Improv I-spy Baby Quilt

Well, I just looked up and realized that after a summer full of lots of fun with a very active and mobile toddler Esther, and plenty of time crafting, I didn't manage to blog at all. Oops! Other bloggers, does that happen to you where you want to spend every spare minute squeezing in the actual crafts and so you don't make time to blog about it?

Now that it is really starting to feel like fall I am planning to get back in a regular habit of blogging. So I wanted to share this improv i-spy quilt that I recently finished for a friend's baby (after it sat on my design wall most of the summer - hopefully they still get some good use out of it even though he's probably crawling around more than laying on blankets now!)  I started out cutting different size i-spy squares and framing them with different widths of solid colors, making great use of jellyroll fabrics.  I originally had thought about making them into wonky stars but I decided to keep it simpler and have the i-spy squares scattered on an improv pieced background.  I used my design wall to lay it out and pulled together a bunch of different grey fabrics for the background.  It turned out a bit darker than I anticipated but I think it's a fun modern take on an i-spy quilt!

I did a quick free motion meander quilting on it, and made an effort to avoid falling into my normal trap of tiny quilting - I couldn't believe how fast it went with big meanders, it probably only took an hour to quilt!  It was good to get some more FMQ practice, I think I should be brave and try a non-meander design pretty soon.

I backed it with a perfect-sized australian animals fabric that I had in my stash and bound in a solid teal.  I accidentally trimmed too close to the orange block when I was squaring up the quilt - originally it was intended to be floating in the middle like the rest of the blocks - but I actually like how it turned out that that one block is against the binding.

I have been doing tons of sewing clothes for Esther (more on that soon), so I'm having a hard time focusing on my quilting projects... I always think I'll get back to them after I just sew her one more shirt, haha.  But I have another baby quilt half pieced and a bunch of similar i-spy squares started for another i-spy variation for us to keep, so I should really get back to it soon!

Mod Mosaic Baby Quilt

I realized that I never shared this baby quilt which I made over a year ago - before she was born for a baby who is now walking!  I used Elizabeth Hartman's Mod Mosaic design although I think I pieced it somewhat differently than in her original floor pillow tutorial - I pieced small sections together randomly and then laid it out rather than laying out all the pieces first.

I mostly used the green/yellow/orange/pink colorway of Thomas Knauer's Savanna Bop fabric line, with coordinating fabrics from my stash, since the parents had shared a similar color scheme fabric with giraffes that they were using for curtains.  I quilted it with looping free motion meander design.  I didn't want to put a border on the quilt but I also wanted to echo the white strips in the quilt, so I used a flanged binding to have a border of white next to the green binding.

It seems like our friends are having another baby boom this spring so I am hoping to make a number more baby gifts for all these new cuties soon!

Lone Star Mini Quilt and mini-tutorial

I am nearly caught up with my blogging backlog, and I wanted to share this project from over a year ago (!) - a lone star mini quilt which I made for my friend Natalie of Greenleaf Goods.  Natalie was so nice and sent me some lovely placemats made with Lotta Jansdotter's Bella fabric when we moved into our new house, so when she moved to Boston I knew I wanted to sew something up for her, too.  I had seen some lone star quilts in her pinterest boards and I thought a mini quilt would be just the thing to brighten up her space!

I pulled some fabrics in a palette that I thought Natalie would like and machine pieced the star (more on that below) and it came together pretty quickly!  I added a few lines of echo quilting around the star and some hand quilted lines inside the star.  When I bound it I added twill tape to two corners for hanging.

Here's a quick mini-tutorial on how I did the machine piecing (I know that I looked at several tutorials online when I was figuring this out but it was so long ago now that I'm afraid I don't remember where to link to them).  This isn't a full tutorial with all the measurements and everything you'd need to exactly recreate this mini-quilt but it should be enough to show you how to do this technique.

If you look at the star, it is made up of 8 sections, each of which has 3 columns (or rows, if you prefer) of 3 diamonds.  Each of those three columns has a different set/order of fabrics.  Cut strips of fabric long enough that you'll be able to cut 8 units out of each strip (one for each section of the star), and piece them together in your groups of three, staggering the ends if you wish (to save fabric).  Cut into diamond shapes at a 45 degree angle making sure to account for the seam allowance in determining the width to cut.  ** I don't have notes on what width/length strips I used or how wide I cut the diamonds but I can go back and try to recreate this info if folks are interested **

Once you have your strips cut, lay them out as they will be sewn together, like this:

Make sure they are not laid out like this!

Then you will piece them in the order you have laid them out.  (The next set of photos are in different fabrics because I was testing the technique before I made the real quilt).  In order to match your points, first take a pencil and use a ruler to mark the 1/4" line at each of the seams.

Then lay your two strips that you are piecing right sides together and put a pin through the two seams at the point where you have marked.  Check that your pin is going through exactly at the seam on both sides, then secure your pins and sew the seam with a 1/4" seam allowance (going through the marked points).

Press open and sew the second seam for each section in the same way.

Then I added triangles of background fabric to each section, pieced them together and squared it up.  Here is a view of the finished piecing - I love how neat all the seams look pressed open.

Halloween Sewing

I'm still trying to get back to blogging regularly, as you can tell - in addition to being busy with the baby (and summer fun stuff until recently), I really have continued to struggle with what I should post about - I have such a backlog of fun things to share, I can't decide which to post so I just don't get around to posting! This is totally silly, I realize, but I do really want to share it all with you, so I'm going to just try to be better about jumping in and sharing something already. In this case, though, it was an easy choice since these photos have been sitting on my computer since last October and I wanted to be sure to share before halloween!

One of the wonderful things about owning a house and being somewhere we intend to stay a long time is that we have finally started acquiring grown-up furniture.  After years of having a tiny ikea dining room table that barely fit 4 placemats, we now have a lovely vintage dining room table with plenty of space for a table runner!  I have visions of making a whole slew of runners for our table but so far this halloween one that I whipped up last year is the only one that has come to fruition.

I had bought up this awesome Lizzy House halloween fabric last year and I was determined to actually use it rather than having it sit in my stash.  I thought these fun square in square blocks would be a great way to show it off (I am sure there is a real name for these blocks that I don't know - anyone?).  I just pieced them by measuring and cutting the squares and triangles but I realized after the fact that they would have been much faster and easier if I had foundation paper pieced them.

I backed and machine bound the runner with a solid grey kona fabric, with the goal of having the runner be reversible.  This is probably why I haven't motivated to sew any more runners since last year, the grey side of this has been a great all purpose, all season runner for our table that matches most of our placemats!  Making your runner reversible is a great way to get more bang for your buck (so to say), especially if you're making something like this where one side is really only useful for a few weeks a year.  I actually often lose track of the fact that this is actually our halloween runner and get a surprise when I take it off the table to wash it!  Which reminds me, it's been October for a week, I really need to go flip it over while it's still halloween season.

In the top photo above, you can also catch a peek of this fun spiderweb mug rug that I whipped up last year.  It's a bit of a play on the traditional spiderweb block, but done in a more improv style.  This was also a fun chance to play around with my low volume grey fabrics!  Maybe this year (or realistically at this point, next year) I'll make a couple other cute mug rugs/trivets that are also halloween themed to make a set.

How about you, have you been doing any halloween sewing?

A fun playmat

Before Esther was born, Lawson and I saw this fun map fabric at Drygoods Designs in Seattle and had to get it, since he loves maps.  I figured that it would make a good playmat/floor quilt for Esther and I meant to make it before she was born... which didn't quite happen, but I was happy to get it made a few months after she arrived and still in plenty of time for her to play on it.

She seems to like it, wouldn't you say?  Since I was sewing this with a newborn in the house, I kept it really simple - rather than quilting and then binding it, I sewed it more like a blanket (but using two layers of batting to make it a comfier playmat), and then quilted it after topstitching the edge down.  The quilting is some very minimal straight lines.

You can see, she's already studying the fun map in the photo above.  When we've had older kids over they've had lots of fun checking out the map and finding neat details on it, which makes me think this may be useful for a longer time than I expected!

For the back, I pieced together a bunch of black and white prints, since babies are supposed to particularly like looking at these types of high contrast images.  And I mixed in some fun i-spy type prints (keys, scissors, leaves, safety pins, dog prints), thinking they would be fun to point out and talk about when she gets older.  So it really is a pretty reversible little playmat!

Esther now has quite the collection of quilts, between the one I just posted about from my do.good stitches bee mates, and the earlier one that I made for her, not to mention several others that we have received as gifts... but between always having one on the floor to play on, having one to take to the park or on the back deck, having one to snuggle under (and having some in the laundry after all those activities) they really all do get put to good use!

A wonderful gift

As I mentioned in my earlier post, Esther received a lovely gift of a baby quilt made by the members of my do.good stitches bee, the love circle.  I so enjoyed the creativity that goes into the bee and the challenge of making different blocks each month, especially when the quilter for the month gave us some room to play around.  So the lovely quilt that Natalie coordinated, pieced together and quilted for us is so special to me... not only because its so beautiful in its own right but because it means so much to me to get to have a quilt that really represents how special and creative this bee is.

I love the scrappy back almost as much as the front - I have to use both sides so we don't miss out on this awesome star!

The quilt seemed so big when Esther was just a few weeks old but she is getting so huge it no longer seems big at all!  Its the perfect playmat (and great for the two of us to snuggle up under, too).

Huge thanks to all the bee members who contributed blocks and especially to Natalie for making it happen!  If any of you all area reading I'd love to hear who made which stars...

babies and quilts

Thanks everyone for your well wishes and nice comments on my last post!  As I mentioned, I really want to get back to blogging, but I have been continuing to have the challenge of having too big a backlog of things that I want to share.  So, I am going to just jump in, post whatever I feel like or in the order that seems to make sense, and try not to worry if there are things that just don't ever get blogged.

This particular post is one that I have been thinking about for a while.  Most of the quilts that I have made have been baby quilts, and so until I had a baby, most of the quilts that I made were gifts (in fact, I realized that Esther's baby quilt is the only actual quilt that I have finished and kept other than my very first small sampler quilt).  I know that many other quilters feel my compulsion to welcome new life with a soft, cuddly handmade creation.  But I also know that for me, I just love the process of making quilts, and while I put a lot of thought and love for the new baby into them, I also never worried too much about if/how they were used after they were gifted.  So it has been an unexpected joy as I have become a mother to see how loved those quilts are by those who receive them.

One lovely gift that we received before Esther was born was a joint present from a group of our friends back in DC - all of whom have small children that I had made quilts for.  Before sending us the gift, they sent pictures of each of the children with their quilt, holding up signs saying that they love their quilts but since their moms don't quilt they wanted to buy us the crib on our registry.  Honestly, seeing all the photos of the kiddos (some still babies, some older) with their quilts was as great a part of the gift as the crib itself!  It was so nice to know the quilts are being used and loved.

Later, at one of our childbirth/infant care classes, the instructor asked everyone by way of introduction to share a favorite gift that they had received so far.  I was amazed that at least half of the people said it was a quilt that a friend or family member had made for their baby - more than any purchased object, it was clear that these handmade gifts are cherished treasures.  Now that Esther is here, I have been joined a playgroup and have been going to other moms' houses, and there is always a quilt laid down on the living room floor for the babies to play on (or brought to the park, or put down on the deck or the lawn) - and there is always a story of who made the quilt for them, with love.  And as you can see from the photos here, Esther spends a lot of time playing on quilts at home too!

I just wanted to share these anecdotes as a kind of group thank you from new moms to all of you quilters out there - you may have realized how loved your gifts are, but in case like me, you didn't fully know, here it is.

So, on to the actual quilt in these photos!  I had a very hard time deciding what quilt design/color scheme I wanted to make for Esther's quilt, and didn't even start it until the last month or two before she was born... finally I had to tell myself that I would surely make her more than one quilt and not to stress out too much about this being her official one and only "baby quilt" that I made her.

The design was inspired by several quilts I had seen with a square pattern like this one by Amy Smart of Diary of a Quilter - I thought it would be fun to make it with rectangles, though.  I also made it so half the white diamonds were wider and half were skinnier - I like the way it turned out, but I think I might actually like it better if they were either all the same width or the differences between the two types of diamonds were more striking.  I realized I haven't taken any photos of the finished quilt that don't have a baby in them, but I figured you all wouldn't complain too much!  Hopefully you can get a pretty good sense of the design even though you can't see the whole thing at once.

I foundation paper pieced the blocks with templates that I drew, so the sewing went pretty quickly (which was good, since I was really pregnant and pretty low energy by that point).  I picked the color scheme thinking of springy colors and then as it came together I realized it was pretty eastery.... not totally what I intended but I am OK with it.  I free motion quilted it with simple loops (it was really quick since its so small), and was actually finishing sewing the binding on in the hospital as we waited for my labor to really start!  Lawson said that he knew the baby couldn't be born until I finished her quilt, so I guess its a good thing I brought it with me.

I also want to share a wonderful quilt that my friends in the do.good stitches love bee made for me, and another quilt/play mat that I made since she was born... but since this post is already way too long, I will save both of those for later posts.

Purple and red improv quilt

I'm going to try to get over my compunction to have to "catch up" on everything chronologically before sharing anything more recent and share this quilt that I finished earlier this month.  I love how it turned out so I didn't want to wait to share!

I made this quilt for a dear friend who lives on the east coast and has been having some pretty serious health troubles over the past several years that have gotten worse lately.  I was feeling pretty helpless to do anything from afar, but she has been having to spend a lot of time resting and I figured a quilt to wrap herself up in couldn't hurt.  I feel like I almost always am making baby quilts, so it was actually really fun to make something for an adult and not worry that it was going to be too modern or not what the parents wanted.  I've been so inspired by the improv quilts that my online friends have made, especially Krista and Natalie, so it was a great chance to play around with the technique!

I was pretty sure that my friend's living room had some bright red and purple accents in it so that was the color scheme I started with.  The Anna Maria Horner Innocent Crush fabric (near the top left in the block above) was a great fit for both the color scheme and the feel that I was going for, and it inspired me to add pops of bright yellow/orange in each block.  I used a mixture of scraps and cutting up some of my stash fabrics, so there is really quite a variety of fabrics in the quilt which is fun.

I tried to keep the blocks interesting with some more detailed/smaller pieced parts and some larger pieces mixed in.  I forgot to measure the final quilt and I don't think I even wrote down the dimensions of each block, but I am pretty sure that they were about 12"x14" before I added the white (Kona snow) borders, which I think were 1.5" strips to finish at 1" after I pieced them.  I used everyone's new favorite neutral, yarn-dyed essex cotton/linen blend in black, which I just love the texture of and how it plays off the bright colors.  I quilted it with a random lines design which I think is a great match for the improv piecing - you can't really see it in the photos but I quilted using a lilac thread which was a fun complement to the color scheme.

I also made my first scrappy binding which was a fun way to play up the scrappy, improv nature of the blocks.  I machine sewed the binding as I have started to do more often, it just is so fast and its nice to know that it will be really durable (although I still love a hand-sewn binding too).  The backing is a thrifted crimson red sheet which you can see a peek of above.

I'm happy to say that my friend loves the quilt and it's nice to know that I'm helping take care of her in a small way even if I can't be there myself!

3 months of bee blocks

I feel like every blog post I have written lately starts with an apology about how long it has been since I last blogged, so I won't do that, other than to say I certainly didn't intend for it to be this long and hope to get back into a more consistent blogging habit soon!  In good news, we are all moved into our new house and getting closer to mostly unpacked.  We are really enjoying the new house and I am hoping to have much more time for sewing and other fun pursuits soon!
So, here are my last three months of bee blocks that I made for the Love circle of the do.good stitches bee.  Above are this past month's improv block for Jacey - I hadn't done much improv piecing before, and I really enjoyed making them!  I'll definitely have to do some more improv projects soon.

For May, Deb asked us to make Patchwork Wheel blocks from (tutorial by Elizabeth of Don't call me Betsy).  I had fun making these scrappy bright blocks and enjoyed the secondary pattern of a star that emerges when you put them together.

For April, Rachel asked us to make Polaroid blocks loosely following this tutorial - but said it was fine if they had fewer than 9 polaroids in each block.  I liked the looser arrangement with fewer "photos" so I paper pieced each of the polaroids and then basically built each part up and fit it all together.  It was really fun to get to fussy-cut some of my cute fabrics and showcase them with these blocks!

1001 Peeps Half Square Triangle Quilt

I finally finished up the twin-size half square triangle quilt that I have been working on today (which I mentioned when I posted about my HST placemats).  Crafting time (and blogging time, clearly) has continued to be more scarce lately as we finalized our house purchase.  Thanks for all the well wishes on my last post!  We closed this week and will be moving in about a month, we are very excited!

So, about the quilt - this is the first twin size quilt that I have pieced and then quilted myself and it made me even more impressed by folks that quilt bed size quilts on their home machines... it definitely took at lot of wrangling (and made me think about getting a nicer sewing machine with more room under the arm someday).  It was gorgeous out today and we went for a walk in a nearby park and took some quick photos of the quilt while we were there.

Lawson was having a hard time holding it all up since it really is pretty big, you can get a better picture of the design in this photo where the quilt is folded 2/5 of the way down.  It is a (late) 8th birthday present for my god-daughter, whose favorite color is purple.  I knew she would love these 1001 peeps fabrics (by Lizzy House) as soon as they came out, and I think I bought them all a year or so ago - I'm glad that I was finally able to make this quilt for her!

The quilt layout is 8 blocks wide by 10 blocks high, and each HST block is 8" finished (so they were 8.5" unfinished).  I wanted to go with a pretty large block size both to make the project more manageable, and to make sure that the characters in the fabric were visible.  I made most of the blocks using the technique where you sew all around the edges a square and then cut it diagonally twice into 4 HST blocks (shown here), so I started with 13.5" squares of fabric (and then I did trim the blocks still, although I'm not sure it was really necessary).

I quilted it with straight(ish) lines on the diagonal and used a pinkish-beige sheet for most of the backing, with a pieced strip inserted.  I started with fat quarters of the 1001 peeps fabric and used almost all of it with this design, which worked out really well since I definitely hadn't planned it out before I bought the fabric!  If you aren't familiar with this fabric line, you can see a bit more of the details of it in the photo above - it has some more abstract prints and also ones with little characters and scenes.  It's super cute!

I'm linking up to Megan's Festival of Half Square Triangles over at Canoe Ridge Creations - there are lots of beautiful HST quilts entered, so definitely check it out if you haven't yet for some fun triangular inspiration!  I'm also linking up my HST placemats from my last post :)

Aqua, Grey and Yellow

I just finished sewing my first quilt top with half square triangles (more on that later), and since I had never sewn half square triangles before, I wanted to do a quick project to practice before diving into making a whole twin sized quilt top.  I made these using the method where you draw a diagonal line down the middle of a square and then sew 1/4" on either side of it - Jeni has a tutorial here.  I originally planned to make a pillow top, but then midway through sewing up the rows I decided I was more excited about seeing these triangles on my table than on my couch, so I sewed up two more rows and made a set of placemats.

The finished triangles are 3" so these measure a nice 12"x18".  I did my best to place them randomly, but I realized that with a scrappy patchwork version like this, where you don't have a defined light/dark or pattern/solid, pretty much any layout ends up looking like either zig-zags or flying geese.  So I tried not to worry too much about the patterns that emerged and just went with it.

Both to save time, for more durability, and to practice my technique, I did the binding on these placemats all by machine - I have done this before but have to look it up each time, this time I followed AmandaJean's tutorial and was really happy with how it turned out!

I bound and backed these in Kona Medium Grey, and had fun quilting them in two different patterns to create a little variety.  I actually really love how the backs look, it makes me want to make a set of really basic solid placemats that just have fun quilting designs on them!  Or maybe I'll just use the backs of these sometimes :)  I had a lot of fun learning a new technique this way so I am thinking that I may use this same color palette (or something that goes) in the future to make other scrappy placemats with different patchwork techniques that I have been wanting to try out.  Wouldn't that make a fun set?

Speaking of this great color combination... when I went to pull fabrics from my stash to make the HST blocks, I just gravitated toward this color combination, and it was only midway through all the cutting and piecing that it occurred to me that it was nearly exactly the color combination that Natalie had picked out for our March do.good stitches blocks.  I guess it was lurking in my subconscious, too funny!  It worked out well, though, because it meant that I had already gotten out all the fabrics that I needed to make my bee blocks this month.  I had a lot of fun with this pattern (following this tutorial) and definitely want to do more with it in the future - maybe make a table runner?  It was definitely nice to do some loose, improv-style piecing after lots of precise HST corners!


[ETA] I'm linking up to Megan's Festival of Half Square Triangles over at Canoe Ridge Creations - there are lots of beautiful HST quilts entered, so definitely check it out if you haven't yet for some fun triangular inspiration!