For a very special girl

This quilt is for Miss Lucy, a very special girl who just turned one and who’s adoption was finalized this month!  My neighbors, and friends now have two fully adopted daughters and it has been QUITE the journey, to say the least.  I can’t think of a more deserving family to receive my first gifted quilt!  Congratulations Elliott family of FOUR!

I finished this quilt top a couple years ago and put it aside because of one reason or another… probably because I had a baby or some weak excuse like that.  Buuuuut, Kelli showed an interest in it back then so I thought it would be perfect to finish it up with a modern back to reflect more of my current style and send it along to a loving home.

At the time I was SO jazzed about the pattern I stumbled upon– someplace I can’t remember, in a book called Super Simple Quilts #1.  By “Super Simple” they mean strip piecing!  Oh MY!  It was like a light bulb went on, this thing is Super-Stinkin’-Simple, even at my snail paced sewing speed it came together so quickly!  I recommend this little booklet if you want to wip something up quick– you know as fast as a quilt can be “quick.”

So far I am the most satisfied with my stippling on this quilt   I am improving with my Bernina Stitch Regulator (BSR), understanding tension much better, what needs to be adjusted on the bobbin case, the pressure on the foot, and what the appropriate stitch length is for my hand speed!  Alllllllll of that to get the perfect free motion stitches!  SO worth it!

Because I thought I was getting this to her last Saturday, before the previous week blew up on me, it is label-less but I went ahead and quilted it on her adoption day anyway.  I will stitch one up over the next couple weeks and ask for the quilt back so I can attach it.  I don’t think Lucy will mind.

It is backed and bound in Kona Bone and measures 39.5 x 51, and I machine finished the binding for the first time on a big quilt.  I will NOT do it again… between the ironing and fixing of mistakes I am not entirely sure it is ANY faster than attaching it by hand.  Maybe with a special biding attachment it would turn out better… but NEVER again!

mini quilt swap!!

Last night was our June LA MQG meeting and we had a mini quilt swap.  I have been itching to do a modern dresden, and this was just the excuse to get it out of my system with minimal commitment and time!  Those fab Heather Ross Gnomes were a lucky acquisition from Chris at one of our weekend sews!

I thought it fitting to pass on the fabric goodness to another MQG member, and THE PERFECT person got it!  Terri (and Chris) were my inspiration in the first place!  I fell in love with Terri’s mini quilt at the first meeting that I attended, and Chris’s @ that same meeting made me look at the traditional dresden in a whole different way!

Oh, and thank you Nicole for loaning me your dresden ruler!  It was THE BEST, I have GOT to get one now!

Alissa’s got a great mini quilt blog post and book review over on her blog today too, check it out!

Tomorrow I’ll post all the June meeting pictures including all the other mini quilts that were swapped!!

New design wall!

Around here laying out anything on the floor is no longer an option with little ‘a’ running around, so I finally bit the bullet and put a couple of nails in my wall to hang some batting as a removable design wall!  This is until I cash in on next years planned Mother’s Day gift and a get a real one like Ashley’s!   Until then, Ms. E and I are going to get some good miles out of this solution.

Please excuse her end-of-the-day-wild-hair and flash photography… but I’m usein’ what I’ve got!

for corinn

SO yesterday I had a surprise baby shower to attend for a friend of mine, and true to my nature I didn’t start on the gift until just hours before!  WHY do I do such foolish things, you may ask?!  Well, in my defense I have been working on all kinds of other things for Ms. E and her birthday TOMORROW, AND I really wasn’t inspired until the last minute.  Does anybody else operate like this?  I have such a difficult time sometimes all-the-time making decisions about how to put things together until I am paralyzed!  So if I wait until the last minute it FORCES me to make decisions, and in this case, also use a bit of horded trim that I had been “saving”… for what… I. have. no. idea… this was most certainly a worthy occasion.

Lets reminisce about the positive side of my “method” before we address the glaringly obvious negatives, shall we?  Yes, lets!  It puts me on a deadline so I work unusually fast and more efficiently, I finish what I started in the same day, and 100% of the time I LOVE what I create.  I haven’t made any bad last minute decisions, YET… I think it forces me to go with my gut and not enter into analysis-paralysis, as Lori would put it.  And, ummm, the negatives are… that it leaves NO room for error, mistakes, machine hiccups, temper tantrums, feeding your kids, keeping the house straight, feeding your kids, effectively parenting, or feeding your kids. :)  Crackers?  We’ll that’s all I’ve got right now.  Take it or leave it.  Awful. I know.  Oh, before your get undies in a knot, most of it was done during their long afternoon nap, but it never fails that there is about an hour and a half of overflow.  And my kids do not like when Nina has my attention and not them.  Just eat your crackers!

The final dimensions are 30×30, which is a bit over sized for a drag-along blankie, but I find that it is more useful for a longer period of baby-hood.  The brown is minky with textured dots, the great dusty lavender is a corduroy I found at Joann’s a LONG time ago, the dots are Kei Dots of course from Sewdeerlyloved, and the trim was (as I said before) a horded find ages ago from Stawberry Patches!  Oh, and the back is a premium creamy minky I got from SP, too.  I just LOVE the trim, and also how the Hope Valley Thistle Leaf (from fabricworm) coordinates with it all!

P.S. Does anybody know what that Alexander Henry floral print is called??  I had a request to make something else out of it, but I don’t know where to begin to track down more.   Thanks!

L.A. MODERN quilt guild!!!

SERIOUSLY?

One EXISTS!?

IT DOES!

There have already been two meetings, I was not able to make the first one but was so thrilled to be a part of the second on Monday!  The back story is that I found out about all the hullabaloo from Alissa (A-lisa) over at handmadebyalissa!  Alissa’s the first blogger I found who LIVES in my neck of the woods and has a more modern style, so you can bet I have kept a close eye on her!Anyway, this whole modern quilt guild is the brain child of her and a few other fantastic chicks, but since it is just starting out it really is being shaped by all who are joining up so quickly.  Jenny, the fab proprietor of the new Home Ec. shop on Sunset, hosted our little soirée!!  Oh my how I fell in love with this place, if you are local, GO GO GO!  So, we met there on Monday, and will continue doing so one Monday a month, and after the new year we will also be getting together one Saturday a month at a church in West LA to SEW! HURAH!  If you are in the area at all, and have any interest in all this crazy fun, JOIN US!  Chris over at Izzy Inspired joyfully made the trek from San Diego County, that’s a wooping hour and 40 minutes, folks!

ok, so here is me sharing– with great excitement apparently, my little Mr. A quilt that just came out of the dryer in ONE PIECE just hours before.  Phew!  I took the liberty of fuzzing out the expletive lurking in the picture!  Hanging in Home Ec., in context, it is quiet funny, but not partially in a picture above my quilt and front and center on my blog! HA!  To get a good laugh visit the LA Modern flickr pool with the original picture to see that and all the other quilts the girls brought to share and inspire all of is with!  *the full poster says: “Make #$*& Your Self”

After all, people we ARE a MODERN quilt guild! LOL!  Perhaps we will try to get that handmade print out of view next time?

EEEEEKK! My first truely-completed-quilted quilt!

Mr. A is now seven months, and it is difficult to ignore the irony that I finished his small roll-around-on-the-floor-and-spit-up-on-it quilt  the exact day he pretty much started officially crawling… that is to say moving his feet AND hands.  In my defense it has been 90% finished for MONTHS, it just needed the quilting and binding but my we little Brother machine decided that it was not capable of such fancy things! BUT the fantastic news is that I got a dream machine out of the deal, so lets just say this is one very expensive baby quilt!

I wanted it to be unmistakably boy, and when searching my stash this is what I came up with, along with the realization that I don’t have much that can be used for a boy!  I have plenty of almost boy stuff, but designers throw in a small flourish, a token flower or something that just tips the scale, for me, even though they are “boy ” colors.  The final measurements are  21.5” x 27.”

and the back…

Out of complete inexperience and probably a bit of ignorance I had the “brilliant” idea to embroider the back to coordinate with Mr. A’s announcements.  This meant I really had no choice but to do some free motion quilting and figure out how to stipple, and you know what?  I love how it turned out, I think I am going to try to do this again, and I highly recommend it!

A little quilt for my Ella & Molly too

Drum roll, please…

I am actually sewing again, it has been ages!!  Don’t get too excited though, it is nothing major, I just set out to do something new, and to learn a few new skills with stuff I already had.  The something new part is not a big stretch considering I am new to the entire sewing thing, nor was using something I already had.  So, I perused the all powerful Internet and decided to make  a little doll quilt for Ella using the brown minky she drags around with her when I am too tired to figure out how she found it again, and some charm squares I picked up from Strawberry Patches a couple months ago.  I figured, #1 it would be a small project just in case I lost interest, #2 I would give my poor daughter something proper to drag around rather than two raw yards of fabric, and #3 learn some patch work skills that did not involved squares and maybe come up with something decent where the corners matched!  This is the result using Moda’s Urban Chicks 1974 charm squares.

I found this depression block while searching, and it seemed easy enough since I already had pre-cut charm squares.  I ended up with one block and an extra row on the top and on one side to make it usable dimensions for a doll quilt.  The final dimensions are 20”x24”, and it works out quite well for baby Molly and mamma Ella.

Here are a few more pics for good measure too: