Oy....

Just wanted to give a quick thank you to Sew Can She for featuring my Curvy Pinwheels tutorial! It was great to have so many new folks drop by.

I'm hoping to have the energy to respond to all the comments soon, but we're completely wiped out from a wedding we went to all day Saturday. Let's just say that's the last time (I hope) we're taking two kids under 2 to a wedding....wow. It didn't even feel like a wedding, unfortunately, since we were so preoccupied.

I used the afternoon naptime today to recuperate mentally with a margarita and scrap therapy:

Days like today make me look forward to not waking up in the middle of the night so we can actually recover from long events!!

Till tomorrow, world.

BQF: Machine Quilted Baby Quilt

My second Blogger's Quilt Festival Quilt is another baby quilt (you can see my first entry here).

Since it was for a girl - and I don't have any girls aside from me in my house - I made it extra girly. I mean, pink, flowers, and a ruffle from a pink lacy print? I'm pretty much only short a bow for maximum girliness.

 

I could tell right away that quilting this one would be a treat. I started by stitching in the ditch along the scalloped diamond edges, along with the diamonds in the background. I used a Frixion pen to mark the background diamonds, which you can see in this picture:

Then I went back and quilted the rest with light pink Sulky thread, working my way out. I quilted a flower with tons of petals in the center green diamond, which made a great texture, and bubbles over the polka dot fabric.





I decided to try quilting a football shape over the bird fabric, mimicking the shape of the leaves in that print. This actually ended up being my favorite part to quilt.



Then I quilted some loop de loops over the pink and cream dot. Over the floral section, I quilted radiating petals of varying lengths (I'm sure there's a more concise name for that!). It's always fun to stop and look at the back while you're going along - I used a low volume text fabric, which really let the quilting shine.



Love that texture.

And finally, you can see the orange peel design in the negative space. I think the unquilted section turned out beautifully; it added some interest to the large background.

To finish it off, a ruffle was the perfect touch for such a darling quilt. The old-fashioned lace print went perfectly.

There's something so special about the texture a good quilting pattern adds to a quilt.

You can read my original post about this quilt here.

And here are my previous Blogger's Quilt Festival Posts, just for fun:
Fall 2012
Spring 2012
Fall 2011

Linking up to Amy at BQF! This one is in the home machine quilted category, so it doesn't compete with my first entry.

BQF Baby Quilt: Curvy Pinwheels

My first Blogger's Quilt Festival entry is this fun baby quilt, made up of Curvy Pinwheels. (You can find my second entry here.)

I was wanting something with a little more movement than a traditional pinwheel pattern, and this fit the bill! (You can find my tutorial for this block here.)

I made it for my husband's cousin, who never finds out the gender of her babies ahead of time (I don't know how she can stand to wait!!). Each block only takes a fat eighth of the print fabric, so I was able to whip this up with some leftovers I had from a fat quarter bundle.

I absolutely love how the binding turned out - I used some of Denyse Schmidt's Flea Market Fancy, with a small strip of a blue and green polka dot as an accent.

I machine bound this quilt with a contrasting bright blue thread for the zig zag, which gives it a great pop. It worked out well, since the baby ended up being a boy!

The backing was made up of a piece of Amy Butler's soul blossom fabric, plus a few scraps to bring it up to size.

Overall, I found this pattern to just be super fun to do. The large size of the blocks meant it was really quick to piece, and the gentle curves are quite easy to sew. I can't wait to do a larger version someday!

And here are my previous Blogger's Quilt Festival Posts, just for fun:
Fall 2012
Spring 2012
Fall 2011

 Linking up to Amy at BQF, of course! This is in the baby quilt category.

Rosie's Crib Quilt - done!

I don't know about you, but I'm getting my posts ready for Blogger's Quilt Festival - so get ready to see those soon!

We were at my in-laws' house from Saturday until Wednesday, and I wasn't able to get nearly as much done as I had hoped, but ah well. C'e la vie. Luckily, I do have a finish to show you though! Rosie's crib quilt:

I made mostly from her old onesies. I also added in some squares from a flannel receiving blanket, the binding fabric (to bring the gray into the rest of the quilt), and just a few blocks of aqua fabrics to help balance out the colors. I think gray, pink, aqua, and white made for a pretty cute color combination!

Luckily, I was able to preserve a lot of the adorable details from outfit, like pockets, embroidery, applique cuteness....

Below left, you can see one of my favorites: this custom onesie with her name embroidered on - love it! The block above it showcases one of the sleeves that had an embroidered flower on it. Seriously, why can't boys have clothes this cute???

In the photo on the right, you can see how I worked in some of the snaps because they looked to sweet to just throw away. The pink ones are the front of a set of pajamas, and the aqua ones are from the shoulder/neck opening of a onesie.


It was really nerve wracking to cut up this ND onesie - having gone there as well, and shopped in the bookstore, I know that their baby clothes are soooo expensive! Yikes....didn't want to mess this one up! I ended up using the sleeves as endcaps on each side of the ND emblem to round it out to the perfect size.

Overall, this quilt was trickier to do than I was expecting...perhaps because I did a lot of these "fancy" blocks instead of just sticking with cutting squares out from the backs of the outfits. But it was well worth it. I quilted it with a large scale meander so that I would have plenty of space to work around all of the embroidery and such without it looking like there were odd, empty areas of quilting. I thought it would be really hard to quilt since it was so thick (with the knit fabric and the stabilizers!) but it actually went really well. I used light pink Sulky thread and was pumped to try out some bamboo batting. It was SO SOFT. Even the lady at the cutting counter was commenting on it! I was really excited to use it especially because my friend Rachel is a natural momma and bamboo is one of the nicer, natural battings out there. Hypoallergenic for the win!

The back was a pink floral that Rachel sent me.

The binding fabric she sent me was perfect - love love love the polka dots! I zig zag machine bound this quilt. This method is growing on me, especially since I'm getting much better at doing it. I always had issues in the corners (with the zig zag popping on and off the reverse side) and am really happy with how it went this time around! I aimed to have the zig zag land completely off on the reverse side since trying to have it land completely on has never gone well for me. I'm really happy with how it went.

I'm excited to give this to her on Saturday! Can't wait to see what Rosie thinks of it :)

And I know I've been showing a lot of baby quilts - but don't worry, I have other things coming up soon!

WIP: Onesie Quilt

A little while ago, my friend was asking me how she would go about making a t-shirt quilt from her toddler's baby onesies. Oh my gosh, I thought to myself, that sounds adorable! I want to do that!!. So I asked, and surprise surprise, she was totally cool with passing off the job to me :)

So I've been busy turning her stack of onesies into quilting squares....

It took a little longer than I expected :)

Basically she sent some of the most adorable outfits I've ever seen:

Pretty cute, right?

Well, I didn't want to lose some of the cuter elements - like the puffy shoulders - but needed to get a little creative in somehow making them reach the 5" square size I was cutting. So I decided to topstitch these pieces to some other fabric to help bring them up to size. Here's how you do it:

Pin your onesie on top of the fabric you are using as the "base". (Both of them should have some lightweight fusible Pellon on them to help stabilize the stretchy knit fabric. I had the best luck when I used onesie fabric for the base, as well, instead of a much thinner quilting cotton.)

Sleeve and neck openings have thick edging. Instead of stitching through all those layers, I just stitched next to them.  Using your zipper foot, use a matching thread to stitch as close to the edging as possible.

Trim the base fabric down to size. All done! I think these blocks add a lot of character and interest to an otherwise simple quilt.

I hope to be back with some finishes tomorrow :)