Kitchen Stitches Blog Hop & A Giveaway!!!

This giveaway is now closed, come back for future chances to win!

If you are new to my little corner of the blog community, Welcome!!! I'm super excited to be a part of this blog hop featuring the new book, Kitchen Stitches, that so many of us worked on. It's been great to collaborate with so many creative women and now we've swapped projects and it's even better! Plus, you can enter to win a copy of Kitchen Stitches, entry details are at the bottom of this post!

 When I got the request to come up with a project for the kitchen from Karen at Martingale, it got my brain working and you can read more about my project here. I was so excited to see all of the projects and was already adding some to my future projects list when I got word the girls wanted to do this blog hop. I had a hard time narrowing it down to just one! Look at the choices I had:

 I finally picked one and got to work with impending snow on it's way. I shared this preview last weekend and now I can share even more about this darling quilt.

 I chose to make the Cartwheels Table Runner designed by the talented Amy Ellis (by the way, hop on over to Amy's blog to see the Pillow Collective she has going on!) I immediately fell in love with this runner and headed to my stash.

 As I said, we had some nasty weather heading our way, so I raided my stash and improvised with what I had on hand. No trips to the quilt shop were in my future. Since we are all making our projects Valentine's themed, I first ran to my reds. Then I grabbed some pinks and as you may know, you never have what you need. My pinks were fighting. I have a mix of dusty and bubblegum and it was a mess.

So then I looked over and spotted this charm pack of Birds and Berries by Lauren & Jessie Jung and it was awesome. Plus I'm not the hearts and rainbows type of girl anyway. The mixture of the red, pink and yellow for the outer pieces worked well with the balance of blues and greens for the centers. (p.s. Wouldn't this be absolutely ADORABLE colored like peppermints for winter?!)

I planned mine out a bit more than Amy's version, but like I said... when raiding the stash and improvising, I dealt with what I had on hand. Including using copy paper. If you're planning on making this, please please please use a good paper made for paper piecing that can be found at most quilt shops (or ask for them to order you some). It makes a HUGE difference! Also, the table runner as Amy made it was 12" x 60" finished which is fine, but none of my tables are that long... so I just doubled it up and mine now finished at 24" x 30". 

The paper piecing makes it so simple to make and it went really quick. This is a great project to try if you've wanted to try paper piecing but haven't mustered up the confidence to dive in just yet. 

 Here you can see my Chihuahua, Paco, eyeing it up for his own. Too bad he's not getting this one.

To finish it off, I first machine quilted the background quite densely and then hand quilted each of the cartwheel rings with a pale yellow pearl cotton. I LOVE how it turned out. I just adore mixing quilting techniques like this!

This was a bunch of fun to make and I kinda want to make another (or three!). Now, don't forget that there are several other ladies on this blog hop showing off their projects this week (and if you've missed some, feel free to jump on back to the posts and catch up and enter some of their giveaways too):

2/3  Heather at The Sewing Loft
2/4  Becky at the Patchwork Posse and  Kim at My Go-Go life
2/5  Amy at FormWork Design and  Deby at So Sew Easy
2/6  Rebecca at Ruby Blue Quilts (that's me!)  and Jackie at Jabot Quilts
2/7  Melissa at Happy Melissa Quilting
2/8  Kari at Fresh Cut Quilts

Now for the giveaway... Just leave me a comment between now and Saturday night at midnight (Feb. 8 EST) to enter. It's that easy. Please be sure to leave your e-mail address if it's not attached to your profile so I can get in touch with you when you win! I will choose a winner at random and a copy of Kitchen Stitches will be on it's way to you soon.