Applique Elephant {a finished quilt}

I needed a quilt for a friend’s baby shower, so I went to my copy of the book Quilts, Baby! for an idea.

This book has many inspirational and very original patterns in it, but I don’t recommend it to a beginner.  It’s more for an experienced quilter.

The elephant is raw-edge appliqued to the front.  After washing and drying, the edges of the elephant are softly frayed.

The background gray stars, the gray of the elephant’s body, and the pale yellow solid on the back are all Quilter’s Candy from Connecting Threads.  The brown for the eye and binding are from my stash.  And the blue plaid for the ear is from a recent trip to JoAnn’s.  It just called out to me from the fabric bolts as I was walking past.

The baby’s initials are embroidered with gray perle thread on the elephant’s neck. 

I wanted to make a matching basket for the baby’s room, using the same fabrics from the baby’s quilt.  The lining is solid yellow and the handles and bottom are linen.

I didn’t know what to put in the basket, but then I found a cute hooded towel (washcloths too) and onesies with elephants to carry on the theme and colors.

Too cute!

The finished quilt is 42” x 42”.   The batting is higher loft.

Thanks for reading!  Have a wonderful day!

Linking up with Fort Worth Fabric Studio and Crazy Mom Quilts.

Criss-Crossed Quilt

Criss-Crossed is the name of my latest finish.  It was made with an assortment of pink, plum, and golden fabrics.  Many prints are Denyse Schmidt of course!  Others are Lori Holt Daisy Cottage, some Thomas Knauer, Joel Dewberry, and even fabric designed by fellow DCMQG member Jessie Aller for In the Beginning.  All of the fabrics including the backing and two shades of gray are from my stash!!!  How often can a quilter say that?  The binding was purchased online and luckily it coordinates beautifully.

The back is an Anna Maria Horner roses print from her Innocent Crush collection and a gray, yellow, ivory Midwest Modern print by Amy Butler.  Pieced backs are definitely my favorite!

This is the first quilt I quilted on the new long arm.  It was an experience.  I had some issues with the edges of the quilt and a few times I had to unpick a lot of quilting.  But overall I was pretty pleased with how the final quilt turned out despite all the extra handling during quilting.  A final trim and the binding hid any imperfections.

Normally I don’t wash any quilts before gifting, but this time I ran the quilt through the washer and dryer just to make sure everything held together, which it did! 

Who can resist a big-eyed bunny?  Not my daughter!

Have a great week!  Linking up to Fort Worth Fabric Studio and Crazy Mom Quilts.

A good day

Last night Bea’s lunch did not get packed in anticipation of a snow day.  The weather was iffy, but around midnight there was already 2 inches on the ground, so I didn’t set the alarm either.  When I woke up, the voicemail and text confirmed it…snow day!

We had a breakfast of chocolate chip pancakes, then romped around in the snow for as long as we could stand it, came inside and built a fire, then I popped in a movie for the girls and headed upstairs to my sewing room.  My lovely feline assistants soon joined me, probably not so much for my company as the intense heat that emanates from a workhorse of a space heater I like to turn on when I’m sewing.

Double Stuf is in the top bunk and Oreo is in the bottom bunk.  They are not buddies yet, so they need separate sleeping quarters.

I finally finished putting together this baby quilt.

It’s ready for the backing.  There is one leftover cross block I want to include on the back.  Then this thing needs to be quilted because the little girl who it’s going to was born a few days ago.

And the day just keeps on getting better.  Bea and I are sewing a new quilt’s strips together now and watching conspiracy theory shows on the History Channel.  Thank goodness my husband was able to go to work or he would be driven out to the garage by these shows.  So far we’ve learned about the Knights Templar (twice), the Holy Grail, American Stonehenge, and now a mystery rock wall in Texas. 

Hope you are enjoying your Friday, too!  Have a great weekend!

A bright and early Christmas

We got up awfully early this morning.  Even the kids were a little sleepy-eyed, but nothing was going to stop them from getting out of bed at the crack of dawn.  Notice it’s still dark outside!

Santa was good to everyone and we spent the entire day hanging out with family and playing with new toys. 

I started a new quilt a few days ago.  Someone at my husband’s work is having a baby girl in January, and I wanted to make them a quilt of course.  The baby’s room is yellow, so I started pulling fabric and gravitated toward some Denyse Schmidt and added pink, magenta, and gray.  The colors look so vibrant together.   Are they warms?  Are they cools?  I have no idea, but whoever said to pick colors that don’t exactly match is so right.  It took me a few years to understand, but I think I’m getting better at this picking fabric thing!

Originally I planned to make a quilt with a star pattern, but after cutting some squares I decided to go another direction and make a wonky crosses quilt.  It started out like this.

And then it became this.

Now I just need to get some sleep so I can do some math and figure out measurements for the setting triangles. 

I hope your Christmas was merry and bright, and that Santa brought you everything on your wish list!

Bold & Scrappy Patchwork Baby Quilt

This quilt made a journey to meet its new owner last week.  Hope it likes being drooled on and snuggled!

The feature fabric—Menagerie—is perfect for a baby quilt.  I’ve read bold black and white graphics stimulate infants’ brains.  I bought it here.  The design is just made up by me to use up some extra 2.5” squares.

After struggling for a long time to pick fabrics for my quilts, I limited myself to blue, green, red, yellow, black & white and then added in gray (presumably to give the eye somewhere to “rest,” but I’m not sure the gray really does that?).  Usually I just go all-out and pick anything I think looks good, but placing the limitation on color made a big difference and kept the quilt ordered yet scrappy.

This is the first time (ever!) that I’ve used a solid fabric for the binding.  I’m not afraid to use solid-colored binding anymore with my machine binding technique.  I was afraid a lot of imperfections would be more visible, but that was not the case.

The backing is a bold black and white Pezzy print that I think was called something like Peas and Carrots by American Jane for Moda.  It was the perfect coordinate for the back of this quilt.

I had so much fun making this quilt that I made two more quilt tops for 100 Quilts for Kids.  Katie at SwimBikeQuilt just announced this year’s charity drive here.  Check out the button on my sidebar and make a quilt for a kid who would love one!

Sweet Squares Baby Quilt

My husband’s coworker has a little girl last month. You know I have a thing for Aneela Hoey’s sweet fabric lines, so this quilt includes Little Apples, Sherbet Pips, and Walk in the Woods.

Oh how I love the foxes, mushrooms, and little doggies!  The girl on a swing is my favorite image from all her lines.  It reminds me of my daughters so much!

One of my favorite things about this quilt is I used all stash fabric for the entire thing.  I had these little dogs from Pampered Pooch by Moda just sitting on my shelf for years.  I’m glad they’ve finally found a purpose!  The pink fabric with stars was a clearance fabric from Connecting Threads.  The finished quilt is 36 x 42 inches.

Of course the whole thing is machine bound.  You can see how straight my stitching is getting on the back.  Practice really does make {almost} perfect!  Something I learned this time around about straight line quilting is to increase my stitch length to 4.0.  I read that somewhere online and would have never tried it.  Usually I do 3.2, which I thought was pretty long, but the advice was spot on.  The stitches look so much better longer.

Have a fantastic day!

Bea’s first quilt

It’s finished!  Bea sewed all the squares in rows and sewed all the rows together.  Then she tied all the floss at each block intersection.  I sewed on the binding.   It measures 38” x 46”.   The fabrics are all from Joann’s, has no batting, is backed with soft pink flannel, and is bound with pink and white striped fabric from Connecting Threads.

We had a little trouble getting a good shot because “someone” was being very helpful by playing peek-a-boo.

Bea created this tiny label that I sewed to the front  bottom corner of the quilt.

It’s  says:

To Ron

From Bea

July 2012

and is very decorated and written with fancy letters. 

I foresee a lot of quilts in Bea’s future!

Linking up to WIP Wednesday.

Sliced Apples Progress

I finished piecing the HST portion of the baby quilt I am making.  My friend is due in July, so I am on schedule for getting it done!

All the seams went together reasonably well, and I didn’t sew any rows on upside down {for once}!

I tried to include lots of fun fabrics, but mostly use up some scraps.

It has a small border sewn on now and is ready to be basted.

Farmer's Market Haul

Okay, I am addicted!  I've been to the Loveville Produce Auction twice now and I'm hooked! It was so much fun today!  Here's Summer's and my haul:

12 patio tomato plants at $.50 each!!!  Summer and I split them.

1 box of mixed beautiful squash for $1.75.

2 1/2 bushels of pickling cucumbers at $8 each.

This was our most expensive purchase--11 pints of blueberries at $4 each and 2 pints of raspberries at $4.50 each...pricey!

12 bunches of beets for canning.

And homemade stone ground white wheat flour at $2 a bag.

All in all, it was a fantastic auction day.  This isn't all we bought, but because my minivan is being serviced today, we had to take 2 cars this time.  This is all the stuff that made it to my house.  Summer bought a bunch of plants for her yard that were beautiful that I don't have photos of.  We have already canned all the berries (triple berry jam and blueberry jam) and tomorrow plan to pickle.

And to top it all off, I sold my first pricey item (a baby quilt) on Etsy today!!! Hurray!!!



Busy Bee--living up to my name this week!

It has been a crazy week here!  We went on a mini-vacation to Ocean City, MD and had a truly wonderful time with all three kids.  They loved playing in the sand on the beach, but boy the ocean was COLD!  Bea encountered some type of crustacean thing that looked like it probably existed in the time of the dinosaurs and after screaming for five minutes turned to me very calmly and said, "Mom, I can see why you prefer the pool." 

Sad news awaited us when we got home, though.  One of our cats, Maggie, got out during one of the cat sitter's visits and she was taken in by another family for a day.  It's a long story, but after all the table food she ate and a pre-existing digestive disease she suffers from, she had to be euthanized.  It was very sad, but not unexpected since she had been ailing for months because of her disease.   We have a garden of rosebushes planted on the side of our house, each commemorating the life of a beloved pet.  Maggie's is peach, which is appropriate because her nose was peach colored, kind of unique for a cat--she was a tortie Siamese.

Then my cousin and I went on a strawberry canning bender. After last summer's prices at the farmer's market we got it into our heads that we'd go straight to the source and buy them at the Loveville Produce Auction.  I live in the heart of Amish country in Maryland, so fruits and veggies are abundant.  I have a 5 month old, so it's probably not possible to pick our own, so this was the second best option.  Strawberries retail for $4 a quart, but we bought 32 quarts for $1.90 each, and they were just picked!  It was a little nerve-wracking doing the bidding, because it's a real live auction with a guy going, "bla, bla, bla, bla..." that I didn't really understand.   Here is the before photo:

And the after:

And this picture doesn't even include the dozens of strawberry syrups we froze in one of my two (yes two) freezers in the garage!  We canned a little under 100 jars of strawberry, strawberry-rhubarb, and strawberry-pineapple jams.  We couldn't find any rhubarb at the auction, but we found a woman who knew a woman, and we drove over to her farm.  She picked it straight from the garden.  Needless to say, the jam is delicious!!!!   So, now we are totally into going to the auction again.  There still are raspberries, blackberries, peaches...

I also finished that baby quilt for my husband's coworker.  I used a decorative swirly stitch on my machine and just quilted straight down the seams.  It looks okay.  I am glad it's done so I can move on to other projects.

And, lastly, this week has been hectic because my great aunt has moved here permanently yesterday.  When her husband died two years ago I invited her to move to to Maryland to be closer.  She has no family and has never had a driver's license.  Back then I was just pregnant with my second kid, but now I've got three kids, none of whom are school age yet.  I'm a little nervous about being her only support because with a five month old, life is a little stressful already, but I know it's the right thing to do.  I just hope it goes well.  I actually have to get going to take her grocery shopping and pick up a few things she will need for her new place.

I also belong to this really cool co-op for natural and organic foods and products.  I ordered a couple of hand soaps for the bathroom, and this one, A La Maison in honeysuckle, is divine! It's like a breath of summer.  I love it!!!   

Patriotic Table Topper and New Baby Quilt

I found a great tutorial for a table topper on Moda Bake Shop.  It whipped up in no time at all, and I'm pretty pleased with the outcome.  It would be a good table topper for a rectangular entryway table or maybe on a pretty big dining room table.  I'm not sure what I'm going to do with it, because it seems pretty darn big to me!

I also learned another lesson to either trim the darker seam allowance or press toward the dark.  You can kind of see a shadow of the darker seam allowance behind the white Moda muslin.  Oh well!  It still is very pretty.

I also am making another baby quilt for a friend's new baby.  It is her first...a girl who weighed over 8 pounds!  Luckily all of my kids weighed 7 pounds or less.  I had one friend whose son was 11 and a half pounds when he was born!!!!!

The fabric is Michael Miller and I chose 3 colors.  I think it looks alright.  I'm not sure about what kind of quilting design to use.  I am stalled at this point. 

The backing is a pretty floral swirly print.  I'll post a finished photo soon...once I figure out how to quilt it.