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...

Blog stuff

A brief non-baby/non-craft related post... as I am sure you have all heard, google reader is going away (or has it already?? I am really not on top of this).

I confess, I actually have not been doing a lot of blog reading of late - in addion to having had a few other things going on like creating another person, I have just been finding it easier to share and connect on instagram (I'm @needleandspatula) and since I so often read on my phone, I find the blog format harder to keep up with there.  I think I'm not the only one in this boat.  But I really do find that sharing and creating community by blogging and reading/commenting on other blogs is a deeper way to connect at least for me, and I am working hard to do more of both posting and reading others' blogs.

I am sure you are all way ahead of me on this, but as you know, if you want to keep following my blog (and I hope you do!), you'll need to subscribe elsewhere if you are currently following in google reader.  I have subscribe by rss and subscribe by email links in the sidebar and I am going to add a bloglovin button for good measure - for now you can click here to follow my blog with Bloglovin.

Can any of you give me advice on if there's anything else I need to do to make it easier to follow my blog in a new format?

Thanks so much folks!

And so this isn't a photoless post, here is a baby pic:

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.