Hello Quilty Friends!
Happy Thursday to you!
Welcome to Week 3!
I hope you’ve been spending some time over on our VRD Facebook page, where the inspiration is absolutely overflowing! Every time I pop in, I get completely sidetracked by all the wonderful quilt finishes made from our 700+ VRD Rose Card patterns. My “MAKE” list just keeps growing… and growing… and growing! Keep those beautiful quilts coming—I love seeing every single one.
I want to do a great big SHOUT OUT to everyone who has finished a quilt during the Challenge so far! Out of everyone who joined, nearly half are crossing the finish line—and that’s amazing for a challenge like this!
If you’ve got a quilt that’s this close to done, this is your week—let’s see how many more we can push across the finish line for Week 3!
As I mentioned above, we are now in Week 3 of our 6 Quilts in 6 Weeks Challenge. And wow… you all have been busy!
- Week 1: 28 quilts finished
- Week 2: 26 quilts finished
We’ve completed a grand total of 54 quilts in just 2 weeks! 🎉 TOGETHER! Yay Us!
Isn’t that amazing?? And the best part… we still have Week 3 wrapping up tomorrow, plus three more weeks to go. I don’t know about you, but I can’t wait to see where we land by the end!
Guess How Many Quilts Will Be Finished?
So here’s a little fun idea to celebrate all this amazing progress…
How many quilts do YOU think will be finished by the end of the 6 Quilts in 6 Weeks Challenge?
Leave your best guess in the comments on this blog post for a chance to win a little prize at the end of the challenge!
Here’s how it works:
- One guess per person
- Leave your guess in the blog comments (not Facebook)
- Entries close before next week’s post goes live
👉 You’ll find the comment link just below the blog post title (location may vary a bit depending on your device, so you might need to do a tiny bit of exploring).
If you have trouble finding the comments, you can email your guess to tricia@villarosadesigns.com and I’ll add yours to the list. Just be sure I have a way to contact you in case you win!
The person with the closest guess (or exact guess… you never know!) will win a fun little prize at the end of the challenge. 🎁
And yes—our international friends are absolutely welcome to join in, too!
So… what’s your prediction?
Are we headed for 75? 100? Even more? I can’t wait to see what you think!
Remember…..you only have 7 days to get your guesses in the comments (or emailed to me) so put on your thinking caps and leave your best guesses in the comments!
6 Quilts in 6 Weeks Challenge Week 3
Shhhh! Don’t tell anyone, but I just finished the binding right before I sat down to write today’s blog post. But you know what????? When I did it doesn’t matter, though, as much as the fact that I have another finished quilt! WOOHOO!
Please cue the entire marching band – wait where is percussion? And what are the Color Guard doing? And is that the drum major having a meltdown? Oh my, what a catastrophe……
Sigh……I guess we’ll just continue without the band.
For Week 3, I finished my version of Angel Face. Angel Face is another one of my 2024 blog tutorial projects that just never got finished. Hmmm. This seems like a real pattern with me, doesn’t it? Well, that’s what quilt finishing challenges are for, huh? You can find a tutorial for Angel Face HERE.
Get your digital pattern HERE or your print pattern HERE
Here is my Angel Face BEFORE photo:
You may have noticed I made some changes when I made my Angle Face version. Instead of a single fabric for the large squares, I alternated 2 different fabrics (I couldn’t decide which one I liked better, so I used them both. Easy peasy.). And I added an outer border using one of the frame fabrics because my quilt needed just a little bit more something. I think it turned out really pretty with the lovely Hoffman digital fabrics paired with a really cool colorful batik.
PSST! You’ve probably noticed I use a lot of Hoffman fabrics here on the blog. In a nutshell, VRD partners with other companies out there in the quilt o’sphere. I work with Hoffman a lot (Hi Sandy!), so I very happily use their fabrics for many of the tutorials for the blog.
My quilty pal, Mary Lee, literally rolls her eyes at me these days (I see you, Mary Lee!) when I make yet another quilt using Hoffman fabrics – particularly their batiks – because in the past I was always very “take it or leave it” about batiks in general while a lot of my friends were totally wild about batiks (including Ms. Mary Lee). Now I get it, Mary Lee.
Anyway, here is my Angel Face AFTER photo:
What do you think of the purple striped binding? I’m not sure. Is it too much? I had a really tough time finding something I liked with the soft colors of the quilt so I decided to just go a little bold for the finish. It does pull out the purple in the quilt, that’s for sure.
I free motion quilted my quilt on my domestic machine (Janome 8900) with an allover big meander in a soft aqua cotton thread. I used a fun grey print fleece on the back, no batting. And finished it off with the maybe-too-bold purple stripe for the binding. And yes, I added my label, too, because a quilt isn’t finished until there’s a label on the back. I know a lot of quilters do not add labels to their quilts for a variety of reasons, but I know personally from collecting antique quilts that 100 years from now someone will want to know who the maker was, especially if it’s a family quilt. So add a label and make a little history, too.
Here’s a close up of the quilting and my purple striped binding. Meandering is totally one of favorite machine quilting patterns!
How about a winner now?
6 Quilts in 6 Weeks Week 2 Winner
Kat S. in Indiana
YIPPEE!
Drop the balloons from the ceiling now!
Congratulations, Kat!
Here’s Kat’s Week 2 Quilt Finish:
Kat’s awesome quilt is the Honey Bouquet pattern. (Did anyone notice that it’s blue??? Anyone??? Blue and white is one of my absolute favorite color combinations in case you didn’t already know that.) Really, I use a random number generator to pick the Weekly winner, I promise you. It was just kismet that it was blue.
As you take a look at Kat’s quilt, you might notice that she used a different layout than the sample quilt on the front of the pattern. And it’s really fun – I love the movement in her quilt. Way to go, Kat!
Get your digital pattern HERE or your print pattern HERE
So what quilt are you finishing for Week 3 of our Challenge??? You have until Friday, 4/24 midnight EST to post your before/after photos on our VRD Facebook page or email them to me at tricia@villarosaquilts.com. Can’t wait to see them!
You know…..if you signed up but life’s gotten in the way of completing quilts so far for the Challenge, maybe this will be your week! We’re in this together!
Shopping Local
Last Friday, I had an errand to run to one of our local quilt shops, Sew Frannetastic. SewFran is a very unique quilt shop located outside Woodcock Township (near Saegertown) in good ol’ Pennsylvania. It’s unique because it is a quilting and sewing consignment shop – YES! You read correctly – it’s a sewing and quilting consignment shop!
When Franne and James opened a few years ago in a different location, I’d never heard of such a thing, but was of course intrigued. Who wouldn’t be? Now I’m a regular customer and every time I go, I find some wonderful treasures I would have never found anywhere else.
The exciting thing is that the shop is currently expanding because they are simply bursting at the seams with merch. And it’s not just sewing and quilting – you can find yarn along with crochet and knitting patterns and supplies as well as paper crafting and I hear that painting will be coming soon, too. When our local Jo-Ann’s closed last year, our community was left in the lurch for crafting supplies. And several of our local quilt shops have closed, too. So it’s really exciting that SewFran is creatively filling the quilting/craft store void. And we quilters and crafters couldn’t be more thrilled!
I mentioned I had an errand to run out to SewFran and of course it was a great opportunity for a little quilty road trip – a FART (Fabric Acquisition Road Trip). All of a sudden, I had Robin riding shotgun and Mary Lee was ensconced in the back seat of my li’l red Jeep and we were on our way. The 3 of us did some serious damage to the banking industry while we were there, then of course, we just had to grab some lunch because shopping makes us ravenous.
We went to lunch at a small locally owned restaurant in Cochranton, PA called Parkside. The food was good and the company was even better.
After lunch, we rounded out our local shopping event by heading to an adorable little gem of a shop in Cochranton called HennyPenny’s that had a little bit of everything tucked into cute little nooks and crannies. I grabbed a few new-fangled tea bag holders that perched on the edge of your tea cup for my Mom as well as some books and a quilt magazine. The shop featured new handmade items, gift ideas, clothing, housewares, cookbooks, collectibles, books, and more. Oh, by the way, it has a super fun chicken theme!
If you’re ever in my neck of the woods here in Northwestern PA, you should check out these super friendly and fun locally owned businesses.
What local gems do you have in your community?
Well, that’s it for me this week. I’m off to do some quilting for Week 4.
Sew. Laugh. Finish. Repeat.
Always,
Tricia @ VRD
Villa Rosa Quilts 