Charity Quilts

You may remember that months ago I started a charity quilting bee, Love Life Quilts, making baby quilts to donate to the local pregnancy crisis center. Well, I am happy to report we have two quilts complete and ready to be donated!

Those working at Mother and Unborn Baby Care told me they gift donated baby quilts to the mothers when their babies are born. So we went in the gender specific direction with the colors of our quilts. For me personally, once I knew I was having a girl I wanted it to be clear by her clothes, bedding, etc. that she is a girl!

Our first quilt is a scrappy string baby girl quilt. I requested these blocks right around Valentine's Day...can you tell?! I think it turned out pretty.

The strings are various widths and shades of pink, red, and white/cream. Final blocks came in at 12.5". I decided to set them on point to add some interest, and went with a grey binding to tone down the riot of color a bit. I happened to have that backing fabric in my stash, the colors coordinated perfectly.

For our second quilt I gave bee members a color card to draw inspiration from. I wanted a baby boy color palette that was a little different from my usual, which is blues and greens. We went with simple 9 patch blocks in random arrangement. I think simple patchwork in bold colors has a nice effect.

I used a backing fabric that was generously donated by one of the bee members. The binding is a black blender from my stash, I thought a dark binding would frame this quilt nicely.

A big thank you to all the Love Life Quilts bee members for contributing! If you would like to join our quilting bee and help show love to those in crisis, please contact me.

A Trio of Baby Quilts

Well it's been awhile! I can assure you I've been sewing these last few months...just not blogging. I just finished up three sweet baby quilts that have a very special purpose. I'm excited to share these!

It has been on my heart to somehow make a difference with the talent and passion God gifted me with. I have a soft spot for little ones, children and babies in need, yes, but especially the unborn. Pregnancy crises happen all of the time, and it is my wish to help, in some small way, to love these women finding themselves in an undesirable situation and to help them love the small life growing within them. Life is precious.

I stumbled upon a local pregnancy help center accepting donations. You can find more information here. This is where I've chosen to donate these three little quilts.

So without further delay-here they are!

This first quilt is my wonky star patchwork quilt. I love the fact that I used all scraps for this one. Many were left over from previous projects and already cut to the right size. Those fun plaids jump out at me but still blend nicely, I think. The white stars against those rich colors make for one gorgeous baby quilt!

 

This is my snowball quilt I named 'Pearl'. It just makes me think of a delicate string of pearls when I look at it. I used a charm pack that I won from a bloggy giveaway. The color palette is much softer than I normally choose, but I think it's beautiful. Maybe I should use soft colors more often. And don't you love that pink floral backing fabric?! It's been sitting in my stash for far too long.

I don't have a name for this last one, but it makes me think of stained glass windows. It was born out of scraps from my granny square project. I had so many 2.5" squares lying around, they were begging to be turned into something pretty. I think this quilt can read gender neutral too, which is nice not knowing the recipient. The backing fabric was another long-lost stash fabric.

It feels so good to have these completed on their way to new homes!

A pillow and a new WIP...

Well I'm sick of winter, how about you? I'm trying not to complain too much...but it does get old this 20 below zero weather. One of the few perks about winter is the excuse to hunker down inside with some hot tea, movies, and lots of soft blankets and pillows to snuggle under. Speaking of which, I have another pillow cover to share!

Look familiar? I had left over scraps from my Christmas stocking and couldn't bear (no pun intended!) to put them away. I had to use them up. I've been enamored with this scrappy improv diamond block lately and I thought it would make a fine pillow cover. Viola! Quick and simple winter pillow cover. I don't love my pillow form though, I think I went the cheap route when I bought this one and it's just too lumpy and floppy.

I've been having so much fun making sweet little baby quilts. Here's another one I started, a scrappy patchwork wonky star quilt. I'm really starting to rack up the scraps so I was determined to only use scraps for the patchwork in this quilt. Happily, most of squares I'm using were already cut to the right size. Score!

My inspiration came from this photo:
 

I love the colors in this quilt, contrasted with the white stars.

I made mine wonky...just because. Since I took these photos I've added another row and more blue squares. I'm starting to piece the blocks now. Our frigid weather does give me more sewing time at least!

On my design wall...

...a new quilt top, recently completed but shown here in progress. I've been calling this one my 'man quilt'.

Awhile ago I thought it would be fun to make a quilt with a more masculine flair. And I wanted it to be scrappy. So I dug out all of my blue and green scraps and cut them into rough strips (if they weren't already). I didn't have enough green and blue so I added grey and black too. I wasn't being very discriminative in my fabric inclusion...so there are some interesting, arguably non-masculine prints in there. But that's OK, I like it.

I've wanted to make the cover quilt from Sunday Morning Quilts for a long time. This seemed like the perfect project to try it out. It's so much fun! No worrying about perfectly straight strips or precise 1/4" seams, this one is charming for it's imperfections. And for all of the pieces of fabric, it still comes together pretty quickly.

This quilt will go to a special guy, I'm pretty sure he doesn't read my blog so it should stay a surprise. I hope he likes it. BTW, there are over 75 different fabrics in this quilt top! A record for me :-).

Christmas gifts - Part 2

I finally got around to photographing the Christmas goodies I made for Lorelai! Between the dreary unphotogenic weather and normal mothering business it has taken me far too long. Plus we were using them already so there was the matter of getting them through the laundry ;-).

In a previous post I mentioned that I'd be turning these lovely towels into embellished hooded towels for Lorelai. She has outgrown the infant hooded towels and I still really like having a hood for her...plus this project is just cute and fun!

I used this tutorial. It's a very simple project, the trickiest part was sewing over the really thick parts of the towels. I broke a few needles. I found ways to avoid the thickest parts though, so no more needles were sacrificed in the making of this gift. The blue towel went to my nephew, and I wrapped it up before snapping a photo of the finished product.

I love this raspberry towel, it's probably my favorite. As luck would have it, around Black Friday towels were on sale everywhere, so I got a really good deal on all of these. I wasn't thinking during my online ordering frenzy though, you can make two hooded towels out of one hand towel so I should have doubled up on the colors. Next time. Flannels were on sale at JoAnn too. They had so many cute prints to choose from!

When Lorelai was born my dad nicknamed her 'little cupcake'. It stuck. So when I saw this festive cupcake print I had to have it. I didn't have a plan for it when I bought it, but I think it's cute on a towel.

This was my attempt at getting Lorelai to model her towel-ha! She wouldn't keep the hood on for more than a second and she was off before I could even get her to face me! Too busy for momma I guess.

And here they are, all stacked up. We've been using them regularly now and we love them. They are so cozy and plenty roomy for our little cupcake.

On to my second project. This was a big one. By big I mean intimidating for me. I decided to make Lorelai a Christmas dress since I made her one last year. This time I actually bought a pattern off of Etsy. I thought that would make things a little easier, take some of the guesswork out of the project. I am not much of a garment seamstress. I've made a few things in the past but I get so discouraged when things don't fit perfectly and need a lot of adjustment.

The pattern was great, detailed instructions and great photos. It comes with several options-short, long, or 3/4 sleeve, sash or no sash. Since this is a winter dress I went with long sleeves.

I think it turned out pretty cute! It was a bit big on her (I made the 12 month size), and I wasn't surprised because she is such a peanut for her age. I ended up shortening the sleeves a little. And that fabric! This was the year of the penguin. It started with a cute little penguin decorating we have in our living room. Then we found a cute little stuffed penguin at a craft fair for one of her Christmas presents. So this fabric was perfect.

And here we are on Christmas Eve, getting ready to go to church. She had just woken from her nap, like momma it takes her a while to wake up!

Christmas gifts - part 1

Did Christmas go by in the blink of an eye for anyone else?! Weeks of preparing, anticipation...and then, in a whirlwind, it's over. I have to say, for the most part we had a really wonderful Christmas. Lots of quality time with family and friends, cookie baking, Christmas movie watching. I loved it!

This year I wound up making more gifts than I ever have, which had me working over time the month of December to get it all done. Yes, that's why I've been absent here. But now I'm excited to share all I've been working on!

I still need to photograph a few things so let me share the handmades that have found new homes. Please forgive the poor lighting in these photos! We had an unusually warm, dreary Christmas here in Wisconsin.

This past fall my mom requested a mug rug to take to her new office. She wanted soothing teal and blue tones, which happily I have a lot of these days :-). I recently discovered the quilting section of my local library and checked out Quilt Improv by Lucie Summers. Great book! I've been interested in improv, in a hesitant, look-from-a-distance sort of way. This book was a great intro, it helped me get my feet wet without being scary or overwhelming. So I tried her string diamond block (not sure if that's what she called it). What a fun block to make! My scraps seem to mostly come in the form of strings, so this is a great way to use them up. I love that it ends up looking a little complex even though it's a very simple and easy block to make.

Around the same time my dad requested coasters for their new home. He didn't really give me any input which made this project really challenging for me. I usually like some sort of design guardrail, a spring board to jump from. Since fall colors tend to be their go-to I went that direction but a little funkier. A little brighter. My husband understood my color vision right away (and I didn't even coach him!) so I guess I got it right.

But as I finished these up I started to see an 80s geometric aesthetic. Gah! NOT what I was going for. After contemplating MANY other coaster designs, none of which seemed quite right and in any way exciting, I ended up gifting these. And now I think I like them after all. In all their 80s glory!

Of course about a week before Christmas I added two quilted stockings to my 'make' list. Because I needed more to do ;-). These stockings are for my brother-in-law and his fiance. When they asked for stockings for Christmas I just couldn't NOT make them. As fate would have it, I had bought some adorable camping themed fabrics at a local quilt shop just a few weeks prior. I thought maybe I'd make something for my husband's side of the family because camping is in their blood. Here was my chance!

They are not traditional stockings I guess, no Christmas fabric or even Christmas colors. But I like tailoring stockings to each person's tastes. I think it's a little more special that way. I kept a couple of the camping fabrics consistent in each stocking and then added fabrics from my stash to customize them.

I really wasn't sure how I'd like all these fabrics together, I had several scary 'do these fabrics look hideous together????' moments, but I think they ended up looking nice. I just love those little retro campers! And the guitars and fish are perfect for my BIL.

The backs are not pieced. I was crunched for time...and you don't see the back anyway! I finished them just in time (December 23rd!) and I think they were well received.

Now to track down my daughter's handmade gifts and photograph them...

Stockings

We finally have stockings for everyone in our family! And they are even hung! But I'm getting ahead of myself. Let me start at the beginning. I really get into Christmas. Yes, I'm the crazy lady watching Christmas movies in October because I'm that excited. So about five years ago when my husband and I moved into our first house, I was determined to go all out with Christmas decorations, including making stockings for each of us. I found this really cool spiral stocking pattern in American Patchwork & Quilting, and started on my husband's. This pattern is paper pieced, and there are A LOT of pieces. And this was one of my first paper pieced projects. It turned out really neat in the end, but I won't lie, it was a lot of work. So of course my motivated stalled after finishing this one.

Because my husband is pretty non-traditional in his tastes, I chose non-traditional fabrics and colors. He liked it. Or so he says ;-). Fun fact, because there are so many tiny pieces and I wasn't confident in paper piecing, I left all the paper in the patchwork. The stocking has a bit of a crinkle to it, haha.

Fast forward to last winter. Having Lorelai renewed my motivation to make stockings for our family. I decided to move away from the spiral stocking and went with simple, sweet patchwork squares in colors and fabrics that made me think of Lorelai. Red, pink, aqua, a little grey/cream. And those little gnomes appear again!

Scrapping the same stocking pattern as before meant needed a new pattern. But I wanted the stockings to be the same size and shape. So thinking I'd be smart and avoid tracing the finished stocking for my husband, I used the individual paper pattern pieces from that project. Well, obviously something was lost in translation. Lorelai's stocking ended up much bigger! Oh well, more room for goodies I guess.

The process for this one was pretty simple. I basically made a piece of patchwork that would cover my stocking pattern/template, trimmed it to that shape, basted it to some batting and quilted it. I trimmed my batting down, and then I used this tutorial to add a lining and cuff. I had to figure out my cuff dimensions though, they were not the same.

I plowed ahead and completed my stocking in November. I wanted it to be similar to Lorelai's in that it would have some kind of pieced body with a solid cuff. I didn't care too much whether all my stockings match...I wanted them to reflect each family member. So for me, it had to be those polar bears. They come from Laurie Wisbrun's Brrr collection. This is an older collection, but I drooled over those polar bears in the red/turquoise colorway for months. When I finally purchased just two small cuts of fabric I hoarded it for many more months, waiting for just the right purpose. I'm so happy to have these pretty fabrics turned into something lovely in my living room!

So here they are, all finished and waiting to be stuffed with treats on Christmas Eve :-).