Blogger's Quilt Festival - My Quilt

Well, I don't have a new reveal for the Blogger's Quilt Festival. But I can show you one of my favorite quilts that I made this year, and it hasn't yet made an appearance on this blog—so that's just as good as a new reveal!

This is my "Vroom Vroom" quilt. I made this quilt for my nephew's first birthday. It was the first "boy" quilt I ever made, and I was extremely indecisive about it. I didn't want the finished quilt to look too babyish, since he was already turning one by the time I got around to making it. (I had a newborn at home myself!) I went through several different possible designs, using as many different fabric lines, before finally settling on this one, which is based on a Moda Bake Shop tutorial by Natalia from Piece N Quilt. I just eliminated the applique and a couple rows of blocks to make the quilt smaller, and ta da—I had a sweet and simple little boy quilt.

Here are some of the reasons I love this quilt:

1. This is one of two quilts that I've quilted myself on a long-arm (rented at a local quilt shop).

2. Love that stripey binding.

3. This fabric is thoroughly boyish, not too babyish, and yet it's super cute. That's not an easy combination to find!

4. This was one of my first forays into bold, geometric, modern quilt designs. From the minute I started piecing it, I was hooked on this look.

5. It was a gift for someone special in my life.

Is there an aspect of this quilt that I don't love? Yes: The back. I wanted to do some piecing on the back, but I just plain ran out of time. And the blue polka-dot fabric I used isn't ideal, but I had no choice. I had to pick from whatever was available at my local quilt shop—which is to say, not much. (Fortunately, I've since found an excellent quilt store that is a little further away, but carries plenty of modern fabric, so it's always worth the drive!)

Aside from the back, I'm really happy with how this one turned out. I think it represents a bit of a turning point in the evolution of my quilting, and I hope it's being used and loved in its new home right now.

Now head on over to the Blogger's Quilt Festival at Amy's Creative Side and check out all the other great quilts! What an amazing display and a fun event!

Another Work-In-Progress

Adding to my to-do list is probably unwise at the moment, but I couldn't resist joining the That Girl ... That Quilt Along. Especially because this Odyssea charm pack has been burning a hole in my stash for ages.

I haven't yet decided on my solids, but I think it will be some combination of Kona Bleached White, Ice Frappe, and Stone. Can't wait to get started!

Whirlwind Weekend Wrap-Up ... and Giveaway Winners

I had a crazy-fun and crazy-busy weekend–my 4-year-old and I took a quick trip to Washington, D.C., where we met my mom, sister, and grandma, who were all in from different cities around the country. My grandma has been wanting to see the World War II Memorial, so we decided to get together there. We had beautiful weather, an amazing suite at the Mayflower Hotel, delicious meals, and even better conversation among four generations of chatty ladies—so much fun! Then just a few hours after my plane landed on Sunday, it was my turn to host my book club. By the time I collapsed on the couch at about 10 p.m. Sunday night, I was wiped out.

So obviously I didn't do any sewing this weekend. But I did finish my Three Generations quilt and present it to the other two generations involved. And yes, I knocked out that binding just in the nick of time! In fact, I had to finish sewing about three-quarters of a side on Friday night in D.C., while we sat around chatting in the hotel suite. Only problem is: With all the craziness of traveling with a 4-year-old, I forgot to take pictures of the completed quilt before it was shipped off to its permanent home! Can you believe it? Oops. But I think I can get my mom to take a picture of it, so hopefully I'll have a "real" wrap-up on that quilt later in the week.

But enough about me: I've got giveaway winners to announce!

Winner #1, who gets the custom-designed blog header (or button, quilt label, whatever she wants) is ... #17, Elizabeth D. of Don't Call Me Betsy!! I love her blog, so I'm happy to be designing something for it! Yay, Elizabeth! : )

Winner #2, the winner of the Mod Charm fat quarters, is #72, Jane P.!

Congrats, ladies! I'll send you both an email. And thank you, thank you, thank you to everyone who entered. Hosting a giveaway is so much fun, I hope I can do it again very soon. And I've added many great new blogs to my Reader, so I'm looking forward to hearing more from all of you!

Advent Calendar Wall Hanging - A Tutorial

Not excited about another $2 cardboard Advent Calendar with penny candy already sealed inside? Neither was I. If you're going to have a calendar prominently displayed in your home for almost a month, it should look a little nicer than that, right? So I designed this calendar for last year's Advent. It comes together quickly and the pockets are roomy enough for a delicious treat or two!

You will need:
• 1 fat quarter of my Advent Calendar fabric, available from Spoonflower (Each fat quarter makes TWO calendars—one for you and one to use as a gift!)
• 24 5" x 4.5" squares of holiday-print fabric (charm squares work great - just trim 1/2" off one side)
• 2 4.5" x 8" strips of coordinating fabric for hanging tabs
• 2 17.5" x 28" pieces of white fabric for background
• Strips for binding
• Wooden dowel and ribbon for hanging
• 17.5" x 28" piece of fusible batting (I think fusible batting is perfect for small wall hangings)
• Fusible webbing for appliqueing numbers and title header

1. Sandwich your fusible batting between the two white background pieces and press to fuse. I didn't do any quilting on mine, but if you would like to do all-over quilting on the background, now's the time!

2. Prepare header and numbers. Decide which header—red or green—you want to use. Cut the fat quarter in half, separating one header-and-number-set from the other. (Set aside the other set to make another calendar as a gift later.) Fuse the entire piece to fusible webbing. Cut out header strip and cut each calendar number into a circle shape. It's difficult to see in the photos, but there are light gray lines around each number to use as a guide for easy-peasey circle cutting.

3. Prepare pockets. Along a 4.5" edge of your printed squares, fold in 1/2" and press. (This will be the top of your pocket, so if you have a directional fabric like I do below, plan accordingly). Fold in another 1/2" and press again.

4. Top stitch about 3/8" from pressed edge with coordinating thread.

5. Fold the other 3 edges in 1/2" and press. Turn corners under as you are pressing, as shown above, for a neat mitered corner. You should now have a 3.5" square pocket. Repeat until you have 24 pockets.

6. Add numbers to pockets. Decide on a layout/order for your pockets. Fuse a number to the front of each pocket, centering it by using an ironing grid. Applique as desired (I'm not much of an appliquer, so I did a simple straight stitch 1/8" from the raw edge in white thread).

Note: The print on your pocket may show through the numbers a little if you use Spoonflower's quilting-weight fabric. It didn't bother me that much, but if you don't like it, you could always order your Advent Calendar fat quarter in one of their heavier fabrics, like the linen-canvas blend.

7. Arrange header and pockets on background. Position your header strip about 1" from top edge of background piece. Arrange your pockets below the header in 6 rows of 4. Don't overthink your positioning—my pockets were spaced about 3/8" apart, but if they're not 100% precisely aligned and spaced, it will still look fine. Pin pockets to background piece. Pin them slightly loose, so they'll be roomy enough to hold treats!

8. Attach header strip to background. Fuse header strip by pressing. Using your walking foot, applique the header by sewing a straight stitch in coordinating thread 1/8" from top and bottom edges. Don't worry about the side edges—they'll be hidden by the binding.

9. Attach pockets. Using your walking foot, topstitch each pocket onto the background by sewing 1/4" or 1/8" from pressed-under edges on three sides (right, left, and bottom). The walking foot is a necessity—using a regular foot will cause your pockets to slip and go crooked, or they'll be too tight to put anything in them!

10. Prepare hanging tabs. Fold each 4.5" x 8" strip in half lengthwise, wrong sides together, and sew 1/4" or from raw edges to form a tube. Turn inside out and press.

10. Bind. Before pinning binding to the front of your wall hanging, position hanging tabs with one short end aligned with top edge of the wall hanging, about 3" from each side. Pin binding over top of the tabs, as shown, and sew binding to front of wall hanging as usual. Before sewing binding onto the back of the wall hanging, loop the tabs over the top edge and hide the other end of the tabs under the binding on the back.

11. Slide hanging tabs onto wooden dowel. Use ribbon to hang your wall hanging. You're now ready for Dec. 1!

And yes, that's the birdie from my blog header, making another appearance on the Advent Calendar header. I think he's becoming my mascot. : )

In addition to the standard Advent Calendar goodies, I also put a slip of paper into each pocket that describes a holiday-themed activity that my girls and I can enjoy that day. Whether it's decorating cookies, making a homemade Christmas tree ornament, or just drinking hot cocoa together, we have something fun to look forward to each day of Advent.

I hope you'll try this one yourself! Enjoy!

Modern Meadow Baby Quilt

I'm making quilts for two babies being born in the spring. In both cases, the parents have elected not to find out the baby's gender ahead of time. I know there's a lot of cute gender-neutral fabric out there, but gender-specific quilts are just so much more fun!

You probably know where I'm going with this—yes, I'm going to make one boy quilt and one girl quilt, to be distributed as needed after the babies are born. If they are both girls or both boys, at least I only have to do one quilt after-the-fact. And I have three more friends who are hoping to be pregnant any minute, so I know the unused quilt will find a home sooner or later.

So here's the first. This is my crib-size version of the Chain Linked pattern by Amy Smart at Diary of a Quilter. One of the two babies' nurseries will be almost entirely white and cream, so I wanted to do something with that two-tone component. Amy's pattern was perfect for that (I used Kona White and Kona Ivory). And if the other baby ends up with this quilt, it's still neutral enough that it should go with any décor. I just love how the geometric-ness of this pattern works with the geometric-ness of the Modern Meadow prints. And I think I just created a new word—geometricness! Now I just have to figure out how I want to quilt it.

And hey—look what I picked up yesterday! They finished it a whole day early. Let the binding begin!

Last but not least, don't forget about my giveaway!

Locked and Loaded

Binding strips prepared: Check.

DVR stocked with episodes of House Hunters, Top Chef Just Desserts, that Austin and Santino show, and other brainless television: Check.

Bottle of pinot chilling in the fridge: Check.

I am ready to hand-stitch some binding onto Three Generations. Just waiting on the call from the long-arm quilter that it's ready to be picked up.

P.S. Thanks to everybody who has already entered my giveaway! If you haven't yet, don't forget: There's a custom blog header and some fab fat quarters on the line!

My First Giveaway!

You know, I wasn't too sure about stepping into the blog world. It seemed like a big commitment, and I wasn't sure if anybody would even read it. But people actually are reading it, and I can't tell you how much I appreciate that. I don't know any quilters in "real life" other than my mom, so to get involved in this amazing online community of creative crafters has been so much fun for me. As much as my sweet husband tries to feign interest in my latest fabric purchase, nothing can replace interacting with people who are genuinely into it.

So I think it's time to say thank you. It's time for my first giveaway! Two winners!

Winner No. 1 gets: A custom-designed/illustrated blog header by a professional graphic designer—me. : ) I'll work with the winner to choose colors, fonts, a subject matter for the illustration, etc. Then I'll create something that's uniquely yours and can be dropped into your blog template, along the lines of my header above. If you'd like to incorporate photos into the header (either in addition to or instead of the illustration), that's fine. And if you already have a blog header that you like, I can design a button for your swap/bee instead, or even a custom quilt label that you can have printed on Spoonflower. The choice is yours!

Winner No. 2 gets: These fabulous "Mod Charm" fat quarters from Anthology Fabrics.

So, you know the rules, ladies. You get up to three chances to win.

Chance 1: Leave any comment here. Tell me what you're working on, what you wish you were working on, whatever you want.

Chance 2: Comment that you're a follower. (Reader counts.)

Chance 3: Blog about my giveaway and shoot me a comment on that. I'm still not on the Twitter, so sorry, no chances there.

I'll announce the winners on Oct. 25. Good luck, and thanks for reading!

GIVEAWAY IS NOW CLOSED.

Today's Happiness

I went to the mailbox, and look what I found! The fabric fairy paid me a visit—in the form of A.J. Dub from Harriet the Homemaker Strikes Again. It's my first swap fabric ever—so exciting!

Not only did she send me an adorable holiday FQ for the Ho-Ho-Holiday Swap, she also threw in this cute pink FQ, because she remembered a blog post from weeks and weeks ago where I mentioned I was collecting pink and green fat quarters for a bed quilt for my daughter. So sweet, thank you A.J.! : )

She has a great blog where she talks about sewing and all other things domestic, so go pay her a visit if you haven't already.

Wordless Wednesday

Okay, not so much. (As my husband would surely tell you, I'm bad at "wordless". )

My Kissy Fish quilt is being featured on GenX Quilters today! Head over there and check out Anne Marie's excellent blog, if you haven't already. And Spoonflower linked up to my blog on their Facebook page yesterday! Thank you, Spoonflower! How cool.

Meanwhile, in addition to finally cutting into my Modern Meadow, I've also decided what I'm doing with my stack of Hope Valley FQs. Hint: It involves more squares and half-square triangles. I'm into those lately.

Spoonflowering

So, who else out there has tried out Spoonflower? I've been dabbling in it for over a year now, and every time I get something printed with them, I love it a little more. The first time I heard about it, I got positively giddy: You mean you can get anything you want printed as a repeating pattern on fabric? With no yardage minimums? Anything? The possibilities seemed endless.

This is probably old news for some people, but if you're not familiar with it, Spoonflower is a digital, on-demand fabric printing service. Basically, if you can design a repeating pattern, you can be a fabric designer. Right up my alley!

I made these tote bags as a class gift for my daughter's preschool teachers last year. Another mom and I had each child draw themselves, and I scanned the drawings, assembled them into a repeating pattern, and had it printed on Spoonflower's canvas-linen blend (which is nice and heavy and perfect for tote bags).

I also made throw pillows for the class volunteers and a rag quilt for my daughter using the print, as a memento of her first year in school. I had labels printed for each item, which made me think that this would be a great way to make all my quilt labels. And a print made up entirely of my daughter's own artwork is definitely on my to-do list! See what I mean about possibilities?

More recently, my mom was lamenting the lack of cute tennis-themed fabric. She's quite the bag-maker, and some of the ladies on her tennis team had requested tennis totes, but the few tennis-related prints she could find out there were tacky, tacky, tacky.

And so, my debut fabric line was born. : ) I finally got the printed samples a few days ago. I tried to make it recognizably tennis-themed without being too literal. (Okay, the double-racquet print is pretty literal, but other than that.) I even got a little crazy and put it in two color ways: Yellow and black, or the green and blue shown above. They should make some good totes for my mom's "tennis ladies," and anybody else out there who happens to want a tennis bag. I may tweak the blue a bit (it's looking a little too royal for my taste), but otherwise it turned out just as I envisioned. Click here to see the full collection on Spoonflower's website.

If you've made something cool from Spoonflower fabric, I'd love to hear about it! And if there's any interest, I'd be happy to post some tips on designing for Spoonflower, based on lessons I've learned.

Three Generations Top

My Three Generations quilt top is finally done and off to the long-arm quilter. What a relief!

My goal with this quilt was to create something that was both vintage and modern at the same time. I wanted it to look as though it owed something to every time period during which it was worked on. Basically, I wanted to span the last 50 years of quilting in this one single piece, and maybe use that to tell a story about the three women who worked on it. Lofty goals, and I'm not sure if I accomplished my mission, but you know? I love it just the same. Couldn't be happier with how it turned out. It's not exactly my usual style, but it's not exactly not my usual style either, if that makes any sense. Plus, it's colorful and fun and pretty and sentimental and will be a genuine family heirloom someday.

And it's clear that all of my stops and starts and pauses to regroup and redesign were entirely worth it. So I guess working on this quilt has been a lesson in trusting my gut. When my gut says I need to change something, usually my brain screams, "No way! Keep going! Just finish the freaking thing!" (Sometimes I think my gut is a better quilter than my brain. My brain always just wants to hurry up and finish, so I can move on to the next project that it's cooking up.) But this quilt shows that I'll be happier in the long run if I put in the extra hours, effort, and thought to make it right. Brain and gut need to work together for optimal results. : )

The quilt store is estimating that the long-arm quilter will be finished with it around Oct. 19. I need it no later than Oct. 21 to be able to give it to my grandma when I see her in person. So there is a glimmer of hope that it will be completely done, when I wanted it to be! I'm prepared for disappointment, but encouraged nonetheless. I'll post full details on this quilt (fabric, etc.) when I get it back from the quilter.

P.S. Check out my blog's snazzy new look! I figured it was time to settle in and hang some pictures on the wall in this bloggy home of mine.

"Kissing Fish" Baby Quilt - Free Pattern!

Good news! This tutorial is now available as a full-fledged PDF pattern, totally free of charge, on Craftsy! Click here to download the pattern.

On Deadline

Happy Monday! I had some pesky social obligations this weekend, not to mention a smallish volunteer project for my daughter's preschool, so I didn't get as much sewing done as I had hoped. Amongst all that, I did manage to make a little progress on my Three Generations quilt. Not much, but a little.

I'll be seeing my grandma in less than three weeks. She lives very far away, so I probably won't see her in person again until next summer. It would nice to have this quilt done in time to give it to her when I see her. And I'm not talking about "done," as in "I have no idea how, when or even if it will be quilted, but isn't this top pretty?" No, I'm talking done, as in really done—quilted, bound, the whole shebang. So tonight after the girlies are in bed, I might just barricade myself into my sewing room until I have a completed top and a back. If it's 7 a.m. Tuesday and nobody's heard from me, please tell my husband that the kids probably want oatmeal for breakfast.

And I have many more things in the works that I can't wait to post about, as soon as I get a chance! I might even have a tutorial or two up my sleeve. So stay tuned.