American Made Brand | Lori Miller Designs

MEOW! Cookie Cat is here, my latest quilt made to celebrate my sweet kitty, Cookie.

You can find this fun little quilt in the March 2018 issue of American Quilter Magazine. This magazine is published by the American Quilt Society (AQS).

Note: If any of you would like to join AQS in February, you will get access to the March digital issue as soon as you join, plus you can get 6 additional issues, a full year, in print. Also, if you join and log into americanquilter.com, all AQS members have digital access to ALL American Quilter magazines back to 2013. I just happen to be a member, so I though I would share.

Here is the real Cookie Cat, he loves to help me with my quilting.

As usual, I designed this cutie with Electric Quilt design software. It makes the process easy and I had quite a few iterations on this block until I got it where I liked it.

I started quilting at my cottage in Northern Michigan. I have a well used Featherweight Singer up there and it pieces a quilt quite nicely.

I generously received cotton solid fabric from American Made Brand to make this sweet quilt. The pieces are sized at five inches so they are charm square friendly too.

There are two variations in the colors for the blocks. These are large 18″ blocks. I love a large block, easy to sew, easy to have a large quilt quickly.

Here is my fancy light box at the cottage. Yes, its a window from the second story, so I have a lovely pine tree backdrop. I just taped the template to the window and then moved the block to where I wanted the face and taped the block to the window. Then I traced with a water soluble marker. Once I had the face on, I hand embroidered the whiskers. The little nose is a piece of fleece.

I went a little crazy with the quilting. I wanted to try out my Babylock Jazz on a larger quilt. It may look like a jumble, but the large throat made it easy to do free motion quilting and the walking foot quilting.

Here you can get a better idea of all of the quilting. I made the tiny swirls so tiny around the kitty, that took me forever. Next time, I will make those babies just a bit bigger to get it done sooner. I cant complain too much, I do love all that texture it creates, especially since the kitty is so basic.

I have enough scraps to make a baby quilt with just four blocks. That just might be a great idea if you want to try this block but not make a twin size quilt. Just one block would make a super cute pillow too.

Happy Stitching!

My mini quilt, Modern Swallow Trail, has been selected to be part of a special exhibit of 40 mini quilts at the Road to California Quilt Conference in January 2016. With lots of bright colors and straight line quilting, this cute little quilt was so much fun to make. I did make the mistake of trying to piece this quilt. I should have paper-pieced it for some sharper edges, but I had a really good reason why I didn’t. Really. Read on to find out how I tackled this project.

American Made Brand Cotton Solid Fabric is sourced and and manufactured entirely in the United States. American Made Brand issued a challenge.

It was called the tiny quilt challenge and you needed to make an original mini quilt from their American Made Cotton Solids in any style you wished. I saw the notice but I did not pay much attention. Then they sent a reminder. I thought about it, but I did not have any material, or so I thought. Then another reminder came and now it was the end of August. I had an idea in my head but I did not have time to make this thing. Well creativity is a weird thing, I could not stop thinking about it. Then I ran across something, a rainbow mini charm pack of AMB solids from Quiltcon 2015. That sealed it and I was off and designing.

I needed background fabric. I called every quilt shop within a 40 mile radius of metro Detroit. A small quilt shop 30 miles away said they had some fabric so off I went. They had 3 bolts and one happened to be a kind of khaki grey color called Taupe which I thought was a perfect neutral for the bright mini charms. I saw a large round swallow tail pattern but this had to be mini. I drafted my swirling trail pattern on some graph paper and cut out templates. I only had a couple mini charms of each fabric and I needed to cut out two diamonds from each plus a binding. There was simply no extra fabric for paper piecing, so I cut and pieced the bright colors.

I took the colors in the mini charm pack and picked the ones I liked and then tried to arrange them in a rainbow pattern. I varied the flow a little from the top to bottom and the colors really blended well together. I had just enough fabric to add my signature colored border snippets. I just straight line quilted it how my heart desired. I love the texture of the matchstick quilting.

Although my quilt was not one of the main winners in the challenge, I was thrilled that AMB asked if I would provide my mini quilt for the Road to California exhibit in January 2016. Road to California is the premiere Quilters’ Conference & Showcase west of the Rocky Mountains!