Pink and Red

Do you know how excited I get when I hear that a coworker is having a baby girl? :o) I love making little crib quilts and it's always fantastic to have an excuse to whip up a girly pink tiny quilt. Here's one I made last week to welcome a new girl. It's very simple, just a charm pack with a few extras mixed in, and a crib size piece of batting. It went together very quickly since it's so small.

Here's a closeup of some of the pretty prints in this charm pack.

I also recently stumbled over some University of Alabama quilting cotton on fabric.com and almost had a heart attack from excitement. My dad went there and is quite possibly the biggest Crimson Tide fan on the face of the earth. So I had to buy two prints, and I made him up a little sofa cushion and a little grocery bag. I can't wait to give them to him.

And finally... I am at last catching up on the Minoru Sew Along!

My fabric is a very very heavy water resistant outwear cotton from BJ's. It's definitely one of the most expensive fabrics I've ever bought, but I really wanted something that would keep some rain out without being a nylon or poly. The fabric is very stiff- pretty much a canvas- and it's been a bear to sew. My top stitching and gathering could be better, but this is as good as I can get with my machine, which is just not cut out to sew really heavyweight fabrics.

The zippers are metal ones from Pacific Trim. Hey, if I'm using $25/yard outwear fabric, I'm not tossing in cheap plastic zippers; I'm going for the theory that using good fabric and notions here will make it come out nicely. Wish me luck. ;)

Here's the shell so far on my dressform

So far I like it, but we'll see how it comes out in the end!

shack attack!

The sailor and I headed over to the World Financial Center Shake Shack last night, since he's leaving Monday morning for work & will be gone most of the rest of the month. Nothing to send you on your way like an awesome shack burger, so off we went. We're very lucky, it's just 2 blocks and a ferry ride away from our apartment. The Madison Park location often has 2 hour long lines for burgers, but since the WFC one is newer and still hidden under some construction scaffolding the lines are usually not long at all. They're famous for super tasty cheeseburgers and REALLY good milkshakes and ice cream.

It was PACKED when we got there, since I guess word is getting out about the new location, but we managed to find a small table and had just sat down when Elizabeth, of Sewn Blog walked by! OK, is NYC not the greatest sewing town or what? You go out for a burger and bump into fellow sewing bloggers out doing the same thing. ;)

We ended up eating shack burgers and fries together and subjecting the sailor to talk about Jonathan Embroidery's button hole sewing hours and how lazy we have been on the sewing front. I may have challenged myself to start sewing a dress on Monday to wear to an upcoming wedding at the end of the month!

This morning I was up early so I started sewing up a little quilt for one of the nieces:





Just a small attempt to get ahead of the "OMG I have three quilts to finish on Christmas Eve" sewing rush that happened this past December.

And finally, here's the full moon rising over NYC when we got home:



The city can be so pretty sometimes.

snowy day cozy quilt

This one has been in progress for over a year and I finally finished it up so that I'd have a warm lap quilt for our sofa. Would you believe I only had one quilt I'd made in our home until I finished this one?







it goes very nicely with hot chocolate and snow falling outside.

Details- just a very simple pinwheel pattern out of kona premium muslin scraps & anna maria horner prints. Batting is a cotton batting from JoAnns, back is some more muslin with a fold-up binding. Quilted with very unintentionally wobbly straight lines with my brand new walking foot.

muslins and pinwheels

One of my little projects I wanted work on this year was a Photo Project 365- take a picture every day. I've wanted to one for a while, and I figured that the year I got married would be a good one to do it. Well, of course, on Jan 4 I ended up catching a horrible stomach flu (like norovirus or something else super evil) and couldn't even get out of bed for a few days. Don't you love how life corrects your plans sometimes? ;) Ah well, I'm picking up where I left off with it anyway. My parents came down to visit today and brought their sheltie, who found the pinwheel quilt top I've been working on. I think the colors very nicely complement his coat, don't you?



My mom also fit the muslin of butterick 3478 and said that it's her favorite so far. So I have some muslin tweaks to transfer to the pattern, and then there will likely be another muslin, with some drafted cap sleeves. I really like the look of these lacey cap sleeves:



The major changes my mom took in the muslin were to increase the inner neckline dart I'd pinched out so that the shoulders came in even further, and then pinned the side seams out a small amount. We both agreed that the skirt hung pretty nicely, and we'd wait to see how the shoulder change affected everything before making any new changes. I'm so thankful that I have her to come and pinfit things on me- I don't know how I'd get through sewing this dress without the assistance!

Have a wonderful weekend :)

Simple sewing

This is about the level of sewing complexity my brain could handle this weekend. It's a few charm square packs of "Nautical and Nice" sewn together, also known as "head start on christmas sewing for my nephew since I can't handle dress patterns right now". ;)

It still needs a border, which will be more of the life ring fabric and some plain white, before getting quilted. But hey- December 25 is far, far away!

A lap quilt

I made my mom a little 9 patch quilt from a jelly roll for mother's day...



But of course her grandkids have "stolen" it. ;)



The move is finally here! I'm living out of a suitcase for the next few days while we drive the car up from Virginia and get settled. If I remember, I'll take some photos of our Exciting Drive Up the East Coast. Ha! As long as I have snacks and my ipod, shouldn't be too bad.

Last week I made Kate a little shirt out of the Ice Cream Dress pattern. I love how quickly it goes together!



It's been beautiful and warm and summery here a lot lately, so we ate a lot of meals out on the deck.

a birthday quilt

Tom turned 2 last may, and I finally finished up his birthday quilt. Here's a little picture:





On a non-sewing note, last night we had a company outing to the prudential center, which is just down the road from our office. We rented out the Devils rink and got to go skating for a few hours. It's a really nice rink, with floor to ceiling windows facing west, so we had lots of sunshine until it set. Here we are after a few hours of skating around:

What to do with a long weekend, part 1

....sew a super girly pink quilt for Kate. This is her Christmas present, but not a surprise because she helped lay it out.

French Hatbox fabric by Tanya Whelan






Fold up binding being pinned

On Point

Remember the quilt I'd started back in the spring with the Amy Karol fat quarter pack? It's finally finished. It's about twin sized, and I used Kona premium muslin for the back. Ooooh... that stuff is so soft and yummy! This is the first quilt I've made that's set on point.

It's kind of hard to photograph a quilt this big.


Here's Declan to show that it's a nice sheltie size ;-)


And from the staircase:



I quilted it with a combination of curvy lines and free motion swirls.

A book review and a pillow

I bought Jelly Roll Quilts this weekend on a whim, because it had some cute designs in it. One of them is a neat star design that you make using strip pieced 45 degree diamonds. I'd never sewn diamonds before, so I had NO IDEA what I was getting myself into. ;-) I thought I'd try one out as a pillow, failing to notice that the whole quilt that they show has only 4 stars on it- so they're pretty big (30" x 30" without a border in the end!).

A diamond section from the back:


You piece 3 rows of diamonds and then 2 filler triangles to make 1/8 of the star, and then put sections together. This is the back once all the pieces are put together:


It was pretty fiddly going- I figured I knew how to handle bias stretching from garment sewing, but there was quite a bit of yelling at the fabric anyway. ;-) This is a not very centered star center:




Here's my huge pillow. I made a couple mistakes putting it together, so I'm glad I just tried a single star pillow instead of a whole quilt.





And the back is just extra strips pieced together




The book has some very nice designs, but doesn't really offer hints on how to deal with things like matching seams at an angle, dealing with stretching, or any extras. The directions are clear enough, but they seem to assume you have a general idea of how to put patchwork designs together.

It's also very light on quilting/binding/finishing. I was initially attracted to it because of the fabrics featured- I have so many quilt books that seem to use screamingly ugly fabric in the designs. I know that doesn't really matter, but this one is really nice to look at and the quilts seemed a lot more attractive to make because they used fabrics I would really use.

It features 15 quilts, starting from super easy up to more difficult. My star was 3rd from the end, and pretty much as tricky as it got. Most of the sections on the quilts are only 4 pages long- they have good diagrams but refer you back to previous steps a lot saying "now do steps 4 to 12 but with X instead of Y" so it can be a little bit confusing. Overall I like it though, mostly for the pretty quilt designs and the clear diagrams.

simple

That one is for Tom









For Ana

Quilting with straight lines is about all my overloaded brain can deal with at the moment.

Purple

Here's an action shot of Kate in the purple quilted jacket I made her a few months ago:


Notice how it's accessorized with brown & pink floral leggings and a sky blue headband. ;-)

And here is Cameron, sheltie testing a quilt layout. If you can't sew, you can still lay quilt blocks out on the floor and move them along. My dad had to help me pick up everything when I was done playing layouts, and by then Cameron (his sheltie) had been replaced with Declan (my sheltie) on the quilt pieces. This is a twin sized one, so the backing and batting are pretty big. We picked up one end and started walking forward to fold it in half. Declan stood his ground on the nice comfy spot he'd found to sit- we had to pick him off the batting to continue folding, then he walked right back on! Silly dog.



Here are some of the squares that I did early in the week. They're mostly using Sew Mama Sew's Amy Karol fat quarter pack. I really liked the colors in that set! So different from the shades I usually gravitate towards.



On the recovery front, I have a huge purple bruise on the back of my hand & I'm pretty run down, but otherwise OK. My mom got out her naturalist books last night and we looked through them & I forced myself to look at the photos of the snakes. Ewww. We figured out what it was, though- it was definitely a yellow rat snake. I actually got shivers up my spine when I saw the picture, because it was exactly the snake. They're non poisonous, obviously, but agressive biters, which makes sense because it really got me. Supposedly they're not uncommon as pets so we wonder if it was an escaped or released pet. Good to know that it really wasn't a ribbon snake, because we have them all over and although they freak me out, I always think of them as essentially harmless.

One more picture- here is Tom playing on his slide. Cutest little boy ever!!!

Tom's Birthday Quilt

So far:

Fold Up Quilt Bindings

For BeeBee, a link to where I learned about this fold-up quilt binding:

How to Bind a Quilt. . . the easy way. at Pleasant View Schoolhouse






I remembered that I had a bunch of squares left over from the 2007 christmas quilts for the kids, and a bit of batting, so I made up another quilt for my sister's car and practiced some more free motion quilting on it. I tried use the multi colored machine quilting thread from Coats and Clark, but it kept snapping. Then I tried Coats 100% Cotton, which is the thread I generally use, and it also kept snapping! I was kind of frustrated and confused, because I didn't have a single broken thread doing Tom's quilt. I remembered I'd use Gutermann 100% cotton thread, so I pulled that out, and used it. It worked beautifully, but I'm a bit annoyed because there are only three places where I can buy it and they're all in the garment district! I'm used to being able to run to JoAnn's for more thread when I need some, so I'll have to make a point to stock up on this.

While I was poking through my quilt squares, I figured I'd see how far I've come on my Mendicino Quilt. Not too bad... just over half way there. My backing is a robin egg's blue King sized sheet, so I just need enough squares to cover it. My king sized cotton batting is quite a bit bigger than the sheet, so I'll be doing a lot of trimming I guess.