In From the Cold!!

I might have mentioned this before, but I love Kate Spain and all of her lines of fabric! Last year, I fell in love with her In From the Cold line because it was just the right mix of green and red holiday, without being too holiday-ish.

I've been kicking myself for not getting any fabric from that line when it came out last year, and have been trolling around looking for it.

I was so excited when I found this bundle, I gave a little squeak and promptly clicked the Purchase button. It is a fat-eighth bundle, which is just enough fabric for what I plan to make out of it. I've already made a dent in cutting it... :)

Linking up to Molli Sparkle's Sunday Stash:

Let's do this again!

Ready for round three of baby blankets? Or round four? Or five? I have seriously lost count of how many baby blankets I've already made this year, but I think the end is in sight!

This one is for a former co-worker of mine who loves the outdoors and is having a boy. The fabric is from the fat quarter set that I bought at a local craft store and split up to make another baby quilt in the same pattern; that quilt used the green and white and brown fabrics to be gender-neutral. I love the teals and browns in this quilt and the flannel fabric is sooo soft!

I did a simple four-patch pattern and quilted it from corner to corner through each square, which resulted in a soft and cozy finish.

The binding is a brown dot (same as the other flannel baby quilt) and is backed in a turquoise gingham print that I fell in love with at the store.

I also finished making the bags for the new big sister. I used a fairy print that I have had in my stash for a couple of years, so I don't even know what designer or whatnot it is, but I love it so much!

I made three bags, two for the big sister and one for me, but since I have already wrapped the other two, I just have mine to show you. The other two were made with the purple fairy print, a brown with small white polka dots, and the brown and white fabric you see on mine.

I adore these bags! They came together fast and the pattern was easy enough to follow; they might pop up again in different fabrics for Christmas presents.... :)

Busy bees

Spring is the time of year when everything starts getting busy: the flowers are busy blooming, the bees are busy collecting pollen and women are showing the signs of getting busy in the fall (if you know what I mean), so needless to say, that finds me busy making baby quilts!


 

I finally got some free time (thanks hubster!) to do some serious sewing, so without further ado, I present my second (or third, but really, who's counting?) baby blanket this year!

I picked up a 12-piece flannel fat quarter set (so soft!) at a local craft store, so I'm not sure what lines these fabrics are from, but they sure are cute! This pattern uses six fat quarters, so I split up the fat quarter set into two different colorways and am working on a second quilt in the same pattern, to be finished sometime in the future.

This quilt was supposed to be gender-neutral because the couple it is intended for is not finding out what they are having, but since the mom will be induced tomorrow, three weeks ahead of schedule, I guess that's a moot point now!

Of course, I had to take a picture of the section that has crooked quilting lines...

The new baby has an older sister, so I will make her a couple of drawstring bags, probably using this tutorial, as a big sister gift. Or consolation prize, depending on who you talk to :) I will post those once they are done.

Hope you have a great week!

So much to do, so little time! That's always the case, isn't it?

I just wanted to do a quick update on what I'm working on...

The Fandango stars quilt is about 1/3 to 1/2 quilted. I dedicated several one-hour time slots over the past few weeks toward it and am frustrated with how long it is taking and how little progress is being made, so it has been folded up (again) and will sit for another time when I feel the urge to work on it. It also doesn't help that I am always changing how I want it to be quilted :) I honestly feel that perhaps this project would have been better sent off to a professional longarm quilter...

I have the backing for my Dear Stella quilt, but have set aside that project...for now.

My kitchen curtains still have not been made...

But...I have started on three different baby quilts! I am really good at starting lots of different projects, but not so good at the finishing part of it :) One of them is from fabric leftover from the Dear Stella quilt, and the other two are made from a fat quarter set I bought at a local craft store.

Hopefully, progress will be made on these this weekend because I am starting to run short on time...

WIPs

Today, I thought I'd share a couple of my current WIP (work in progress) projects that I've managed to start but don't have any time to work on.

Alas, I can look at the pictures and say "someday, I will work on you"... :)

The first project is one that I started last year when I was pregnant with Boy #2. I was technically on bed rest, but anyone who has had that sentence knows there is no way in heck you can just lay in a bed all day long. So I sat sometimes, instead. I saw this pattern on Moda Bakeshop a while back and loved it, fabric and all and put it on my to-do list with the stipulation that I would make it, but only with the fabric it was originally made with because I loved it so much. So, I waited and searched and hunted in vain, until one day, a local quilt store had a layer cake and by that time, I was ready to pay the price they had listed for it.

The fabric line was Fandango by Kate Spain, and she is one of my most favorite fabric designers. The pattern is made from 3 charm packs and some yardage and I just love it! Mostly because it has stars in it :)

The top is all finished and basted. I have 3 of the 16 stars quilted and with the way I am quilting it, each star takes about 45 minutes to quilt...so, needless to say, it is hard for me to commit the time to quilt one star versus getting 45 minutes further on another project, since I pretty much only sew after bedtimes for normal people. I really want to get this done soon though...

My next WIP is a quilt kit that I picked up at a local quilt show. I fell in love with the display quilt, but decided not to get the kit. Then I walked around the show and thought about that darn quilt the whole rest of the time I was there. Somehow my feet wandered back there and I grabbed it before I could think twice about it (again).

The colors aren't something I normally lean to, but the more that I look at them, the more I love them! The fabrics are Paloma by Dear Stella. I just got the backing for it and it is a flower-embossed minky in white that I am so excited about. This will be my cuddle-on-the-couch quilt for myself, since I still seem to be borrowing Boy #1's quilt to snuggle with...

The third thing on my WIP list is to make curtains for my kitchen out of these super cute fabrics! I picked up a couple of half-yard cuts at my local quilt store because they were so cute, but I didn't have any plans for them. A few weeks ago, I hung up the fabric to see what they would look like as curtains and voila! new plan for the fabric. The fabrics are from the KITSCHenette line by Claudine Hellmuth for Andover Fabrics.

Also on my list is finding a pattern using fat quarters for Boy #2's quilt.

I just have a couple of things to keep me busy :) Hope you have a great first day of Spring!

 

Round and round finished!

Yay! My second finished quilt of the year! Man, I am on a roll!

I have so many WIPs floating around, that sometimes I feel like a butterfly flying here, working on this for a little bit, flying there, working on that for a little bit, and somehow I manage to come up with even more things to do while I'm fluttering around. So, last month, I decided I needed to finish something and get it off of my to-do list, and what better thing to finish than something that has been on my list for over a year (maybe a little more).

 This quilt is for Boy #1. It feels so good to know that he is going to have something handmade by his mommy. Even if he never uses it (he's pretty attached to some other blankets), at least he has it :)

I quilted the circles with swirls. In the beginning, I tried to keep the lines uniformly apart, but then some squiggles happened and since I have a no-unpicking policy (unless I royally screwed up the piecing part of it), they stayed, along with the hundred other squiggles that happened.

I stitched in the ditch around each square/block and did a loopy-loop on the borders. I really enjoyed doing the loopy-loops because they were super fast and perfect for borders.

He hasn't received the quilt yet, because I am still on the fence about whether he should receive it as a birthday present (which is still a few months away) or as a just-because present, but I think he will be receiving it in the near-future, just because :)

Also, I might be borrowing it to snuggle with after he goes to bed...maybe.

Jack-Jack's Quilt

It's a lovely day in the neighborhood today! I'm deluding myself that spring is just around the corner and pretty soon it will be all bright and sunshiny outside again! Whatever it takes to get through the day, right?

This weekend I finished my quilt for my coworker, which makes it my first completed quilt of 2014!!! I actually started and finished a quilt in the first month of the new year - pretty awesome-sauce if you ask me! We'll overlook the fact that it was a baby quilt and a pretty easy pattern at that :)

I'm calling this one "Jack-Jack's Quilt" because 1) the baby's name will be Jack and 2) I love the little baby from The Incredibles named Jack-Jack and 3) I'm not feeling clever enough to come up with a really creative name.

    




I ended up pulling the stitches from the top row and resewing the top row on the other side of the block and that fixed the problem that I was having. It might've taken help from my super-smart hubster to figure that out, but it worked like a charm! I was ready to throw in the towel and consider it done.

I quilted it in straight lines running from corner to corner. I had intended to then go the other way to end up with a grid, but by the time I got done with the first set of lines, I fell out of love with that idea.

I love the texture that all those lines produces!! The only concern I had was bunching; I'm not sure if I didn't baste well enough or if it was the shot cottons that I used, but I ended up with some bunches in between the lines. It added to the whole look of the quilt, and feels super-neat, but I'm not sure if that is normal or if something was off on my end of things.

Anyway, the end result is that I was able to finish it the day before my coworker left; I feel so accomplished and I kind of wanted to keep the quilt for myself - maybe I'll keep the next one I work on instead!