Our Jan/Feb ’10 issue (No. 131) features a gorgeous quilt in QM Spotlight (on the last page) with an interesting story sent by Kathy O’Toole.

Cabin Constellation

It was made from a pattern called Cabin Constellation which first appeared in the May/June ‘05 issue (No. 103).

Peggy Stern from Baxter, Minnesota and Kathy O’Toole from Oakland, California are sisters who made the quilt together, in spite of living more than 1500 miles apart. It’s one of many projects they have worked on together through a system of long-distance quilting they have developed over the past 12 years.

Along with a cousin, Marilyn Petersen from Watertown, South Dakota, they sometimes have several projects going at once.

It takes the three women about three years to finish a quilt together. So far they have made about nine quilts and given away three as wedding gifts to young couples in their shared families.

Granddaughter Latice and her new husband

Cabin Constellation became a wedding gift for Kathy’s granddaughter Latice and her new husband.

Both sisters had been saying they wanted to use up some of their scraps. When Peggy saw this pattern in Quiltmaker, she thought it would be more fun than most patterns because it had more than one type of block. She suggested to her sister that they make the quilt. Kathy had already seen Cabin Constellation in Quiltmaker and liked it too.

Kathy picked the colors by looking through many books and narrowing the color scheme to a combination that appeared mostly in antique quilts from the mid- to late-1800s. Both sisters pulled fabrics from their stashes, which differ considerably.

They exchanged enough fabrics so that each had some from both stashes. They made extra blocks so that in the end, some could be eliminated if necessary.

Kathy says their tastes in fabrics and designs are very different but they each admire what the other can do. “It’s nice to bring two totally different sets of eyes to the same project and to use each other’s fabrics. Most importantly, the joint project gave us some alone time during visits when we were surrounded by other family members. These sessions together alone bring back the good old days of playing paper dolls when we were kids.”

The women as children in South Dakota

The women grew up on a farm near Watertown, South Dakota. Along with Marilyn, they belonged to a girls club organized by their mothers, through which they learned to sew, embroider and bake cakes and cookies. Like many others, they discovered quilting when America celebrated her Bicentennial in 1976.

A September wedding in Wisconsin

Peggy’s son Tad was married in September and Marilyn’s son Bruce will be married in January. Each couple will choose a quilt when the family gathers next for the holidays. By that time, another cousin who is Marilyn’s sister, Liz from Dallas, will have been added to the circle. The women are learning to chat online and to hold conference calls for virtual quilt meetings.

“This is about more than quilting. We are trying to keep a family together in an era where we are geographically scattered. I love my local five-member quilt group in the San Francisco Bay area, but I value even more the time with this virtual family group that dates back to childhood,” says Kathy.

What’s your long-distance quilting story? Have you made a quilt for a special occasion? We always love hearing in the comments what our readers are doing.

Cabin Constellation will be available for purchase as a downloadable pdf in the near future. We’ll announce its debut here.

I finished sewing a Quiltmaker project recently (from gorgeous Red Rooster fabrics) and had a bunch of patches left over.

I decided to play around and see what happened. The most obvious thing was to sew the rectangular patches together.

I made three strips like the one above.

I knew I wanted to use this fabric for some sashing. I love those little birds!

I sewed them together and liked what was happening:

I trimmed it up (no stressing over the irregularities) and started auditioning other possibilities.

Eventually decided against the red polka dots. A little too intense.

Landed here. I have an idea for the edge treatment, but first I’ll quilt the whole thing as a rectangle.

I love quilt basting spray for small quilts like this. I use just a few safety pins. I treated this as a practice piece for machine quilting. I tried all kinds of different ideas and it was really fun and relaxing. Here’a side shot of some clamshell-type quilting in the borders. It’s freeform, no marking and no stressing. I used pink thread.

Now I take the plunge: freeform cutting of the edges into soft, flowing curves.

I love it!  It’s just what the doctor ordered. In my next post, I’ll share a great tool for cutting bias binding strips, because of course on a curvy edge, bias binding works best.

I started working on another UFO last week, in pursuit of my goal to retire 12 UFOs this year. It’s a top I pieced from Denyse Schmidt’s first line of fabrics called Flea Market Fancy for FreeSpirit. It can hardly even be called a quilt design: it’s just squares set with sashes and corner posts. Here is the recipe:

You need big squares cut 9.5″ x 9.5″

You need small squares cut 3.5″ x 3.5″

You need rectangles cut 3.5″ x 9.5″

Join them as shown below.

I created a “fake” border by making all the perimeter patches dark. I like this effect a lot and will do it again sometime.

I only auditioned one border fabric, because it was so funky and unpredictable that I just had to use it.  It’s a FreeSpirit from about five years ago, designed for a line by Terrie Hancock Mangat called Fiesta. The print is called Pie Party. Isn’t that fun?

The people in the border are just wonderful!

So are the dogs!

I didn’t want to lose the craziness of the scene, so I cut the borders 11″ wide. I like this! Even though I had several yards of the fabric (off a clearance table), I had to piece the top and bottom border strips; I also needed to add corner posts.

In some ways I think this is hideous. But I also love it because it is so weird. Have you made a hideous/funky quilt? We’d love to see it.

Now to think up some off-the-wall quilting designs and calm down the edges with a simple binding fabric. I’ll keep you posted.

Bonnie’s not really mysterious, but she sure has fun with mystery quilts! The QM staff have enjoyed getting to know Bonnie Hunter through her blog and in person when she traveled through Colorado in 2008 and we got to spend some time with her.

Let me tell you a little bit about Bonnie. She’s a prolific quilter, a lot of fun and she makes great scrap quilts. She has a workable system for using her scraps (Scrap User’s System in Jan/Feb ‘09) and for making one quilt while she’s working on another (Leaders and Enders in Jan/Feb ‘08). If you ever have the chance to hear Bonnie speak, go! When I heard her speak, I sat there thinking “I can do this–I should do this–It’d be so simple to set up a system like hers.” She’s inspiring.

I’m so glad that we’ve been able to introduce Bonnie to QM readers and, in our July/Aug ‘09 issue we’re starting a mystery quilt designed exclusively for us. It’s called Christmas Lights and part 1 is now available in the magazine.

Special Offer: If you’ve missed any of the previous Quiltmaker issues that feature Bonnie’s articles and patterns, we’ve got a Bonnie Hunter Special on sale now. You get 4 issues that feature Bonnie’s articles and patterns, including July/August ‘09 to start the Mystery series all for $10.99.

Book Review + Giveaway: Bonnie is also the author of a book called Scraps & Shirttails: Reuse, Re-Purpose, Recycle! The Art of Quilting Green, published by Kansas City Star Books. This book is filled with Bonnie’s ideas to recycle everything from stash fabric to thrift store finds. Bonnie will help you tame your scraps and turn them into quilts, and the book has 12 fun patterns as well. Leave a comment mentioning your favorite quilt-related blog  by 12 noon Mountain time on Friday, June 19 and I’ll select 5 different people to win a copy of Bonnie’s book!

I’m stuck, but in a good way.

I can’t stop making these lovely little blocks I call Windmills.

I started piecing them as “leaders and enders.” I first heard about leaders and enders through Bonnie Hunter at quiltville.com—it’s done while you’re chain piecing, but instead of feeding a useless scrap through the machine, you feed real patches through as “leaders” and “enders” to your chain. It’s like piecing for free, and eventually you end up with enough blocks to make something wonderful.

(Here the block is laying on a piece of pale green fabric.)

This is a super simple little block with small-ish patches. The patches are all cut 1.5″ by 2.5″. For one block, you need four patches from one fabric and four from another fabric, preferably with some contrast.

The only trouble was that I got so excited about these, I couldn’t keep myself from just making a whole bunch of them. They were like M&Ms. I could not stop! Then I started playing with them in different layouts. More trouble: possibilities galore.

To make a long story short, my pile of blocks has grown dramatically.

So far I’ve pulled out some green and blue blocks and made this baby quilt:

I quilted it with a new-to-me technique called “Just Leaf It” from Kim Stotsenberg. Kim has written a book by the same title, which I highly recommend.

You can read more about Kim’s technique in the Nov/Dec ‘08 issue of Quiltmaker.

The back of the baby quilt with "Just Leaf It" quilting

This technique was amazingly easy and so very forgiving. I will definitely be using Just Leaf It on many more quilts.

Here are blocks I made last night, up on my design wall:

It’s saying “baby girl quilt” to me. I can hardly wait to get back at it.