birthday quilt

After mulling it over at Legoland Deutschland for the long Easter weekend and changing my mind at least half a dozen times, for the Naked Bed Challenge, I am sticking with the Bless You pattern, but in a Scandinavian color scheme, my inspiration being a beautifully delicate duvet cover made using vintage fabric featured in this book.

I don't have any vintage fabric to use for this, but I think some Essex linen/cotton with some Kona blues and one itty bitty half-yard of the City Weekend grid will do nicely.

Ideally, I would love for it to be reversible, and on the back I would love to do mostly white with one large square of blue scraps off center. If I have time, that's what I'll do.

For the challenge, the top must be done by June 2nd, and my birthday is a few days after, so I would love love love to have the whole thing done by then, and make it my birthday present to myself.

call me crazy

I signed up to do the Naked Bed Challenge.

I barely have enough time to get my work done for my actual job and now I have committed to making a full size quilt. Oh well. I am excited!

I am using Sarah Fielke's easy peasy Bless You pattern (but mostly solids) and will probably tie it rather than try to quilt something that big on my dinky little Singer.... although now that I've begun free motion quilting that wall hanging I can see how it can get to be addicting...

creative quilt top

I lost my sewing room this weekend to our new au pair. Although I am so glad to have reinforcement on the way, it was a little sad to put my fabric and notions away in boxes. Not having space to leave my machine and the iron out will mean a lot less sewing. I was able to get a lot done in twenty-minute increments of stolen time, here and there.

Luckily, I managed to finish this one last thing before packing it all up.

It is the top to what will hopefully soon be a quilted wall hanging. I followed this tutorial and it was the most fun I've had piecing since I made the improvisational blocks for my sons' quilt.

I didn't follow the guidance exactly. She recommends using four fabrics; I used three. She doesn't break up the strips as much as I did either. But I started out the way she suggested and relied heavily on her tips and the examples she provided for inspiration.

This concept of a non-pattern is incredibly appealing to me. It was the first time I felt like I was making art.

summer colors

Not a lot of time for sewing lately, there is so much going on, but every so often I shirk my responsibilities and sneak into my sewing room. Today my little helper and I managed to finish this little summer bag in canvas.

I lined it with some more of the canvas at the top and some plain old white cotton at the bottom. And added a little tag with my name.

lila

My youngest son recently received his first invitation to a birthday party.

What better gift than a soft, handmade mouse for a little girl who's turning three?

Oh yes, it was the perfect excuse to make another of these. The pattern is from "Hand-Stitched Felt" by Kata Golda and is very easy to follow. I've probably made dozens of these by now.

I don't follow her instructions exactly. I do not cut out the head and body separately, because sewing the whole thing up as one piece is much faster. It also looks much neater and I don't have to put a collar on the clothes to hide the unsightly seam in the poor gal's neck.

I also cheat a little and stitch up the clothes using my machine. Lila got a little button in back, too.

I made a little gift bag for the birthday girl as well. I started doing these when I gave away the Take Me to the Park quilt and needed a nice way to protect it during shipping, but didn't want to just stick it in some plastic (I hate plastic). And now of course, I can't stop making little bags out of muslin and free motion stitching people's names on them.

old-fashioned charm

This is the first quilt I ever started. I put it aside for awhile to work on other, more exciting projects. And when I came back to it I was struck by what my idea of a quilt was before I started reading modern quilting blogs.

I started sometime in November and finished yesterday. I had machine quilted it all in a cross-hatch, but then ripped out all the stitches and hand quilted it all over again using Perle cotton in five or six different colors. Each nine-patch block is quilted differently.

The sashing and backing are just a plain natural muslin and the binding is pieced together from scraps because I had so many and knew I'd never use them.

I had no idea how to calculate how much fabric I'd need when I bought it and ended up with way too much. Which also explains why the quilt turned out so much bigger than I'd planned. At 130 x 215 cm (51 x 85 inches), it's a good twin size - pretty ambitious for a first quilt!

Until the binding was on, I wasn't sure how I felt about it. I never would have finished if not for my husband. He said he liked how it looks so vintage, and now that it's done, I see what he means. It does have an old-fashioned charm to it. And boy is it warm! Polyester batting is not the softest stuff, or the easiest to work with, but it will keep your toes toasty.

Although, if you look close enough, it looks a lot like a clumsy Home Ec project. I'd probably get a C+ though, for effort.

serendipity

This is an old picture. The top is actually done, but I haven't taken any pictures, although it is all laid out on top of a leftover bit of batting I had on hand, which miraculously turned out to be a perfect fit without any planning.

I started this on a whim, using scraps. The pink was left over from my last quilt and the little coins of color are bits from another work in progress that I am gradually losing interest in. I saw this coin quilt and decided I needed to make one too.

It was the fastest quilt top to put together. I usually only have twenty to thirty minutes about once or twice from Mon-Fri to spend in my sewing room, and on weekends I can maybe get a few hours in if the conditions are right, but this came together in almost no time at all. And when I pressed the seams and flipped it over it just kept looking sweeter and sweeter.

But then I but couldn't decide how to do the back. I had a bunch of ideas but they were all awful and I kept changing my mind. I even cut and started sewing a couple before coming to my senses.

Then today, as I sat working right around lunchtime, the mailman rang the bell and told me I had customs duties to pay. Two packages of fabric from the States! Inside were a bunch of yards I'd nearly forgotten I'd ordered and lo and behold, there was a yard of a perfect pale yellow (Kona maize) that looked so sweet. I lay it on top and immediately saw that it was a perfect fit, color, size and all. No piecing! I had also, though I don't know why, ordered a yard of pretty green cotton with tiny aqua dots. That will probably end up getting cut up into strips for binding.

So unless I can think of a better name, this will be a Serendipity quilt. It's going to a friend who is elatedly expecting her third child and has been put on bed rest. The baby's fine, but she is bored to tears. Bet you can't guess, based solely on my quilt, if it's a boy or a girl.