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It's been 3 years since Brigitte Heitland of Zen Chic released her Fragile collection, and to this day it remains one of my favorite collections ever. I have made quite a few quilts with it, including Critical Sunshine and Paradox. And, it was because of Paradox that I have this new quilt.

There's no question that Brigitte Heitland from Zen Chic is my favorite fabric designer. I have loved most of her collections, to the point of collecting them obsessively, but I was a little disappointed when Day in Paris first came out. But when I actually saw it in person, it began to grow on me, and when I saw X & + made with Day in Paris, I fell madly in love with it.

I was in the mood for a quick and easy finish this week so I pulled out a quilt top I finished quite awhile ago. The original pattern is Mod Ovals by Malka Dubrawsky, but I made my blocks bigger. The fabrics used in this quilt are all from Libs Elliott's Tattooed North line, a sparkly line of neutrals with some golds mixed in. I simply love Libs Elliott's fabrics, and I consider her the rock star of the quilting world.

When I quilted Rainbow Road, I had the idea of a Matrix-style steampunk city, so I tried to do a steampunk design of gears and teeth. I wasn't sure how it'd turn out, but I really liked the result. I've received requests for a tutorial on how to quilt this, so I'm trying my hand at a how-to guide.

I suggest practicing drawing this before trying it on a quilting machine. This design is actually just a variation on swirls, so it'd be helpful if you already knew how to quilt swirls. That being said ...

Rainbow Road, pattern (originally called Prism) and fabric by Alison Glass, is actually a very old quilt top lying in my stash. I've wanted to quilt it for a long time, but I kept putting it off because it is the scariest type of quilt to deal with: the negative space quilt. Negative space quilts offer infinite potential, and also infinite chances to not reach that potential.

As far back as a few years ago, I already had a story and a plan for this quilt. I imagined a futuristic steampunk city with a lot of paths criss-crossing in ...

When I'm about halfway done machine quilting a quilt, I start thinking about what quilt top to quilt next. While I was quilting Color Pop, a slew of candidates came to mind. So I was very surprised that when I went to my rather alarmingly large stash of quilt tops, I pulled out Swoon. It was not even on the candidate list!

But it was calling to me, asking to be quilted, while some of my other quilt tops seem rather reluctant to leave the shelf. Swoon is a pretty new quilt top for me, as it's only ...

When I first saw Cheryl Brickey's pattern Use Your Illusion, two thoughts ran through my mind: wow that is so striking, and wow that looks like a lot of fun to make.

And when I stared at the pattern, I started to see a Greek spiral effect, and then my mind went straight to Santorini. I thought about the lovely blue dome in pretty much all the photos of Santorini, and I found a shade of Kona cotton that matched it.

Piecing of this quilt definitely took awhile since paper piecing always does, but it was as fun as ...

Bridges is a pattern by Anne Sullivan that appeared in Modern Monthly of the Modern Quilt Guild 2 years ago. As soon as I saw it, I knew I wanted to make it, even though at the time my curve piecing skills were non-existent. Now that I'm a little better at it, I can finally take a crack at this!

I used the fabric collection Diving Board by Alison Glass, which I thought was very fitting given the theme. The pattern is for a wallhanging size, so I expanded it to be a throw sized quilt.

When picking quilting ...

Spliced is sort of my "return" to longarm quilting, because prior to working on Spliced, I had not touched my longarm for almost 3 months. Between vacations, lifestyle changes, lots of road trips, I just haven't felt like quilting. I've been piecing a lot, but not quilting.

But I'm back in the longarm room now, and I hope not to take that long of a hiatus again. This quilt top's pattern is called Whiskers by Modern Quilt Studio. I used a kit because I find the colors to be perfection, and I think the usage of ...

I’m going to the International Quilt Festival in Houston again this fall, and I’ve signed up for a couple of classes there. Going through this year’s class listings, I started thinking about the classes I’ve taken there in the past. I have some partly finished projects from those classes, and it seems like a good idea to dig those out and finish them. I have a bad habit of bringing things home from classes and putting them away, adding them to the stack of UFOs hidden in the closet.

This one is from two years ago ...