Finished Twin Quilts

I meant to post about these quilts last week and totally spaced it. I guess that's what you get when you're chasing after three little kids, working full-time, and never feeling like there are enough hours in a day.

Anyway, here are my first FINISHED quilts of 2012! Took me long enough, right?

I mentioned in this WIP Wednesday post that my nephew and his wife had twin boys a couple months after I had my baby. We were so excited for them! And while I was floored at the thought of becoming a great-aunt at 29 (although, let's be honest, I've been a "great" aunt since I was 5), I was super excited for my parents to become great-grandparents and for my sister to become a grandma. The only downside is that my nephew and his little family live thousands of miles away in Chile and I won't be able to meet these little guys anytime soon.

And while I couldn't be there to help out while the babies were in the NICU or while my nephew and his wife were living away from home to be close to the hospital, I could make them quilts.

First up is Jayden's quilt. I used a couple-year-old sock monkey print from Moda for this one. I cut 10-inch squares and then stacked them together for the stack and whack method.

I added the green Heather Bailey print (Winter Road in Slate from her Nicey Jane line) for more color variety and used the leftover pieces for a scrappy binding. On the back, I used the sock monkey books fabric, which I happened to get for a steal at my LQS (like 75% off!).

Next up is Sam's quilt. This space robot fabric is from David Walker's Robots line for FreeSpirit. I had a bunch leftover from my son's quilt and decided to use it to make an offset squares quilt inspired by Jessica's Baby Blocks quilt. I added in the green and gray fabrics (I Heart Gears from Rashida Coleman Hale's I Heart line and Kona Charcoal) since I didn't have quite enough robot fabric.

I used the gear fabric for the backing and a Kona yellow for the binding (not sure the exact color).

My typical binding method is to machine stitch the binding to the back of the quilt and then sew it to the front with a nice topstitch. However, I bent my walking foot a while back and my binding has been bothering me on the last few quilt I've made. I used my typical method on Jayden's quilt, but half way through attaching the binding to the front, my walking foot totally stopped working. So I had to use my regular foot to finish. For Sam's quilt, I decided to try Kati's machine binding method, which she demoed at one of our guild meetings. Her method consists of stitching the binding to the front of the quilt, folding it over to the back, and then stitching in the ditch on the front while catching the binding on the back. I was skeptical at first, thinking that I'd have a hard time catching the fabric underneath that I couldn't see. But, after trying it on Sam's quilt, I'm pretty much sold...and I can do it easily without my walking foot.

One of my sisters is making a couple diaper bags using the scraps that I had leftover from the quilts. So, as soon as she finishes those, I hope to get these shipped to their new owners ASAP. It's almost winter in Chile and those babies need to stay warm!

Goodies for Spicing Up the Kitchen Swap Round 1

If you haven't had a chance yet, you can enter the CSN Stores giveaway by leaving a comment on this post. I'm drawing a winner tomorrow (Tuesday 1/17/11), so hurry on over.

*************
For the Spicing Up the Kitchen Swap, the deadline to mail the items for our partners is March 1. I started and finished mine yesterday (a month and a half before the deadline and only a few days after finding out who my partner is).

BUT, don't think I'm an over achiever or anything. The real reason I finished these up so soon is that my sewing time will drastically be reduced starting the first of March. See, I've been working from home for the past three and a half years, but come March, I have to start working in the office again. Boo. There are a lot of projects I want to work on (not to mention the other two swaps I will be in between now and April and the bee I'm in this year). So I'm trying to spend as much free time sewing as I possibly can. Thankfully, the mister is very understanding and encouraging. =)

I stalked my partner for a few days, pulled out some fabric, and started brainstorming ideas. I decided to start off with an apron. My partner likes Nicey Jane by Heather Bailey (at least I'm pretty sure she does), and I just so happened to have a fat quarter of this floral print and some of the green stripes. I half-followed this tutorial. Thanks to Traci for making one and pointing out the tutorial.



I opted to make the apron reversible, so I pulled a yellow fat quarter from my stash that matched the Nicey Jane fabric (I'm sadly lacking in the yellow department).



Next up, I made a couple of patchwork towels. I found some really soft bamboo cotton towels and added a band of various fabrics to the bottom. Simple, but cute.



I thought about stopping there (since the swap expectations stated that they didn't want us to get overwhelmed by trying to come up with too many items for the swap), but I had a few leftover pieces from the towel and put them together into a little mug rug. If my partner isn't big on mug rugs, she has a couple places in her kitchen for a little mini quilt wall hanging.

I added a little bit of stitchery because my partner said she liked that too.



So here's all the loot. I hope you like it, partner. I'm planning on sending this off tomorrow. It has quite a way to travel, so I'm hoping it makes it to its new home safely.

Finished Monopoly Mixtape Quilt

I finished this Monopoly Mixtape quilt a couple days ago. I used Elizabeth Hartman's Mixtape Quilts II pattern (for purchase here). I initially planned on making the Favorite Songs layout for a 47x47 quilt. Since I decided to make the quilt at 9 at night, I opted to leave out the sashing and just sew the 6-inch blocks into rows and columns. That way, I had a finished quilt top by the time I went to bed. Omitting the sashing left me with a 36x36 quilt.



As this is for a new little baby-to-be, I wanted to try quilting with a flannel backing to make it softer. I thought it would be really shifty, but it was surprisingly the same as with a cotton backing.



I like how the quilting adds another type of texture to the flannel.



I still need to work on getting a consistent stitch length as I'm quilting. For some reason, I just want to move the quilt fast and I have a hard time slowing down.

To save time, I trimmed the backing to about an inch and a half and then turned the edge over and then over again to self-bind the quilt. I did this a few weeks ago on a quilt my brother-in-law asked me to bind for his wife for a surprise Christmas gift. The corners didn't turn out as well as I would have liked on that one and I wanted to see if I could figure out how to miter them properly. I think it worked well this time. It certainly helped that the flannel I used wasn't shifty.



I think the quilt came together nicely and I think my friend will like it. She's having a girl, and since it's her first, she's really excited for all things pink. I'm not a huge fan of "baby pink" so I thought I'd add a little brighter pink to her nursery.

The only unfortunate part of this quilt is that I finished it before making my practice dresden plate. I think that flower would have looked so cute sewn onto the back of the quilt.

Finally some quilty sewing!

After Christmas, I was so excited to get started on some new projects. You might say I was a little impatient. I felt a little scatterbrained at first trying to decide what new project to start, so I ended up starting three.

One of my quilt plans for 2011 is to make a new quilt for my bed. The mister and I decided to go with the All Star 2 line. My plan is to make square-in-square blocks. Here are the first two.





I'm not sure what the final size blocks will be. These are about 12 inches, but I'm just kind of winging this one. The finished quilt needs to fit our queen-sized bed so I might finish the blocks at around 16 inches. We'll see how they turn out.

I got a baby shower invite in the mail yesterday, so after working on the two blocks last night, I started a quilt top for the baby-to-be. I tried out Oh Fransson's Mixtape pattern, but made a few modifications to speed up the process. I'll talk about this more later as I work on the quilt (it's due by next Friday), but I left out the sashing and I think it came together nicely.



Finally, I decided to start on a Kitchen Windows quilt from Elizabeth Hartman's book, The Practical Guide to Patchwork, using two of the colorways from Far Far Away 2. I wasn't quite sure what fabric to use as the "windows." I initially went with Kona Green Grass to create a lot of contrast between the windows and the background. But, the more I looked at the fabric, I didn't like how the color changed depending on the light. In natural light, the fabric matched the colors in FFA2 nicely, but in florescent light, it totally clashed.



The problem with going with a neutral, though, is that I'm worried the quilt will just get muddled.



Then I had the thought that if I go with the green window sashing, the green might overpower the FFA2 fabrics and stand out more than anything else. I kind of want the FFA2 fabric to be the star of the quilt, so I'm torn.

Any suggestions?

Shop Hop

As I set out for the Wasatch Front Shop Hop and the Scenic By-Ways Shop Hop in mid-June, I had good intentions to hit most of the stores within 45 minutes of my house. After the first stop, however, I hit a big rock and blew out a tire. The mister was at the park with our kiddos, but since I was close to home when it happened, he was able to come to my rescue. He offered to let me take the other car and he would just stay home with the kids, but I didn't want him stuck there all day. Instead, I went to another shop during my daughter's nap and then hit one more on the way to my quilt guild meeting that night. I wanted to visit more of the stores, especially the ones that I hadn't been to before. However, I think hitting that rock was a blessing in disguise because I had a fairly good haul just from the three shops I stopped at. Who knows how much money I would have spent had I visited more.

I'm trying to branch out from just buying fabric in collections. My goal of visiting these shops was to find fabrics that I liked to start building my stash outside of fabric lines. I broke down and bought some Summer Song by My Mind's Eye for Riley Blake, but the majority of the items I purchased were random.

Some Summer Song and Bloom and Grow

Summer Song and Meadowsweet

Nicey Jane dots

Neptune

All-Star
Summer Song

Do you remember my submission for Natalia's Ugly Quilt Contest? Well, I ordered this rocket fabric for the backing so if I totally hate the quilt top when it's all finished, I can at least use ths back side on my son's bed.


And since this Heather Bailey fabric was on sale at Fat Quarter Shop when I bought the rocket fabric, I grabbed some of this for the New Wave quilt I'll be making one of these days.