A Baby Quilt

Some good friend of ours are adopting a baby soon.  We are so excited for them!  I designed a potential quilt, which may turn into a duvet cover, for them based on these pillows from IKEA (which I think are discontinued):

 

 And another quilt we found on the internet:

So here it is. I'm excited to get started on it. Of course when am I not excited to start a project?

What I Did Instead of Sleep

What do college and crafting having in common? All nighters. I finally got the motivation to stay up late and finish quilting Abby's quilt. It helps that we've been snowed in.  It's all quilted, now I just need to bind it. I'm going to do an invisible binding, so it will look essentially the same. I also realized that the size of the quilt is a little shorter than I was planning on, but at least it will make it easier for Abby to make her bed!

Felt Foods

This is an informational post for me. I don't have time to make these right now, but I'm getting tired of all the plastic play food that I'm finding around the house and these look like they could be fun (if I don't get tired of all the hand sewing). I'm sure that there are other places that I could get patterns from, but there are a lot of good looking foods here, including sushi. What kid doesn't want to play with felt sushi?

Felt Food Etsy Shop

(The link should work now!)

Neglectful Sewing

My sewing machines are getting jealous of my other projects.  Although, I've managed to churn out 4 hooded towels and embroider another one in the past week.  I have been meaning to post the instructions for making those for about a year now... 
I've reorganized my sewing area again.  I can't decide if I should get rid of a bunch of stuff or hang on to it.  The problem is that many many times I'll be in a fix and some of those things that I have left over from other projects, or got from other people come in extremely handy.
After Christmas, I'm not starting any new projects until Abby's quilt is done.  She'll be happy to finally have it after a year of waiting.  Part of the problem is that JoAnn's doesn't sell the pink print that I've been using and it is not exactly a popular color of pink at the moment.  The plan is to head out to a quilt shop to see if I can find something that might work, but I really don't want to take any kids.
That's what has been going on in my craft world.

Still Working...

This quilt is taking a LONG time. I knew it would, I just thought I would have more time to work on it. My goal is to work on it for at least a half hour everyday. Probably in the afternoon while Seth and Lucy are napping. I think that even with home schooling that it will work.
I'm really excited about some of the designs that I'm stitching. As soon as I get some good work done on them, I'll post pictures.
At some point, I'll need to start on our Halloween costumes. What I had planned, isn't going to work, so I'm going for something much, much easier. I'm putting my other idea on the back burner probably for a couple of years. It really does depend on what happens with the kids and school.

An intermediate post about Abby's Quilt

Well, I got it all laid out:

And sewn together:

Now, I have to go buy some of this (I'm going to use cotton this time, more expensive, but also more breathable and easier to sew, or so I hear):

And lots and lots of these:

And I need to track down some more of this (or at the very least something that is the same pink color):

I did the flowers on my embroidery machine, the designs once again are from Designs by Juju. I made the hill appliques on my sewing machine. I ripped strips of varying widths and sewed them together. Lucy's quilt is going to be very similar, but with purple and yellow daisies and a different striped print. I'm using a twin bed sheet for the backing and planning to use cotton or perhaps wool for the batting. I'm going to be sewing designs onto the strips, which I'll post when I get done.

Seth's Quilt

Well, I finally got Seth's quilt done. Sorry about the perspective on the picture.

Now that I'm done with it, I really like it. It went through several iterations. At first I was going to put animal print squares where the green jungle print squares are, it just didn't look very good, so I went with the jungle print. After I got all of the stitching done around the squares to quilt the front, batting and back together (referred to as "stitch in the ditch" by quilters), I realized that there was way to much room for the batting to move around and clump. So, I sewed around each of the animals, and then I wanted to do something on the other squares to help keep the batting in place, but also keep with the theme of the blanket. What I finally came up with was footprints. I found pictures of the animals footprints on the Internet, made stencils, traced them onto the quilt and then sewed around them. Here is what the zebra footprint looks like on the back of the quilt:


There are two of each footprint on the back, Zebra, monkey, lion, tiger, jaguar and elephant. Under Seth's name, I put his footprint. The animal appliques I made with my embroidery machine and got the patterns from Designs by Juju.

Apart from taking care of the baby, my major hold up was lack of skills and direction. I could have called it quits after stitching around the squares, but I'm glad I didn't. I think the quilt is awesome and I sure hope that Seth likes it. I'm not to happy about the stitching, but I'm learning and if I stay too concerned about perfection, I'll never get anything done.

Up next: Abby's quilt! This shouldn't take as much time because I learned a lot doing Seth's quilt and I've already got it started (it was something to work on while I was being indecisive about the direction I wanted to take with Seth's quilt).