just grabbed right up and sewed up one day.  It is such a nice, little, easy to sew mini-quilt.  I used lots of scraps that I have.  (Mostly stuff from my daugher infant room that I swear I now know I bought 5x's too much fabric for but even with everything I make from it, the pile never gets smaller!!!)  This is absolutely one of my favorite quilts I have ever made.  I stipple stitched in the heard area and did a straight stitch through the white to finish off the machine quilting.

Picture taking is not my favorite thing.  I am not that good at it.  The lighting is often off and the pictures are often crooked.  Sorry.  These posts are a journal for me, so while I take plenty of time to create what I love, I spend...not as much time on the picture taking. Haha!!

Many years ago I started making a long table runner to my piano to put underneath all the stuff I keep on there to teach piano.  I now have one for every month and it is soooo fun!!!  Then I started making a few table runner's for fun because they are so easy and quick to pull together and finish.  I put the second posted on my kids books bookshelf.  I made the first table runner the a Sandy Gervais line of fabric.  The second one I made from the fabric I decorated my daughters infant room with.

Do you see my chatbooks??  When I realized in 2016 that I couldn't keep up with this blog let alone a blog about my family and their lives, I knew that I needed to do something that would help me keep up with journaling.  It is important to me that I keep track of our lives in some fashion.  It helps give me a sense of purpose.  Honestly, chatbooks are so incredibly cheap and easy.  When I either add up to 60 photos manually or through my instagram account, it automatically prints.  I have 3 days to check it out and make sure that the cover photo is what I want and edit pages I might want to take out or keep.  My kids LOVE reading them.  I find them all over the living room as they relive moments in their lives.  Best decision I made in a long time.  If you haven't hear of them, check them out.

Back to the post at hand, not only do I have quilts to hang, table runner to lay across things in my home, but Valentine's Day was the second holiday I really created pillow covers for.  Back in 2014, I posted a post about a dresden Christmas Quilt I was making.  I am shortly going to post a finished picture of that quilt, but I absolutely love dresdens!!!  But they just take so long to cut and iron on that I decided that I couldn't handle making a full quilt of them for Valentines Day.  So, I made a 16in pillow cover with a dresden.  Of all the pillow covers I have made it is definitely my 3rd favorite.  (Wait until you see my new Halloween one late next week!!!  Oh, and my fall one...or my embroidered/quilted spring one.  Yep, I can't wait to post the millions of pillow covers I made this Christmas.)  As it was actually the first dresden I ever completed, I take a lot of pride in it...even if the middle circle was a complete fisco and not a real circle anymore when you look closely.

I have been collecting red fabrics with gorgeous prints for many many years.  I have yet to make a fun quilt with them, but I did make this pillow cover three times for 2 other people and myself this past Christmas and I just love this one!!  I didn't use a white background to applique it on, I used a muslin. I think it just made it have such a warm color that I wonder why I use white so much.

Whoo blurry!!!  I will try and take a better picture of this pillow cover soon.  This was a leftover block from my pieced-block-panel quilt.  Not my favorite at all, but worth a mention.

Ya, clearly this pillow cover is not on a 12in pillow form.  But I couldn't find my other 12in pillow form so I put it on the 10in until the other one reappears.

Couple all those with the two I made a long time ago....

and I am near complete with my Valentines Quilts.  You can find the last two here and here in other posts in the blog before.  True to form, now you can finally see a finished project because in the original post it was just the top.  These were both some of my first experiments doing machine quilting on my domestic machine.  But the chocolate/pink quilt was my first quilt quilted with a darning foot.  I will never go back to taking everything to a long arm quilter.  It is so much fun to do it myself.  I have the intention this year of branching out and perfecting some more stitches because I default to the stipple stitch nearly everytime.  

And to say thanks for reading, here is the bottom of one of the panel quilts made into it's own mini-quilt!!

Hope you enjoyed!!