Quilts of 2009

1. Quilt for Teacher's Baby, 2. DQS6- finished!, 3. Dime Quilt- completed!, 4. I Spy Stars- Finished!, 5. Strip Twist in the garden, 6. DQS7- Completed!, 7. Star mini, 8. Tile Quilt Finished! , 9. Bunny Bed Quilt, 10. Baby Brick Quilt, 11. Juicy Jungle quilt12. Not available

Here they are: my competed quilts from 2009. I still have 3 WIPs waiting to be finished: the I Spy Houses Quilt, the Bright Snowballs quilt and the Stars & Strings tabletopper. I hope to finish at least 12 quilts in 2010. Happy New Year!

New Year's Wishes

Happy 2010! I'm looking forward to a better and brighter new year. While I have many wishes for the coming year- and decade, and beyond- I'll just talk about my sewing-related wishes here, since I didn't get around to making a Christmas wish list. While I was annoyed by having a January birthday when I was a kid (too many "joint" Christmas/ birthday presents and birthday gifts wrapped in Christmas paper), it's pretty handy now that I can roll over the things I didn't get done for the holidays to my birthday. And if these don't work out a birthday gifts... well, there's always some other occasion later in the year!

Singer Walking Foot- after quilting for 2 years without one of these, it would be great to put a better finish on my quilts with a walking foot!

Dresden Plate Pincushion- love the colors, love how much easier this would make it to access all my pins & needles! (Also sold locally at JoAnn's!)

Collaborative Quilting- Great inspiration from some of my favorite quilters!

Applique Outside the Lines- I'm interested in learning the Piece O' Cake applique technique and the designs in this book are fresh & fabulous!

One Line at a Time- One of my quilting goals in 2010 is to improve my machine quilting skills- this book looks like a great starting point for me as I like simple, geometric designs with minimal marking.

Thousands of Bolts, Sew Mama Sew or Hancocks of Paducah gift certificates- Do I need fabric? No! Would it be nice to be able to obtain the perfect fabric that I must have to finish a project without breaking my "no buy" rule for this year, because I don't have anything in my stash that will even remotely work ? You bet! A gift certificate to one of my favorite online (or real-life) fabric stores would save the day!

Flickr Pro Account- I love sharing projects and inspiration with the great sewing and quilting communities on Flickr, but I am about to run out of space on my free account. Whoops! I either need to be way less prolific or upgrade... and I don't see the former happening anytime soon :-)

A Juicy Jungle finish and continued Houses development

December has been a whirlwind of a month, but I did manage to finish a quilt and get a bunch of work done on another one, in addition to making a bunch of Christmas gifts and all the other holiday bustle.

This finished quilt was a total departure from my disciplined progress at whittling down my WIP pile. Whoops! But sometimes you just need to go where Inspiration leads you, or that Lady won't come around any more.


I've had this Alexander Henry Juicy Jungle and the yellow Jackie Shapiro Animal Stencil in my stash for ages, and I thought they would end up as kids' clothes. But one weekend recently, they jumped out at me and asked to be paired with some vintage fabrics and pink polka dot I had hanging around. The result is pretty irresistible, as my daughters demonstrated... I couldn't get a picture without at least some of their toes in it!


The back is fun, too- especially when you can see how sparkly the clouds are! It makes for a two-sided quilt, which is fun, since my girls claimed it and the older one likes the front, and the younger one likes the back.


I also am making progress on my I Spy Houses quilt. I had been having a lot of fun improvising houses, figuring I would end up somehow with sizes that fit together perfectly for a quilt top. Then, as I was reading Freddy & Gwen Collaborate Again, I realized that all I needed was some variably sized sashing to for a fabulous center panel. My plan for the borders changed once I put it together, and I am now about halfway through making 6"-ish log cabins for the borders. I'm planning on quilting this with a 3" lattice but who knows what will end up happening!

Baby Bricks Quilt

This little quilt was inspired by Kaffe Fassett's Baby Bricks Quilt from Glorious Patchwork. It's for our friends M & S's son who is already about 3 months old! It's made from 3.5" x 6.5" pieces of men's dress shirts that I rescued from the thrift store. After a hot wash and a lot of cutting and sewing, they make for a supremely soft baby quilt!

The back is pieced with leftover bricks, plus some chambray and muslin from my stash. The binding is also from my stash. I tied this one with Cascade 220 superwash worsted weight wool. I like the way it turned out, but it was very difficult to sew through the quilt layers with such thick yarn! I ended up using a carpet needle and it was still a challenge.

M&S prefer more traditional, subdued styles and colors than my typical palette, so designing a quilt for their little boy was a good stretch for me. I love these shirting fabrics for a little boy, and am looking forward to making a log cabin quilt from the scraps.


With this quilt finished, my stack of quilts to finish is getting smaller. I've been working on whittling down the pile of projects in my sewing room before the year's end. The feeling of completion is so satisfying, and while I'm basting, quilting and binding, I can let my mind explore the possibilities for the next quilt I'll start.... Fun!

Bunk Bed Bags

Now that my 7 year old is reading chapter books independently, she loves to stay up late and read in bed. We got book lights so that she and her sister can read when they want to and not disturb the other one. I made them little quilted bags to hold their books and lights so they don't loose them as a little pre-Christmas present.

Here's the fabrics that my 7 year old picked out:

And the ones that my almost 4 year old picked out:

The book lights are by Mighty Bright, and they have been great too!

Winners!

We picked the 4 winners for the Star Quilts Giveaway last week- congratulations to all of them!