I'm extremely unmaterialistic -- until we start talking fabric

I'm really trying to spend less money on fabric these days. Really! It's a disease. But I'm making progress -- while I did drag the kid into Pacific Fabrics today up at Northgate, I was a fortress of willpower. I looked neither left nor right upon entering the store, but instead headed straight for their sale table, perused nothing but the sales, and then actually walked out without buying anything.

If you're not fainting in shock, you should be. This is an unheard of event for me. I mean, there was stuff on SALE!

However - a recent post on a message group I'm a part of reminded me that it's always interesting to crafty folks to share great online locations for fabric-shopping. Here are a few of my well-visited, well-loved haunts:

• Connecting Threads - this is a relatively new one for me but they were highly recommended to me recently as a great source for really high quality thread at a reasonable price. I just stocked up on a big sale and am really happy with how it's performing. No more tangles! And wow, were the prices good.
  
  


• Fat Quarter Quilt Shop - love this site. Probably my favorite out of the whole list. And look - they have a Christmas store!
  
  


• Old Trinity Schoolhouse - really great place to get repros. I got all the fabric for my nephew's quilt there.
  
  


• Sew Mama Sew - not a huge variety of styles, but cutecute modern fabrics and good sales! I often load up on certain colors I need to balance out my stash when they have markdowns.
  
  


• Quilt Something! - yep, this is the place I mentioned visiting in Moscow, Idaho a week ago. But after I got home I got a great idea for something to make and wished I'd bought a couple more things. I ordered a bazillion little fat quarters and they came in like two days. And I know she had to cut them all by hand since my selection was totally random! Quick, friendly service and a great selection. I think I'll be shopping more there!
  
  


• Pumpkin Patch Primitives - just a cute store, and some unusual patterns and fabrics too.
  
  


• Ethelbird and Eliza Kids - great source for unusual kids fabrics. Check out the fun categories under "fabric by type" - I love that I can look up things like "I Spy" and "animals - whimsical."
  
  


• Hancocks Paducah - of course. Everyone lists this, no? But they're that good.
  
  


• The Cotton Vault - another good source to hunt for sales.

What essential online shopping sites am I missing? Please comment on your favorites!

Mini quilt winner...

And the winner of the miniature quilt is...

Dandy!

Who has, wow, over ten blogs listed in her profile. But I think this looks her main one: http://purpleisafruit.blogspot.com/.

I finished the binding in the car on the way to the wedding on Friday, and just need to get the hanging sleeve on and then it will be on its way up north to its new home.

Thank you so much, everyone, for playing!

More Free Motion Play

Just a reminder to go to this post to sign up for my mini-quilt giveaway! You can sign up until Friday night. Winner will be posted on Saturday.



****



I got this highly recommended and as-it-turns-out thoroughly excellent book, Machine Quilting Solutions by Christina Maraccini, in the mail yesterday and was so excited after flipping through it that I jettisoned my other naptime plans -- you know, clean the house, do some grant work, take care of various responsibilities, or even take a nap myself -- to come down to the sewing room and play on the big practice quilt sandwich I made for last week's class.

And, because a lot of commenters seemed interested in my first post on my fledgling free-motion attempts, I thought I'd show a few more. I had about five squares left on my practice quilt, so I started from the beginning of the book and tried a few things until I ran out of steam.

I started with her heatwave pattern, an all-over pattern. Yes, my stitches are ENORMOUS, but I'm trying to get used to doing this without the feed dogs:



Various leaves with swirls, including if you look closely, one abortive attempt at a holly leaf with only one recognizable leaf -- but overall these came out pretty good:






The answer to my question about whether it was easier to make a row of leaves if you were moving horizontally or vertically -- horizontally looks better, but vertical is easier. But in the vertical version the leaves don't really point out at an angle the way I'd intended.

And something she calls the artichoke - the lumpy thing in the bottom left corner of this square, with an attempt at her crocus border (a pattern I've always liked and which wasn't too hard) up in the top and left, and an e's and l's border along the bottom (not difficult technically but keeping them even was beyond me:


And this one was fun - this is a chrysanthemum, designed to fill up a square rather than be a repeated pattern:


Lots of fun! And my stitches are getting smaller. I finally quit in frustration not because of the quilting but because I keep having endless problems with my thread! The bobbin thread breaks, gets stuck and won't spool, gets loose and overspools, gathers up in lumps on the bottom, you name it, it happens. Every few minutes, it seems like, one of these things happens. My machine was recently serviced so I don't see how that could be the problem. I've dusted. I've changed the needle. I've threaded and rethreaded a billion times. Any thoughts from the quilters out there? (I have a pfaff, if that helps.)

Mini quilt giveaway!

I hit my 100,000th visit yesterday -- and to belatedly celebrate I'm giving away this pretty little mini-quilt, made by me. It's approximately 16 x 18, all cotton batiks, and it's waiting for a good home!

Here's the front:

Look - it's stippled! And yes, you're seeing pins around the binding -- it's not quite finished yet.

And here's the back. The binding isn't sewn down on the back yet, which is why this looks kind of strange:


To win this little pretty, all you have to do is leave a comment on this post between now and Friday. On Saturday I'll choose a random winner and post the winner's identity!

A few notes:

• You may comment as many times as you want. Each comment gets one name put in the hat. :)
  
• If you post an entry about this giveaway on your blog with a link back here and let me know that you've posted, I'll give you two extra entries in the drawing.
  
• Please leave email contact info if you're set no-reply, and be sure to check back on Thursday to see if you're the winner!

Thanks for visiting! I know this is small potatoes in the blog world, my 100K visits, but it sure feels like a lot to me!

Free Motion Quilting

I took a machine quilting class at the Quilting Loft in Ballard on Monday -- and what a revelation that was! Finally, finally, I learned how to use the free motion foot on my machine (including a trick I never would have figured out on my own about why this is hard to do on a Pfaff and how to get around it), and now a whole new quilting world is open to me -- I can quilt in something other than a straight line!!

I learned to stipple and make loops:

The instructor said most people prefer either stipples or loops. I thought the loops were really fun.

I made snails, and flowers, and stars on a chain -- and yes, these are all screwy, but it was my first time doing this and it takes a while to get good at it:


And back-and-forth landscape quilting, and something she called "Es and Fs" (bottom left corner):



And then I came home and practiced on some old quilts from my unfinished projects bin -- stuff that was probably never going to get finished anyways so I didn't mind practicing my less than perfect freehand motion on it. Like this old Christmas wallhanging I never finished. So I stippled and looped all around the snowmen and trees on this, then did stars in the border:


View from the back:


And then I bound this tiny little thing and did some back and forth quilting on it and made bubbles around the rocks at the base of the lighthouse:

Brett's taking this to work today to hang in his cubicle. It's tiny, probably 6 x 8 inches, something I got a long time ago out on San Juan Island. But very cute!

Another quilt finished, another quilt begun

Just finished the second of the heart doll quilts I've been making lately for Sofie's little friends -- this one has been sitting on my "get to it" pile for several months lately and I'm glad to have it finally done! As always, finishing it was no big deal once I got it sandwiched -- I got 90% of the quilting done in a single naptime, with a little bit of handstitching and sewing on the binding that evening. Added the label today and it's finished!! Yay!

Front:


Back:


The back isn't really pieced -- it's a single piece of fabric that looks like it's made of tiny blocks. My machine quilting is slowly getting better - I'm actually really happy with the wavy meandering line in the inner border and the tight parallel lines in the outer border on this one. And the hearts didn't shrink or distort in the wash as much as the ones on Molly's quilt, because I hand quilted a heart shape inside the border of each of them, which seemed to stabilize them. Live and learn.

And -- I'm extra excited because I'm signed up for a machine quilting class on Monday the 9th at which I'll get some expert help at learning how to quilt freehand on my machine. Which should make a huge difference in what I can do! I can't wait.

Being all caught up on the mystery quilt for the moment, I've also started working on My Blue Heaven, from quiltville. The first step of which involves sewing together SIX HUNDRED AND NINETY SIX triangles. Ouch. I've got 400 cut and about 200 sewed. But Brett's going away this week for four days and I'll have my evenings wide open to obsessively quilt after Sofie goes to bed, and I figured this will be a good project to work on while he's off gallavanting about at his high school reunion. I'm thinking of it as my own little quilting retreat.

And here's my take on what the mystery quilt is going to look like -- we find out the next step, which should be laying all the rows out, somewhere around the 9th. But I had to lay out my blocks and see what it looked like:



It's REALLY bright but I like it! This is my first truly scrappy quilt -- in that all of the little four squares and other small blocks that make up the larger pieces are just random colors from my scrap basket, evened out by the red, blue, and orange yardage that repeats throughout the quilt. I had a hard time with the randomness at the beginning but I'm officially hooked on scrap quilting and will be making a lot more things from strips. If you look closely at the little squares and triangles above, there's everything in there from neons to darks to christmas fabric. Look how it all blends together so nicely!

This is only about half of the blocks in the quilt top -- I ran out of room laying them out and just added the half and quarter blocks around it to simulate what the final top might look like. What do you think?

A few crafty things

Just a little bit of show and tell today -- first of all, here's a cat I made for Sofie out of one of her winter dresses (a really cute purple fleece) that I just couldn't bear to get rid of. Her friend Hazel has a cat that's laid out like this and which Sofie just ADORES and carries around every time we're at our house, so I drew it out on paper, approximating its design as well as I could from memory. And I stuck a bell in it, because Hazel's has a bell. :)



I'm happy to report she loves it, stumpy misshapen legs and all.

And - I haven't really shown a picture of the work I've been doing on the Quiltville Mystery Quilt, because up until now it's just been a series of small pieces that weren't that interesting in themselves. But for the last two weeks we've been joining all of those small pieces into a larger block called a spinning star:



And we made thirty of them, which laid out on the floor actually looks like a quilt!



That said, I don't think the final quilt is going to look much like this -- the quilt is called Orange Crush and the major fabric in it is orange, plus there's a bright turquoise accent fabric I haven't used yet either, which we haven't even used yet, and a whole other set of small pieces we haven't incorporated. There are three more steps until we're done. I can't wait to see what it looks like!

Gnomes garden party finished!

I just put the last stitch in this quilt for Sofie -- called Gnome Garden Party, and based on a piece of novelty fabric I bought on our last trip to Hawaii. I knew I wanted to build a snowball quilt around it, and ended up liking how the primary colored nine-patches set the whole thing in motion.

Here's the front:

My only regret now is that I didn't miter the corners -- but oh well! Live and learn.

Here's a closeup of the wonderful stitching -- I had this longarmed by City Quilting's talented Alayne Pettyjohn, who did a combination of spirals, rings of circles, and stippling:


And here's the back, also pieced. I need to label it but I haven't made the label yet, so I'll do that some other day:


I can't wait to give it to Sofie -- as soon as she gets up from her nap it's hers. She's going to have fun picking out the mice and gnomes who are partying all over the front, and unlike a lot of her quilts, this is a nice big one she can use as a blankie when she moves to a toddler bed.

Tulip wreath for MiniatureQuilter

Now that it's arrived I want to post some pictures of this quilt, which I made for Lisa over at MiniatureQuilter. She likes applique and doesn't really do that technique herself, so in exchange for her beautiful pineapple quilt she made for me, I made her this tulip wreath:



Here's a closeup showing some of the quilting from the back -- basically outlined stitched both sides of the wreath and did some swoopy scallops in the borders:


Once again I must bemoan my relative lack of skill at the actual quilting part. I'm getting better, but I'm still not great at it. I'm signed up for a machine quilting class in June, though, which I've been dying to take for a while now, so hopefully that will help solve such mysteries such as how on earth you pull the bobbin thread up from the back, or how you manage changes in direction when you're not using a freemotion foot.

And here's the full back -- just didn't have QUITE enough of that pretty green fabric, so I had to put a pink strip across the top and bottom.



And here's a post of it not only received but already hanging on the wall in her house!

Yay! Now back to focusing on my orange crush mystery quilt. And my nephew's quilt. And my log cabin top. But really, that's all. :)

Flea market purchase - lap quilt made from baby clothes

Flea market purchase - lap quilt made from baby clothes, originally uploaded by Brett&MeganZalkan.

Bought this at a local farmer's market today -- I loved the bright colors and the fact that some of the squares are obviously from baby clothes due to their texture or smocking. Isn't it cheerful? And next to nothing, so that's a bargain. It's just the right kind of quilt for playing in the grass at the park or snuggling up to read a book.

Update

Not a lot happening this week. I've been having migraine clusters this week -- one that lasted over 36 hours, followed by a day off, followed by another one that struck last night and has lingered through part of today. Bleah. So I'm not getting a lot of anything done other than just managing to keep up with Sofie and do some minimal house upkeep.

Migraines are an odd thing. I get the full aura kind, where you have big huge visual disturbances preceding the actual headache -- either bright flickering rings, blind spots, or (a new one for me this week) double vision. Yay. The visual distortions last twenty minutes and then the headache kicks in. And if you catch it early enough in the visual stage and take your prescription, you just MIGHT lessen the headache.

So it's always a race. Like last night, when I was two blocks away from home letting Sofie "take a walk" (a veeeeeery slow affair) when the blind spot hit. I actually had to pick her up, tuck her under an arm and sprint home to try to get a pill in time. I try to keep one with me but I don't always succeed. Now I'm stocking up again -- all my bags, coat pockets, etc. Because my brain is probably going to ambush me again any second.

Makes me feel like my brain isn't working right. Which, technically, it isn't. But it's a disturbing idea, that.

On other fronts, here's a little bit of quilting news. Two things in progress right now, although neither is progressing very fast. First, here's an update on the log cabin quilt -- I showed a bit of this a week or so ago, but have since finished the top. It's on the pile of stuff that needs to be quilted:



I haven't measured this but it's something like 3 x 4 feet. I'm not sure if I like what I did with the borders, echoing the log cabin design like that. But it's a finished top and it's pretty and it'll be easy to quilt.

I'm also working on getting borders on the little quilt below and finishing it up -- this is the first thing on the work pile right now. It's for MiniatureQuilter, my Internet quilting friend who sent me the beautiful pineapple quilt earlier this spring in exchange for a piece of applique from me:



So far today I put two borders on it, decided they were horrible, took them off stitch by stitch, and put on a new inner border, then decided I better take some tylenol and leave well enough alone.

It continues to be unseasonably cold here -- mid May and it's 44 degrees every morning. I've got a tray-ful of sprouted seed potatoes sitting on my dining room table waiting to be planted, not to mention a second set of tomatoes waiting to go in the ground. The tomatoes can survive, but I'm not sure about the potatoes -- the instructions say DO NOT PLANT UNTIL THE GROUND IS OVER 45 DEGREES. Which I'm sure it isn't. But they've grown nice little eyes and the eyes are turning into sprouts and they've just GOT to go in. So I guess I better get around to it by this weekend, warm enough or not.

The lilacs are blooming, finally, and all the planted tomatoes are doing fine. Both apple trees are blooming, including the one I thought I killed last year, and the herb border in the garden is doing great. The tarragon, especially, is almost knee high and just so beautiful. I'll have to make tarragon chicken soon. I planted extra chives and sage this year, and now I've got almost everything I like to cook with (rosemary, italian parsley, sage, chives, oregano, tarragon, fennel, etc) on hand in the garden. Yum.

Sorry for this sort of flat-toned entry. I still have a headache and it's the best I can do. Signing off for today...

Four seasons quilt swap received!

Came home from running errands today to find a big white envelope on the porch containing my Four Season's Quilt Swap quilt, from Jessica in Oregon. What a great thing to come home to! It was a quilt I'd never seen on the flickr group where people post their work in progress, so it was doubly fun because it was a total surprise!

When I first opened it up, I saw this side of it and oooohed and aaahed delightedly for several minutes before realizing that this is actually the BACK of the quilt:



Then I turned it over and was just blown away by the beautiful, whimsical front:



Check out the closeup of the dark-haired little girl on the swing:


Also in the package was a lovely card and a little hat for Sofie with a cat face and ears. She went to bed for her nap wearing this and I don't think she's ever going to take it off:


Here's Sofie expressing her true feelings about her new quilt, which will be hung in her room:


Thank you Jessica!! We love it!

Signature quilt

Now that it's gone out to its new owner, I can post pictures of the final version of the signature quilt:



This is a miniature quilt that a set of moms we play with made for one of our number who's expecting her second baby in June. I pieced the top out of thirties prints, based on a much more sedate-looking pattern in Prairie Children and Their Quilts, and the six of us signed the larger white rectangles with well-wishes for R. and her family.

The top was tied by my friend Dianne and then outline quilted by me. We did the binding together.

Simple quilt, but this was a tough one, design-wise. The original quilt uses patterns for everything except the white triangles where you sign, but when I tried to recreate this using bright, thirties fabrics, the result was somewhere between nauseating and seizure-inducing. So I had to start swapping out prints for solids, or for less busy prints, and then try to get some balance between all of the colors, scattering reds and blues and greens and yellows somewhat evenly throughout. In the end it worked, but it taught me some lessons about not assuming that translating a set of period fabrics into another period will be straightforward.

Quilting withdrawal

Well, two days into having no sewing machine I have:

• Finished the binding on one of the two hearts doll quilts I'm making - as soon as it's washed and all beautifully wrinkly, the way I like my quilts, I'll post a picture. Probably tomorrow. This is a gift, which will be going off to its new home this weekend. The other one is for Sofie but it's not quilted yet.
  
  
• Finished hand quilting the squares in this small quilt, which was going to be a swap quilt but has been claimed by my husband for his cube at work. It's made from a charm pack of different flower fabrics, cut down to 2 inch squares and set in a nice leafy green:
  
  
  It still needs some machine quilting on the green parts, which will have to wait. And I ran out of green so I don't know what I'm going to bind it with. Hrm.
  
  
• Decided I need to try to redo a couple parts of the tulip quilt -- one or two places I'm just not happy with on that. Except that it's half quilted now -- I was partway through outline quilting it when the sewing machine conked out. Hrm. I think I can still fix it as long as I'm careful about how I knot it.
  

And that's about it for hand-work right now. I've got a little ironing to do on the first step of the mystery quilt, and yeah, there's my big hand quilting behemoth I haul out now and then to work on, but I'm itching to get back to the machine bigtime. Oh well. I've kind of been overdoing it lately and a break will do me good.

And I suppose I could clean my office with the free time. Or nap. Maybe nap.

Today's random bits

In no particular order:

• Things I did not expect to learn from my child, part 403: Pickle juice, when rubbed in the hair or secreted under the neck and not immediately washed off, takes on an odor eerily similar to body odor. Which I discovered while sitting with Sofie in my lap at Gymboree the other day thinking, "Man, who smells?" only to lean forward and discover it was own darling baby who reeked. Wow.
  
• Sofie has taken to sharing her lunch with Phoenix, who comes over every day when lunch begins to sit on the table right next to her high chair and wait for what Sofie calls "gobble gobble" (turkey lunchmeat). When I give her a slice, the first thing she does is rip off a piece and put it on the table for the cat, who happily eats it up. This is so cute I can hardly contain myself from smothering them both in kisses. Sometimes, like today, he then happily follows her into her room for naptime and sleeps in the rocker until she wakes up. They're becoming fast friends.
  
• Right smack in the middle of about five quilting projects, several of which have to be done this month, my machine has gone bonkers (threads breaking off inside the machine, lots of nesting problems), and I'm forced to put it all aside and take the darn thing in for service. Yikes. It'll be a whole week before I get it back. Arg!
  
  What am I gonna do in the meantime? And will I get my two swap quilts done by the end of the month with this interruption? Will I have severe withdrawal? Stay tuned to see.
  
  Luckily I'm done with step one of the mystery quilt, and step two shouldn't be coming out for another week or so, so that will hold.

It's a beautiful day, in the 50s and sunny, and we're going out to play soon. As soon, that is, as the kid and the cat wake up from their naps. Any minute now.

Time to take the plunge

Sorry, father-in-law, this is another quilting post. I'll start and end with some gratuitous cute baby pictures for you, ok? Here you go:

Begin cuteness:

End cuteness.

***

So I've been quilting on and off for about ten or eleven years, but only quilting in what I would call a serious way for the last two years or so. Ever since my wonderful husband gave me a Pfaff Quilt Expressions for Christmas one year. Now I sew almost every single day, and am getting better at this bit by bit. And yet, still, I have never made a bed-sized quilt. Just little things. Little pretty things, but still little things. Crib quilts and wallhangings are a lot of fun, and I'm not set up well to quilt a larger quilt on my machine.

The largest thing I've made is probably Sofie's birthday quilt, (below) which still isn't finished because I foolishly decided to hand quilt it. It's darn close to twin-sized, I think.



Apparently I'm ready to take the plunge, though, since I've suddenly found myself working on two double-bed-sized quilts at the same time. How did this happen? I've already posted about my Sunny Lanes quilt, which I'm a quarter of the way through now and which is SO UNBELIEVABLY EASY that I can't believe I didn't make something from this book before now. No real pressure there since I don't have to have it done until my nephew's birthday in October. I'm trying to make one block unit a week. They're large blocks, so it goes fast -- only 12 in the whole quilt.

And now, I've signed up for the Orange Crush Mystery Quilt at Quiltville. Which is also full-sized. And I have no idea how fast that process goes -- if I'm supposed to get the whole thing done in a month or a few months or what. But I've pulled fabric for it and cut scraps and bought the little ruler I didn't have that was needed and so I guess I'm committed. We'll see how that goes! Here's my fabric for that one:



The orange and rust-red are batiks, and the blue in the back is much darker than it looks in this picture. The turquoises are accents. These colors seem sort of strange to me but it's what was called for in the quilt, plus a ton of dark, neutral, and medium-toned scraps. We'll see how it goes -- the last mystery quilt turned out to be a stunner so I'm sure it will be lovely when it's done.

Anyone want to sign up with me and compare progress? :)

****

And now for my gratuitous closing cuteness, here's Sofie at the egg hunt at the zoo last Saturday. She had a great time trying to clean up the whole zoo by herself. This is right up her alley.

Doll quilt

IMG_0007, originally uploaded by Brett&MeganZalkan.

I think I must not be liking the swap quilt I'm making. Because I keep finding something else to do instead of work on it. Like make an owl. Or today, make a doll quilt out of some old applique heart blocks I've had sitting in a closet for the last four years. I'm going to make two of these, because I have exactly twelve little hearts that were completed out of the fifty or so I was trying to make ages ago.

Nice, no? The red around the edges is just the backing fabric which is sitting behind it. It's also going to be the binding fabric so I just wanted to get a sense of how it looked.

Here's a more head-on view, again with the backing showing just for effect around three of the edges:


And here's the Four Seasons Swap quilt, so far -- all that's left is for the last two tulips to be sewn down. It'll take an hour, maybe. And yet I keep putting it off.



So why am I not finishing it? I think it's because applique, although I enjoy it, makes me a little neurotic. You're so up close to what you're working on that you can see every little imperfection and foible, even if they completely disappear when you back up a foot. I always second guess myself on pieces like this. But I think it's going to be nice. It's going to be set on point, so there are big triangles that go on each side to turn it into a square. I'm trying to think of something creative to do there.

Quilt show loot

I went to the Quilters Anonymous Quilt Show out in Monroe on Saturday with my friend Robin, and luxuriously spent almost the whole day there, taking it in at a leisurely pace. This show is gigantic -- two huge buildings at the Evergreen State Fairground, packed full of displays and vendors and special exhibits. Brett stayed home and had quality time with Sofie while I got out to play.

I had intended to take lots of pictures of the quilts I liked and post some of them, but my battery died after only five pictures, approximately twelve minutes into the day. Arg. So instead I'll show you what I got.

These are all fabrics for my spring swap quilt -- the green is a hand dyed fabric and the rest are a watercolor roll. I'll post more about that soon, but it's gonna be great!


A great animal print I couldn't pass up - Sofie has been enjoying pointing out the frogs and ducks and sheep and making the appropriate noises, so this will probably end up in a quilt for her:


Practical buys - thing I needed for projects in progress:


Pretty things I couldn't resist adding to my stash:


And a few more that are for a specific project I have in mind:


And a couple patterns I've had my eye on for a while:


And finally a couple charm squares and some sparkly fabrics for the next foxglove quilt:


Wow! Lots of stuff. But it was a great time, and I really enjoyed it. As Robin put it, people at a quilt show are really, really HAPPY. None of the stress and tension of everyday life, just lots of creative people walking around beaming at things and oohing and aaahing. It's a great vibe to soak in for an afternoon.

First block of Sunny Lanes - UPDATED

Well nevermind the post below about how sometime later this week I'd post the overall pattern four of these blocks make -- she slept so long for her nap that I got four done today. So here's the big x these blocks make. Now I need to make, oh, seven or so more of these big x's.



What do you think? Are the colors sufficiently manly enough for a teenage boy who's rather sensitive to these things?

***

First block of Sunny Lanes, originally uploaded by Brett&MeganZalkan.

I've taken a break from sewing for most of this week -- after I finished the purple thing, I didn't really feel like starting anything else. But today I sat down and started on what will be a full-sized bed quilt, for my nephew. It doesn't have to be done until October, but I wanted to get started on it so that I can make it slowly -- a few blocks a week, here and there, as I feel like it -- while still goofing around with other, smaller projects.

This is the first block -- pretty, no? The fabric comes from a set of charm squares from the Climbing Jacob's Ladder line, and the pattern is Sunny Lanes from Nickel Quilts. When I get four blocks and can show you how they lay out to make a larger "X", I'll post a new pic. I think it's going to be really nice.

Quitlathon today!

Judy Laquidara over at Patchwork Times is running a quiltathon today, and in my own slightly-lame way I've been trying to participate by sewing in whatever free minutes I have. Which isn't much. But here's what I got done during naptime:

Finished the quilting, cut and sewed on the binding and hanging sleeve on the pinwheel quilt:



Note that the binding is not stitched down on the back yet, which is why it looks a little loopy and weird right now. That's a hand-sewing job that I'll tackle tonight while watching television.

This was supposed to be a gift but I'm not sure -- it's got some mistakes in it on the borders. I was quilting through a paper pattern and it didn't go as well as I would've liked. So I think maybe I'll hang this in Sofie's room, where it will look great with the purple paint and green accents.

Also -- yay! I got the foxglove wallhanging put together and I love it!!



What did I do on this today? I connected all the blocks, removed all the paper, found some nice border material (you can't see it well here but it's small birch tree branches on a sky background, which I liked in the context of this quilt), and put the borders on. I also cut the backing and batting, so this is another hand-sewing job I'll do tonight to baste the layers and get it ready for quilting.

This one is definitely a gift, although I'm not saying for who yet. I'm going to make another version of it for myself, but the full quilt instead of the wallhanging -- the original pattern has four of these flowers next to each other, in different shades and heights. But I've been thinking about a gardener friend of mine the whole time I've been working on this, so once it's quilted, off it will go to its new home.

And that's it -- about all you can really get done in a day with a toddler afoot. But I'm here to make the other quiltathon ladies look good. :)