I don’t know about you, but I love placemats.  I use them every day.  In fact, I use placemats and a tablecloth most days.  There is just something that feels wrong about putting a plate and silverware directly on the table.  Do I have issues?

And we all know about my scrap problem.  Well, I’m so over making scrap quilts for a while (I was going to tag posts of my three recent scraps quilts, but I realized I haven’t blogged about them yet.  Fail!).  Which is one reason I started making prayer flags.  And then I decided to whip up these placemats.  And oh, this was fun!

I just chopped up a bunch of scraps into 2 1/2 inch squares.  I used pretty much anything except red.  I heard that when making a scrap quilt, you should eliminate a color or two so that everything will go look slightly intentional.  Or maybe I dreamed it.  Anyway, I didn’t use red (and instead opted for a red bowl in the center of the table).

I grabbed spools of thread and quilted each placemat with a different color of thread.  You know, it helps me justify my obsessive need to buy more.

And then I used my serger to finish the edge because I’m a lazy ass.  I am pretending that this is temporary until I get a real binding on there, but let’s be honest.  This is the way it is.

I’m tempted to cut up all my scraps into 2 1/2 inch squares now.  How about you?

This new home and new community brings new hope and promise for Nacho Family, so to honor this moment, I made a prayer flag.

I hope this home will be filled with love.  That’s really a given since the love is with us now… but do you ever want to hit the pause button in life because everything is so perfect and you never want it to change?  That’s right now for us.

I hope we will be blessed with good neighbors.  Neighbors who won’t mind when there are kick ball games in the cul de sac and will want to pull up a lawn chair and watch or even join in.

I hope I’ll have the garden I’ve been waiting years to create– with fertile soil enriched from my own black-gold compost.  Fresh flowers cut from my own garden.  Vegetables from the garden to nourish our bodies.

I wish for prosperity so that we can afford all my big plans.  The plantation shutters.  The hand-scraped wood floors.  The granite.  All in due time, of course.

And most importantly, healthy lives.  Without our health, the rest is pretty hard to achieve.

So, as soon as we close on the house, I’ll hang this prayer flag on my fence and let the wind carry my prayers and hopes until it is time for new ones.

If you are interested in making your own prayer flag, this is the tutorial I used.

I also have a stack of text fabrics that will work well with this palette.  In fact, I pulled a bunch of fabrics that work well with this bundle– some oakshottes, mirror ball dots, black and white prints, and text fabrics.  They all work so well with just this small pop of chartreuse, don’t you think?  and I just can’t wait to quilt in all this negative space!

So, have you met my friend Anna from Urban Stitches?  She and I have been friends for almost 3 years through San Antonio Modern Quilt Guild, and if you are short on ideas, she’s a great person to talk to.  I can’t tell you how many times Anna and I have just sat around brainstorming creative ideas. She is definitely my muse!  She also is the proprietress of the Etsy shop Ciao Bella Solids, which is where I get a LOT of my solids.    What I love about Anna’s shop is that if you order at least 5 yards, she’ll only charge $5 per yard… and that’s without a coupon.  I’m not a fan of trying to keep up with coupons, and I know that any time I need solids, I can get them for that price through her shop.  Also, if she doesn’t have what I need, she’s quite often willing to order it for me since I usually order 5-10 yards at a time. (I love solids as backings, and I sure can’t beat the price.)

Anyway, Anna let me pick out some solids, combine them to make a bundle, and then asked me to give it to you!  So here’s what I picked.

Let me introduce you to my little friends, from top to bottom.

Light Lime

Chartreuse

Etchings Stone

Dove

Etchings Charcoal

And she has the bundle in fat quarters, half-yard cuts, or yard cuts.

Some of our other friends from the guild are also playing along.  They have picked out fabrics to make bundles, and will each be giving away a bundle, so make sure you mark your calendar and hop on over to them, too.

April 15- Anna of Urban Stitches
April 22 – Erin of Schlosser Designs
April 29 – Jen of ReannaLily Designs

All you have to do to get a shot at winning a fat quarter bundle of my fabrics is leave a comment telling me your favorite thing to do with solids!  Also, sorry, but Anna isn’t able to ship internationally.  You have until April 15 to participate, and then a winner will be chosen with a random number generator.

So, I’m Danielle Wilkes of Nacho Mama’s Quilt.  (daniellewilkes on IG)

5 things you don’t know about me:

1.) I would love to cook a meal for you. If I could spend a day doing anything I want, i’d be cooking or quilting, two things I do practically every single day.

2.). I never thought I’d get married, but I did, and I also never knew I could be this happy, but I am.

3.)I am an only child, which is probably why I am a natural leader. I am not good at doing things your way– I want to be the one to organize, plan, delegate, and execute ideas. This is definitely a double-edged sword because apparently the world does not revolve around me. So they say.

That’s a 40 (but backwards) on my tiara. Okay, well in real life it isn’t backwards if that makes it better.

4.)Life really does get better at 40. It’s like I woke up a new person on my last birthday, and now, I wouldn’t go back to the other side of the hill for anything.

5.) I have damn near been a paid member of Weight Watchers since about 1988. It’s not their fault I have still have rounded edges, though. It’s all mine.

And I never ever get time to sew for myself (okay, I say that, but my blog might look like that’s a big ol’ fib.  Actually, most of these quilts are for clients and/or shop samples.), and I was hooked on Breaking Bad on Netflix, and I had to finish the series.  I had already made a couple quilt tops, and I wanted more tv time… so I needed one more project.  So here it is using this tutorial.

I had just received a thread order and really went to town embellishing those feathers using Patsy Thompson‘s hyperquilting technique.  The neon is my latest favorite thread.  (This is not a sponsored post.  Superior has never sent me anything free– this is just me telling you how much I love their products!)

This quilt will hang at QuiltCon and will then go to Austin Children’s shelter.  There will be 47 quilts in this series for the 47 beds.  Soon you’ll see our other quilt, which I also quilted.

Wait, let me back up.  Mika was my college roommate.  But really, she’s a lot more.  Our grandparents pipelined together, our mom’s grew up together, and we were college roommates.  I was her maid of honor, her daughter has my name for her middle name, and she’s really like a best friend.  She’s actually the friend who we’ll take each other’s secrets to the grave– the kind of friend every girl has.  And our mom’s have the same relationship with each other.  So, anyway, this is for her daughter Megan Danielle, who is attending our alma mater.

My husband and I, along with Megan’s mom and dad all are graduates of A&M, so to have Megan go to school there, it really gives me a reason to remember the good ol’ days with her mom. BTW, Megan received this quilt for graduation last spring (but I’m just now posting!), and I just heard that she made the dean’s list.  Whoop!!

Okay, the quilt… let’s discuss.  I wasn’t planning to make a t-shirt quilt, but since her experience is really an experience for all of us, I wanted to put a little piece of her parents and my husband and I in there.  I have her dad’s lacrosse jersey, and a shirt from each of the rest of us.  I’d hate for her to be at A&M alone since I kind of broke the family cycle by not giving her a best friend like our grandparents did for our moms and our moms did for us:-)

If you’ve been reading here for a while, you know that this month is my 20 year quiltaversary, and for years my husband has been complaining that all the quilts on all the beds in our house are store bought.  Look, in all honesty, when you can find a Denyse Schmidt quilt on sale for $40, you buy it, am I right?

Anyway, so to appease my husband, I made a quilt a couple years ago for our bed.  But I just get tired of looking at it year round, so I needed a summer/fall quilt.  And I just so happened to have a stack of Amy Butler Love and some Moda Crossweaves onhand.  And you know, they looked pretty sweet together.  So now we have another quilt for the giant bed.  I drafted the pattern myself, and check out those sheets!  Amy Butler from Bed, Bath, & Beyond!  Sweet!  Oh, and don’t mind the naked guy in the corner.

St. Pious X Steeple, New Orleans, Louisiana

My Aunt Ruth passed two years ago this month, and when I was at her funeral in New Orleans, I looked up into the steeple of St. Pious X, the church where she had attended daily mass for a gazillion years, and I knew what I should do to pay tribute to the spiritual legacy she left our family. Aunt Ruth was the first lady I knew who went to daily mass.  Before her, I didn’t even realize that they offered church on weekdays.  (Sorry, Mom and Dad, but it’s true.)  So I made this quilt, that I will pass on to my Uncle Lucien, or one of her sons… as soon as I can part with it.  I was hoping to show it at QuiltCon, but it didn’t make the cut.  Maybe I’ll shoot for Dallas or San Antonio this year.

Feel free to click on the image to see it larger.  As you can see, I had a lot of fun quilting it, too.  I was working on this trying to beat the QuiltCon deadline entry, so I channeled Aunt Ruth, and you know, I think she heard me because my tension was flawless, and my thread did not break once.  It was the perfect quilting day with Aunt Ruth guiding me at my machine.