Little baby clothes!

Well, I’m on to my next project! A friend of mine sent me her son’s baby clothes and asked me to make them into a baby quilt, and to use his old receiving blanket as the backer. I started laying out the onesies with central graphics out last night and ripping the seams on the others to see what I have to work with.

Have you made a quilt out of baby clothes? I’d love to see them

Zig Zaq Quilt

It’s finally done! It measures about 49.5″x39.5″. I quilted it using a diamond pattern and used Quilters 80/20 Cotton. I’m pretty happy with how it turned out, but look what happened in the wash!

Ack!

Looks like there was some running dye, which I don’t understand because I ALWAYS pre-wash my fabrics! Oh well. Maybe I’ll go back and try to attack it with stain fighter or something.

Ignore my feet and curlers sticking out at the bottom.

And here’s the back of the quilt. I had some of this cloud flannel lying around, so I thought I’d use it here. I just love this print and it was hard to part with it, but I think the clouds and rainbow concept works really well. And I did end up doing a scrappy binding on the quilt, I think it looks really cute.

Happy Friday everyone! Enjoy your weekend!

Will the binding ever end?

I think I’ve decided that binding a quilt is my least favorite step! You’re so tantalizingly close to finishing your quilt, there’s just this one teeny tiny thing to do first and it takes FOREVER. By the time I’m done binding I could SWEAR that I have a five, six, seven or EIGHT sided quilt and not one with four sides. It seems to go on and on.

That’s why this time I decided to try machine binding the whole thing. It was SO much faster and I’m pretty pleased with the results. It wasn’t so straight in some areas but I thought it looked good overall.

The zig zag quilt is finally finished, it’s in the washer right now getting good and crinkly for pictures, I will probably post them on Friday.

My Singer Confidence Quilter

When I first started quilting, I was using a basic machine my husband had gotten me as a wedding present. It was a small Singer (Inspiration model, to be exact) and it worked just fine. For Christmas 2010, my in laws gifted me my current sewing machine, a Singer Confidence quilter. It has about one hundred different stitches and a mess of other neat features, including a longer arm that I can stick on there for easier quilting.

These small Singers do great for sewing the quilt tops, but I have to admit… when it comes to quilting anything larger than a baby quilt, they’re a pain in the rear! I can’t wait until I can get one of these bad boys, but I guess I need someplace to PUT it first!

What kind of sewing machine do you use for your quilting? I’ve noticed that a lot of quilty bloggers use Berninas or Brothers. How about you? Do you send your quilts out to be quilted and just make the quilt tops?

This is how it looked before Jetty decided to do spins on it.

So far I’ve sewed the bottom six rows together, only eight more to go!

I’ve been thinking about adding a white border to the quilt, but I’m not sure. I think I’ll wait and see how even the edges of the fabric are and decide then. I also need to decide on a binding… I’ve thought about doing a black binding like the inspiration quilt, but I think I’m leaning more towards a multicolored scrappy binding… of course I’d be thinking of making this more work!

As for the backing, I know I want to use flannel, but I haven’t decided between using some flannel scraps I have or some of a cloud print flannel I have. I guess it will depend if I have enough flannel scraps!

Linking up:

My partially completed Zig Zag Quilt

Remember how I said in this post how I don’t like to have more than one project going at a time? Oops. I do now! I have put my Chasing Chevrons quilt on hold and started this zig zag quilt. It’s for a very special little girl in need, but I’m going to wait on the reveal until I get the OK from her parents.

The pattern I’m making up as I go along, but it’s based on this quilt by Rita at Red Pepper Quilts. I think I’m going to do purple instead of black pieces, though. And ALL the material is from my scraps bin or my stash. Hooray for a scrap buster!! And I can tell you where each scrap came from… but if you just look at the quilts in this post you’ll find them soon enough!

So on my to-do, list continuing from this post:

1. JD’s Silly Safari Quilt (in progress) Complete!!
2. My niece’s Christmas present (sleeping bag) Complete!!
3. Chasing Chevrons (in progress)
4. My husband’s T-Shirt Quilt (picked out the shirts to use)
5. A scrap quilt (doing zig zags)
6. Doily Quilt (bought the fabric!)

Happy Wednesday! I’m going out to my parents’ house in Orange County to watch my nephew. Normally his Grammi (my mom) watches him while my sister and her husband are at work, but my Mom needs to go to the hospice today to visit HER mother… Unfortunately she’s very, very sick. It’s been coming for a long time now, so we’re not surprised, but it’s still sad. Happiness and sadness in the same day, isn’t that how life works?

Lovely, lovely Ruby.

When Ruby came out, I fell in love! I drooled over the prints in the collection. I saw all the wonderful projects that quilters in the blogosphere were making and was intensely jealous. I put Ruby on my Christmas list, hoping Santa would bring her to me. Alas, no such luck. Then last week I noticed some my favorite online stores SELLING OUT of Ruby. I panicked! We were about to be separated forever! I couldn’t let that happen. Ruby HAD to me mine.

When I saw that the Forth Worth Fabric Studio still had some Ruby on sale, I jumped. I still can’t justify shelling out $100+ for a line of fabric, so the Fat Quarter bundle was out. I happily ended up with a Layer Cake and a Charm Pack:

My gal Ruby!

I couldn’t be more pleased or excited!! I can’t wait until I can start a project with my new fabrics. Maybe this Ruby, Pearl and Opal quilt? This Georgia Quilt? Expand this Cathedral Window project into a quilt? A bigger version of this? For as long as it took me to decide to BUY some Ruby, it will probably take me twice as long to decide what to do with it.

What are some of your favorite projects made using Ruby?

I didn’t feel too bad on NYE, but New Year’s day I spent on the couch and after exerting myself too much on Wednesday, I came down with a little fever. So please forgive my lack of blogging!

When I have felt well enough, I’ve been working on the Chasing Chevrons quilt along that Jennifer is hosting. I kept thinking while I was sick on the couch, how much I wished I had a comfy quilt to snuggle up with rather than my fleece blankets that were making me too hot! After receiving my Coal Kona fabric I got to cutting… and cutting… and cutting… then pressing… pressing… pressing… and then cutting AGAIN! I think I finally finished all my cutting for this quilt, thank god!!

This is what all of my chevrons will look like once I’m done sewing them together.

My chevrons!

I’m so excited!! I can’t wait to get step 2 (can you believe I’m only on step 2??) OVER and DONE with and move on to piecing the quilt top together!!

My brother’s Ultima quilt

Of course, I took the finished product picture upside down.

Bobby Jr’s Quilt

Bobby Jr.'s Quilt

Liliana’s Quilt

Completed Quilt

Jacob’s first Quilt

All over shot of the quilt

Dawn & Donny’s Coffee Quilt

The finished coffee quilt!

American Flag Quilt for my in-laws

American Flag Quilt, completed August 2011

Andrew’s Snips N Snails Quilt

Snips N Snails quilt completed October 2011

Caroline’s Sweet Hearts Quilt

Sweet Hearts completed

My Mom’s Camping Quilt

Completed Camping Quilt!

JD’s Silly Safari Christmas Quilt

Scarlett’s Kitty Blanket

Completed Kitty blanket!

I can’t believe I finished 11 quilts this year! That’s almost one a month! It makes me tired just thinking about it! I hope I can be as prolific next year!

Happy 2011, thanks for reading my blog this year! I hope 2012 brings you lots of joy, success and happiness!

Vintage Pattern.

(Unfortunately the seller has since closed up shop, so I can’t link you to it.)

I thought that it would make a really cute Christmas gift for my two-year-old niece, Scarlett, so I bought the pattern. Unfortunately, I didn’t look at the listing closely enough though because all of the measurements were in metric! I set out buying fabric and cutting as best as I could, but I ended up ditching the pattern completely and just winging it. This is what I came up with!

Completed Kitty blanket!

I used Kona Candy Pink and the striped fabric is by Brother and Sister Design studio. The inside is lined with this soft pink fabric (anybody know what this fabric is called?? I love using it, but can never remember what it’s called!)

Detail of the head and lining.

I thought the head on the original pattern looked kinda scary and demonic, so I changed the eyes on mine to make it less scary.

Closeup of the face.

The whiskers are ric rac left over from Liliana’s quilt. I applique’d the eyes, nose, lips and chin and added french knots for whisker details.

The quilting on this one was kind of a nightmare, there are puckers all over the place on the inside of the blanket. I decided to let them go though, as I was running low on time and I figured as long as they were on the INSIDE, not the OUTSIDE, I could live with them. It was also originally meant to be a sleeping bag, but I decided that adding a zipper is outside of my skill set at this time so I just left it as a blanket.

Scarlett and her parents loved it and in the end, that’s all that matters! I’ll just be glad that this one is over.