A Long-Delayed New Quilt

I am working on a new quilt right now that involves quite a bit of hand work and I didn't want to show it before it was done. I have other projects I need to start, but haven't gotten around to them yet. I was resigned to a week of blog silence - a depressing prospect. But then these photographs came to my rescue:




This is a quilt that I finished back in December. You may remember it from various in-progress posts. I hadn't posted about it before because I had some truly awful photographs of it that I just couldn't bear posting due to the fact that they did not make my quilt look pretty. Well, the very nice person who purchased this quilt has an amazing camera and was able to provide me with these lovely photographs.

You can see the free motion quilting that I first tried out on this fabric scrap. I was very pleased with how it turned out and that it wasn't too difficult with the tiny underarm space on my machine. I just may make more lap-sized quilts in the future.

Scrappy Shapes Quilt

Several years ago I made a quilted Christmas wall hanging. It's a big tree with pieced multicolored balls and a garland quilted into the tree (you can see a not-so-great picture of it here). Every year I hang it on the wall directly opposite the stairs that lead to the second story in our townhouse, which means that we walk by it a lot. This made Simon very happy because he LOVES this quilt. Every time we walked by it he would stop to point at all the ornaments and wait for us to name the colors. After about fifty times of doing this, I decided that Simon needed a quilt of his own to hang all year round.

I approached this project very differently than all my other projects. I had absolutely no plan when I started. I knew that I wanted a variety of appliquéd shapes, so I dove into the scrap bag and cut out a variety of shapes: circles, squares, rectangles, diamonds and ovals. I prepared the shapes to be appliquéd and then faced a dilemma: what was I going to do with them? I decided to sew them onto long neutral rectangles and then made some smaller blocks out of strips from the scrap bag. I laid them out and quickly found that the quilt was way too skinny, so I padded it up by adding some purple sashing. Then I added a green border and quilted it all up with a meandering stitch - after so much creativity and spontaneity I just couldn't think of something equally creative to do with the quilting.

After hand-sewing the binding, I threw it in the washer with some Woolite only to discover this disaster:


That is the pink from the backing fabric bleeding through onto the border. I always prewash all of my fabric and this time was no exception. What, I ask, is the point of all that prewashing if it's just going to bleed anyway?? This weekend begins the search for Synthrapol and then fervent prayers that it actually works.

Quilting Completed

Once again, I have not been able to get a truly good photo of a completed quilt and had to settle for just having a photo. I was trying to get a shot that really shows off the quilting, and I think you can see it here, but I'm biased because I know what it looks like.

Anyway, the quilting did not come out like I had envisioned, but I actually think it looks better than my original concept. Stupid me did not factor in the distortion that happens when you use the guides on the walking foot to sew curves. But, I was lucky in that the overall effect is really cool and I was able to adjust the design as I went along.

Yo Yo Yo!

I've been itching to try making some yo-yos ever since they started floating about all over blogland. I was thinking about making a little wall hanging out of denim scraps left over from some purses, but was inspired to make this instead when a friend of mine lamented about the starkness of her guest bedroom. I seized upon the color scheme and made this sweet little quilt.

I meant it to hang in a little wall space between her mirror and towel rack, but now that it has materialized it seems a lot bigger than it did in my head. It's only 10" by 12", but trust me when I say that is a lot bigger than it sounds. I just hope that my friend finds a suitable place to hang it. And, while I'm at it, I hope that she likes it enough to hang it in the first place.

The yo-yos were a lot trickier than I anticipated, but they probably would have been easier if I had made them a little bigger. Hindsight and all that. Anyway, my first attempt took a L-O-N-G time and wasn't terrific. Then, I had the brilliant idea of using freezer paper to speed the process along. I cut out my circle of freezer paper, ironed it on the fabric, and then cut a 1/4" seam allowance around the edge of the paper. Sewing up the seam went loads faster using this method and they came out prettier, too. I had debated using the buttons on the yo-yos. I though they looked too big on the tiny flowers, but I'm happy with the result. I'm not sure if more yo-yos are in my future. Only time will tell.

I Love Color!

About a week ago, I was playing around with the plans for this quilt and trying to figure out how to get the right sized blocks. Rather than fool around with the actual fabric for the quilt I decided to use scraps from my stash to make practice blocks. The practice blocks soon evolved into into these adorable little pillows (about 7.5" square). The center blocks are made from the robot-print fabric leftover from Simon's jeans. Then, I had so much fun picking out coordinating colors from within my fabric stash. It was like fabric therapy. Whenever I make something for the fun of it I tend to lean towards very bright colors. They just feel happy.

I decided to quilt each pillow in a sort of squared-spiral, running parallel to the edge of each block. I liked the way it looked against the tilt of the piecing, not to mention the fact that I did not need to mark the fabric since I was able to use the magic of the walking foot. I have been seriously loving the walking foot lately. My latest objective when quilting a project is to mark it as little as possible. It's more convenient and it has allowed me to be unexpectedly creative. I just love the way my latest quilt is turning out. Hopefully I'l have pictures by this weekend.

WIP Saturday??

Well, I was going to post a WIP Friday post yesterday, but I couldn't find the time to take any pictures. Taking pictures is my biggest stress when it comes to this blog. ANY pictures - I've long ago given up the dream of posting only fabulous photographs of my work. I don't have the time to learn all the ins and outs of my camera, I don't have the money to buy a fancy camera, and I still wouldn't have the time to take the pictures in the first place.

There are so many great craft blogs out there run by women who have small children, and they manage to take unbelievable photos. I don't know how they do it. I sometimes find myself close to tears when Simon refuses to take a nap unless he is lying on my nap, knowing that this may be my only opportunity to take any photographs while there is still daylight available. I think I need to just let it go.


Anyway, this is the best picture I was able to take in the early morning with an overcast sky. It is a crib quilt sized to actually fit over a crib mattress - I know, very radical. I usually make a less narrow quilt that doesn't really go in the crib, but this is a custom job. For the quilting, I'm planning on using those nifty bars on my walking foot to make parallel curved lines. In my head it looks awesome. Let's just hope it looks awesome in reality as well.

Jeans Tranformed!

Simon is very tall for his age, but his legs are very short. This means that all of his pants are way too long. I started basting a hem in several of them with the intension to let the hem out at a later date when he is taller, but I've quickly realized that when he is eventually tall enough for the un-hemmed pants his waist will be too large. So, when my mom found these adorable jeans for him at a super-discounted clearance price, I decided to forgo the basted hem and do something really permanent.


I measured the desired length and cut the jeans off at that point. Then, I used this totally adorable robot fabric to make fabric cuffs. In retrospect, it would take a lot less time to make cuffs on pants that I sewed myself instead of ones that I was altering. It was rather tricky to work around the legs of the jeans and to sew a side seam. And I decided to hem them by hand in order to avoid an unsightly line of stitching in the middle of the cuff. But nevertheless, I prevailed and they are super cute!

Unfortunately, they turned about to be about one inch shorter than I had hoped. That's what I get for trying to measure hem-length on a squirming boy. They are actually the perfect length for him right now: just above his heel so that he doesn't trip on them. I just wanted them to be a bit longer so that there was room to grow. Now there is no room to grow and I predict that I will be adding a second cuff on the bottom at a later date so that I can keep him in this cuteness for as long as possible.

As I was trying to take photos of Simon wearing the pants, he decided that they (and he) would look much better once they had been smeared with a generous helping of mud. Ah, I love boys. After taking some pictures, we met a little girl at the park who was only a little bit older than Simon. She was busily playing on the slide when she started laughing to herself. When her mother asked her what she was laughing at she said, in this totally exasperated and weary tone of voice, "boys."

Organization: Rah Rah Rah!

There hasn't been a whole lot of crafting going on here lately. My parents came to visit for New Years, which kept me busy. Then, Simon and I both came down with horrible colds (and we are still getting over them!). This whole week, any time that I would normally spend crafting was instead spent desperately trying to get Simon to go to sleep or stay asleep. If I managed to do either of those things, I then tried to get some sleep myself.

Throughout the week I managed to thoroughly clean and organize my sewing room. It was a certified disaster area due to an explosion of crafting for the Christmas season. Who has time to clean up between projects when you have a looming deadline? Not me.

I end up having to do a major cleaning of my room every few months. No matter how hard I try to keep up with the tidiness, it always gets away from me and I once again have to do a total reorganization. This mostly means picking up the many piles of discarded projects, sorting and organizing all the scraps, and refolding and ordering the fabric stash. It's an annoying task, but so satisfying when it's all done. It's so nice to have a sparkling, clean room with all of my supplies easily accessible (not to mention, easy to find). I mean, look at those lovely rainbow stripes!

I'm taking bets on how long I can keep the room this way. Any takers?

My First Messenger Bag

OK, this is probably the last of my Christmas gift posts, although I may venture another. The Christmas season does last until January 6th, although everyone driving all of this commercial nonsense would have you believe that it ends sundown on Christmas day. But that is a rant that doesn't really belong on this blog.


I made this messenger bag for my sister-in-law, and she loved it. I'm so glad when homemade gifts are really appreciated. You always have to be careful who you bestow them upon - some people think that "homemade" is the equivalent of "junk". Of course, I am undoubtedly preaching to the choir since people who read this blog most likely value homemade things.

Wow, I sure like getting off track today. ANYWAY, Erin (seen here) is currently starting her second year of volunteer service at Nazareth Farm - a Catholic community that provides home repair in rural West Virginia to those who need it and can't afford it (I am really oversimplifying their mission. Click on the link if you want to read more). I figured that she could use a sturdy bag for work and decided to jazz it up with the Farm's logo.

The logo was made as a freezer paper stencil and painted on with a mixture of fabric and craft paint. It was made with the assistance of my husband. Pat always laments that the gifts I make are really from me, even though his name also appears on the gift tag. I repeatedly suggest that he can help make them, but he has no interest in sewing. So, I saw an opportunity here for a non-sewing project he could take part in. I had him cut out the stencil from the freezer paper using an exacto knife. He complained that it was most tedious - and it certainly was - but he was able to put his name on the gift tag and feel that it belongs there this time. Well, actually, I wrote his name on the gift tag, but you get the idea. Right?

And, I've put off adding a post to the latest Whiplash competition for far too long. I had considered entering the drawstring bag I made for Simon's blocks, but it's been so long that I decided to enter this bag instead. It obviously fits in the "gift" category.