A couple WIPs

It has been a busy week around here, but not a lot of quiltyness. Hubby has a picture on his phone of what I have been up to, so once I get it uploaded, I will share. But until then, here are my current WIPs:

I didn't realize how awful this picture was until I had it on the computer...but that's what I took so that's what you get!

I have a stack of squares pressed and waiting to be squared up that I plan to work on this weekend. I'm at the stage of wondering if I chose my fabrics well for this quilt; hopefully that will pass once I get them squared up and figure the layout.

And I have this gorgeousness: 

Yeah, there are 5 other quilts underneath there...and a baby walker...and a diaper bag...and a backpack...
Anyways, I got my blocks sashed and sewn up, and I have to say, this one is looking good!

Now, I need an opinion. Is the pink fabric sitting on top there too dark of a pink to use as binding? I could use some feedback, because I am on the fence for this fabric. It is way darker than the rest of the pinks in the top, so I can't decide if it looks good or not. Help! Then just to figure out the backing...

Have a fabulous Memorial Day Weekend!

Purple People Eater

I made this quilt based on Oh, Fransson's blocks from her Paintbox Quiltalong. It is a graduation gift for a sweet girl that is a friend of my sons. I had one of my sons ask around to find out her favorite colors and he came back with purple, black and silver.

It's done in all different purple prints, although some of the purples look really washed out in all the pictures.  Apparently purple is difficult to photograph? One time when it was on my design wall, I called it the Purple People Eater, and the name just stuck.

My sweet friend and my daughter's bff, Melanie, took pictures for me when we were at the park on Saturday, but apparently there is such a thing as too much natural light because the pictures she took of the front of the quilt looked a bit washed out, but the back looked great. I loved this big swirly black and grey for the back.  The fabrics screamed for swirly quilting, but I haven't done much quilting besides straight quilting and I was terrified to try swirly on this one. I mean, literally nightmares about trying to quilt it and then having to tear out the quilting because it was so bad! So, Kirsten came to the rescue and quilted it for me and she did such a terrific job, don't you think?

I didn't know how I was going to be able to include silver in this quilt, but check out this fabulous swirly fabric I got for the binding. Yes, that is SILVER! Not gray, shiny silver.  Just the right amount of bling to finish off this quilt.  My son has been showing it off to all his friends except the girl that it is for and I get to give it to her tomorrow night after graduation!

Blogger's Quilt Festival!

So I had all these good intentions of taking new pictures of my festival quilt, but I just hosted a 1 year old's birthday party. New pictures are not happening :)

This is Zoey's string quilt. I had just started this quilt during the last festival, so I didn't get to feature it then, but I get to now!

The patch of blue and green on the back was ALL of the cut scraps of blue and green from the front!

This quilt lives out in our living room, and gets used for pretty much everything now.

I free motion quilted loopys all over. Still an early attempt at my free motioning, and I improved a lot on this one.

And here it is in use by the owner :) (This isn't a current picture, this was Thanksgiving!)

Thanks for stopping by, and have fun checking out all the amazing quilts in this year's festival!

I jumped on the coal train

I started another new one :)

Bedroom window drapery

Spencer and I finally have something covering our bedroom window! I finished these panels 2 weeks ago and they have been sitting on the floor of our living room since then...But these were on the list during our major-end-of-the-semester cleaning on Saturday.

So, these are not *exactly* how I would make my drapes look if I had the cash, but when you are a starving college family, you do what you have to! The fabric is actually a remnant from work that happens to look pretty dang good with our new bedding(that is still not done...). So I rolled with it! I'm going to add some sort of red trim to the top edge once I find something I like.

You have to understand something about this window. I have to walk by it to get to my side of the bed, and during the winter that walk past is frigid, and during the summer those few steps are HOT! Upstairs apartments in Arizona do NOT hold their temperature well! We are crossing our fingers that this new addition will help with:

1. Our electric bill

2. Outside noise

3. Light

I already know it helps with light, hurray! I didn't blackout line them, so we still get some light through, but it helps a lot!

We threw one of the finished quilt tops on the bed to see the effect with both. We like :) Someday those quilts will be done....hopefully sooner rather than later!

Anyways, thanks to my awesome awesome boss who lets me use the workroom for my own projects, I finally have window coverings in my room!

A little of this, a little of that

So I think I mentioned months ago that I moved my sewing machine out of the kid's room, but I realized I never did get around to posting before and after pictures! Alright, this was my old area.

I had lots of room to work, and it usually looked all disastrous like this, too. Though, it looks like I must have had my machine on the kitchen table when I took these pictures...

Anyways, I had lots of space, but Zoey couldn't even play in her own room, and once she was finally taking naps in her crib regularly, I couldn't sew during naptime. Despair! What was I to do? I told my husband that all my sewing stuff was getting transferred to our bedroom!! He was incredibly gracious and said that was just fine. He's so awesome :)

And this is what my sewing space looks like now:

I kept putting off taking pictures because I always have things such a mess, so I figured I would let you all see my disaster area or else I would never get pictures posted. It's so nice to be able to walk in and sew whenever I have a chance now!

And while I am at it, here is my current quilt project:

This one is going kind of slow, because I am pretty much improv-ing my blocks, and cutting whatever I want as I need it. So, 9 blocks down, 11 to go!

Time for Blogger's Quilt Festival!

Hey all! Guess what, it's that time again! The Blogger's Quilt Festival!! So start thinking of a quilt to blog about and head on over to Amy's Creative Side and see what it's all about(that is a button up there :) )! Now to figure out which quilt I want to use....

Sneak Peek!

Yep, that's a whole pile of blocks all trimmed and ready to put together!  Can't wait to get back to that one but I have a couple of others that have deadlines, so I had to box up my Birdies for now.

Just lucky around here lately!

So just a few days after mom won an awesome giveaway, I did too!! When I saw that I had won these AWESOME fat quarters from Kristina at Sew Domestic, I squealed. Loudly. Besides never having won a giveaway before, even though I feel like I have entered a gazillion, I LOVE this fabric! Especially those little trees. How can it get better than cute little trees? Now to figure out what I am going to make, and getting myself to cut into these!
I actually got them in the mail last week, but things have been insane here the last week, what with school deadlines that affect entry to next year's program for my husband...

Thank you again Kristina! You made my day! Or week...or month...

Trash to Treasure?

One week a month, we have bulk trash pick up in my neighborhood.  You can put any large items by the curb and by the end of the week, they will magically disappear! Sometimes, it's the garbage truck that makes the stuff disappear and sometimes it's just crafty neighbors!

Here is what my neighbor thought was trash!

But I knew it was a diamond in the rough!  Can't you just see that stacked full of fat quarters?  Yep, me too! 

A couple of coats of white paint, a little cutting to take the bottom "stand" part off the shelf, some cute shelf brackets to hold it up on the wall and Voilà!!!!
 

A place just right for fat quarters and other fun stuff.  And it just cost me the paint and shelf brackets!  It's one of my favorite things in my sewing room.  More pics of the sewing room to come later.  It's a work in progress.

Bugs!!!

 When Kirsten first introduced me to our favorite LQS, they had this fabric.

I think it's called Dancing Bugs.  It was so fun and colorful and bright.

So I made this.

I used the disappearing 9-patch pattern and it was so much fun to make.  It doesn't have very good contrast between all the fabrics and it was a really good lesson for me in learning more about contrasts, but it's a fun quilt and perfect for throwing out on the grass or on the floor or just for snuggling up with.  This was also my first attempt at quilting swirls and it is pretty awful.  I did really heavy swirls in the purple fabric and then just did straight stitching around the inside of all the buggy squares. It was a good practice quilt.

The pictures make it look like a rectangle, but it's really square.  It was too wide to get out of a width of fabric, so I pieced in some of the scraps from the front.  And the pieces on the sides of the big square in the middle are pieced in and I think I did a pretty good job of matching up the stripes!

One of these days it might even get a label :)

Hexies

I'm not one to sit and be idle.  Even if I'm watching TV, I like to have something for my hands to do...something creative.  It might be genetic because I never saw either of my Grandmas or my mom just sit with their hands idle.  There was always crocheting, counted cross stitch, needle point, or some other kind of hand work going on while they relaxed.  So, when I saw a tutorial somewhere out in blogland about hexies, I thought it looked kinda fun.  One day, instead of going home from work, I decided to go to Kirsten's to play but I didn't have anything with me to "do", so I hit our favorite LQS and picked some fabrics from their FQ 1/2 price bin (it's sorta like the candy shelves at the cash registers at grocery stores!)  Then I went next door to the grocery store and picked up a roll of freezer paper and the next thing I knew, I had these...

And those have grown into these...

I pretty much just take my hexies with me everywhere I go and when I have a few minutes I pull them out and keep adding to them.  I think they are going to be a doll quilt for Zoey.  I don't love all the fabrics, so I want to finish up this project and then start on something else with hexies.  I really love doing these, they are so addictive!

Diamond Quilt Finish!

I really should get more creative at naming my quilts...ANYWAYS, this one is done and in the shop!

Super cute pinks and purples in this one. It pretty much SHOUTS girlyness. I quilted 1/4" away from each of the seams to outline the diamonds, and then it made a fun diamond pattern on the back.

Speaking of backs, I think I have outdone myself on this one! I  L O V E it! These are my 4 leftover diamonds from when I had no idea what the top would look like and just started cutting. Well, when I went to cut the purple fabric for the rest of the back (inset diamonds was already the plan), my mind would NOT wrap around the math to figure out the cuts for this! I don't know what was up. So, I gave up and decided to hand applique the diamonds on so they would line up just right! Probably took 3 times as long as it would have, but dang do they look good!

And it gets better! I managed to line the front and back diamonds up EXACTLY, so the quilting would match front to back. Yeah, I'm good like that :) Not gonna lie, it looks AMAZING!

Well yeah, you can see that :)

When I went down to have a photo session outside, suddenly it was windy! Ugh wind is soooo not fun! Leaves kept rolling into the shot...once a plastic bag whirled by...But I thought I got some good ones. Then I went upstairs to check them out on the computer, and there was a little stick thingy right on my closeup of the back!! So, back down for more pictures, because I was NOT having some bit of leafy stick thing in the middle of my favorite shot! So there!

I made myself some new tags for quilts that are going in the shop, as this one is. I think they are cute :)

And then there is the super cute pink flower binding. It makes me happy.

Quilt finishes at 31"x36". did I mention this one is in the shop?

Here's one for the boys.

Right after I found out my niece was having a baby boy, I was at my favorite LQS and they had just gotten in Animal Alphabet by Cheri L. Strole for Moda.  It was soooo soft and I immediately fell in love and so this sweet baby boy quilt was "born".

Two charm packs were perfect for a quick finish baby quilt.  It finished at about 40" square, so I used a solid piece of one of the prints for the back.  I just love the stripey fabric for the binding.