Little Cow Girl Cheater Quilt

For your little cow girl my newest cheater quilt on Spoonflower 

Great way to make a special gift for the newest little girl in your life. Or if you just want to have the special gift at your next baby shower.

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Southwestern Blanket

I have just finished this design to be included in my collection Arizona 2, It is available at my #Spoonflower Shop

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Mix and Match Designer Bedding

I am excited to share with you some of my designs that Roostery  is now carrying in bedding.  You can get pretty much any of my designs in sheets, duvet covers and pillows.

You can mix and match sheets, pillows and duvet covers.  However I do not think all my designs translate into bedding. Like my tea towel designs I think work better as just tea towels. It is unfortunate that the images below aren’t the best but that is the best images I could get at the moment. They show up better on Roostery.

https://roostery.com/e?q=lana_gordon_rast_&page=4&pc=bedding

 

 

 

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Quilt Blocks for Farm Life Quilts

Quilt blocks for my Farm Life quilt, quilt block #2 is one of the blocks I designed to use in the quilt. Quilt block #4 was also used I just flipped it over for every other one.

 

Quilt Block 2

 

Quilt Block 4

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Farm Life a new fabric Collection and Quilt designs

Dear Friends and Family

I’m excited to share with you a new fabric collection I designed! The name of the new collection is titled, “Farm Life,” which is the life I so happily live. I have been eagerly waiting to show you the designs but I wanted to get the quilts I designed to go with the collection completed first.

I would also like to share with you is the new way Spoonflower has created for you to order fabric! It is called Fill-A-Yard. I used Fill-A-Yard to help design my Farm Life quilt. With Fill-A-Yard you simply select a collection of fabric on Spoonflower then you select from 5 different Fill-A-Yard options and finally you select the type of fabric you would like to have the designs to be printed on. For my quilts, I used Vertical Split Yard and Horizontal Split Yard on Kona Cotton. This may sound complicated but I promise it is super simple.

You can see how I used Fill-A-Yard on this quilt

The layout I chose to use with Fill-A-Yard

 

Like every summer this one has been a busy one. As you know my family lives on a small farm and the old proverb always applies each summer, you have to make hay while the sun shines. In addition, to literally making hay, there are lawns to mow, sometimes four hours to get it all done! Weeds, weeds and more weeds to pull. Berries to pick

I designed this quilt using up left over fabric from the original quilt

and freeze so that as soon as the weather cools I can get jam done before it is time to pick and can pears and apples. This year we didn’t have a garden as my hubby and I were busy finishing his sister’s new house that he built for her. (That is a tease about my other design collection, I will be releasing soon.)

Farm Life is busy and hard work but I wouldn’t trade it for any other life. The awe it inspires when the tiny little things you planted and tended bear fruit. Your grandson wants to know if there is anything left to pick. It is true that home grown things taste so much better than store bought. When you have canned more than 40 pints of home grown and canned jam and your son gets bummed out because you run out of jam!

Other than family and farm life, I love to create surface designs and have Spoonflower print my designs into fabric. Then I can create quilts or maybe make clothes for my daughters, and once in a while I squeeze clothes in for myself. Sometimes I get to share them with you!

Thanks for stopping by and visiting with me.

Here is a link to my Farm Life Collection:
https://www.spoonflower.com/profiles/lana_gordon_rast_/collections?filter=designed

Here is a link to my Spoonflower page:
https://www.spoonflower.com/profiles/lana_gordon_rast_

Here is a link to Spoonflower’s Fill-A-Yard:
https://www.spoonflower.com/fill-a-yard

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My New Headboard

My husband bought a couple of solid wood doors at an auction for $1.00 each. He had some extra time last week and turned one into a headboard for our quest bedroom. I had originally painted it a brighter white but that was too white so I found some off white paint to tone it down. It seem to work better with the off white and sets off the cabinet I had painted several years back. You can see my husband screwed the door to the wall, then trimmed around it.  I don’t think anyone would guess it was a door to begin with.

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Quilted Pillow Shams

 

 

 

 

 

I have been having  fun quilting pillow shams! You can also see them at my shop on Etsy. The pillow shams are quilted on both sides. I am going to start on a quilt that coordinates with them, I can’t wait to get that done.

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¼ of an inch seam, what?

Mad About Plaid Quilt

I designed this quilt for my grandson. It happens that blue is his favorite color right now, yellow and red a close second. I of course love plaid, lots and lots of plaid! So I designed some plaids with his favorite colors and came up with the idea of using oversize nine square blocks to keep the quilt simple. Of course he had final approval.

I have come to the conclusion that I love fabric, I love to sew but I am always wanting to get on to the next project. There might be a little ADHD in me! I don’t love to fuss over things. I do so admire quilters that create quilts with all the tiny pieces and intricate patterns. They amaze me and I drool over them. For a long time I thought I had to do it that way and of course with my total lack of patience it did not go well. I spent more time removing stitches then stitching. Or throwing it in a pile of other not so successful projects. Promising myself I would figure it out later.

Now I create my own quilt designs, sometimes changing it in mid way through. I have decided what I enjoy is the color and the fabric designs themselves. If it is a design I especially enjoy I want to see more of the design so I don’t think a traditional pattern on it’s own is what I want for it. Maybe a traditional block but oversize works for what I want. I also have a hard time sticking to the ¼ inch seam, so if I am using bigger pieces I generally use ½ inch seams. I figure I can trim the seams if I need to.

Block 1

 

 

 

The quilt is fairly easy to make as I used the strip quilting method. Each block is 19 inches square (remember I am using ½ inch seams). I also have strips of fabric at the top of the quilt, I just like the look. I did use a lot of white fabric in this design. I thought it would show off the plaid more.I found a plain yellow fabric that matched the yellow in my plaid for the round bolster pillow. For his pillow sham I decided to keep it simple. It is basically and bit of an over sized pillow case, before sewing it together I quilted the fabric. After sewing it together I bound the edge in the solid yellow fabric.  To get a copy of the pattern click on this  mad about plaid twin size quilt pattern if you have any questions about the pattern please feel free to ask.

Mad About Plaid fabric can be found at Spoonflower.com. I have quite a few fabric collections on there now.

I am learning to free motion quilt on my home sewing machine. I have a lot to learn and a lot of practice to do. That is pretty obvious in the photo’s. All I want for Christmas is a long arm machine! I have asked for information on the machines from several Linkedin groups I belong to and they have been kind enough to share their experience with me. I have to take some time and try out machines.

The headboard was built by his grandfather. Kind of an all in the family thing. My husband builds wonderful things and I get to paint them and sew.

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Spoonflower & Me

I am so lucky as a fabric and surface designer to have a company like Spoonflower to help me with my creative ideas. I was working on this quilt using some of my collection from Evelyn’s Sewing Notions. I had wanted to use some white with the quilt design. However after getting the quilt sewn together, I realized I had way too much white. What to do with a huge white border, that was way too plain? I decided what I wanted to do was apply some applique  to cheer it up. After giving it a lot of thought I decided to take my actual design and separate and blow up the design and use that for my applique. It saved me a lot of time and frustration trying to get the applique  just the way I wanted it to look.

side applique of quilt

both end corners have this applique on them

Spoonflower printed a yard of it and I ironed on wonder under, cut, ironed, sewed it on and was really happy with the end product! Lucky me for being able to use Spoonflower. I then took it to my local long arm quilter Jeannie Horton at Quilting Arts Studio and she did a wonderful job quilting it for me.

At home I worked on quilting pillows and pillow shams to go with the quilt. As you can see too I love to make my queen size quilt bigger than some queen size’s available as I don’t like my blankets showing on the edges of the bed. This quilt will stay in my sewing/bedroom until my sister-in-law claims it in May. I think she will be surprised!

Okay while I am bragging on myself, I also made a queen sized sheet set for her to match. I trimmed the top sheet in a blue gingham check that is part of the collection and trimmed the pillow cases with scissors. I was lucky to find some 118″ white fabric that is scrumptious for sheets. I just can’t find more of the fabric and I want more, I love the feel of it. I need to find a place to get this kind of fabric for sheets.

 

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New Sewing Machine, Equals Quilts

Twin Quilt using Swatches from “Nature” Collection

I have been busy having fun! I bought myself a new sewing machine and have been as busy as I can be quilting. Okay I have to confess as long as I have been sewing ( more years then you need to know) I had no idea what a walking foot was. I used to quilt my quilts by hand which I truly enjoy. However I did not make that many quilts. I did more personal or home decor sewing. At any rate my machine came with a walking foot. It is the most marvelous thing! I can machine quilt my quilts and not have it push the fabric all over the place. I am using up tons of fabric I have had around for a long time and I am also using my own fabric designs which I am really excited about. The last three quilts I have made I used up swatches of my fabric designs from Spoonflower. My Grandmother always taught us “waste not want not”, so with that in mind I made quilts! The first quilt made with swathes from my “Roaring Twenties” collection I had a wonderful lady in town that does long arm quilting, quilt it. The next ones being smaller I quilted on my machine. Using of course the walking foot.

Lap Quilt from Bay City Chicks Collection

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