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You may remember this quilt top from 2009 when I originally had it slated to become a finished quilt for my niece’s first birthday.

Well, as you may know I’m really bad about finishing quilts. Mostly because it isn’t cheap to get them quilted professionally and up until I got my new sewing machine recently it was a huge pain to quilt them myself.

So what I’m saying is that my niece didn’t get this for her birthday in 2009.

It ended up being a lovely baby shower gift for my friend Adria who is due in February. Adria made me a quilt a LONG time ago and is responsible for my slightly expensive fabric hoarding obsession.

Also, I posted the photos on my flickr last week and cutable.com picked one of my images and featured this quilt on their flickr Friday on December 1. I couldn’t share until after her baby shower for obvious reasons.

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I love giveways, especially ones that involve fabulous fabric.

Quokka Quilts is hosting a blogger’s choice giveaway for 12 print fat quarters and 3 solids (holy cow!) of your choice from Fat Quarter Shop.

Since I mostly make bags, I picked a bunch of patterns conducive to bag-making. I also mocked up a couple of bag patterns.

First, these are the fabrics I chose. I went through and picked my favorite fabrics without thinking about putting them together. I didn’t read the rules all the way through … they are PICKING the best ones. I doubt I will get picked, but putting random fabric patterns together and making them look pretty is kind of what I do, so …

And now? How about a couple of ideas for what I might do with them. Stack them (wonkily and not straight of course):

Wow that’s a lot of fabrics. Okay, now for the bags I could create using a bit of ALL of these fabrics.

Probably with an orange zipper on that one.

And a turquoise zipper on this one. Obviously the patterns would translate into bigger than what they’re shown here, but you get the picture.

Anyway, here is the part where I say … pick me! Please.

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I went to my first Des Moines Modern Quilt Guild meeting last Thursday evening. My friend Doris has been bugging me to go since she is one of the co-founding members. I missed out on their Habitat challenge and their ugly fabric swap, but came last week. They have a guest speaker every meeting and a show and tell where members show things they’re working on (quilts or related sewing).

I introduced myself by showing all my embarrassing works in progress: My coin stack baby quilt, Hello Betty quilt and my Thea’s puzzle quilt — just to name a few (there are WAY more).

And member Eva Marie was kind enough to fill in for a speaker that was unable to attend. She taught us the quilt as you go method. Here are some great tutorials.

Whilst she was showing us the methods I shared above, my brain was spinning on all sorts of ideas. I’d seen this method before and thought it was a great way to make things on my machine because it doesn’t quilt large objects well. I could use this method to make blocks for a larger quilt, make larger bags, pillows, all sorts of things …

… But then I remembered that my machine doesn’t do well with quilt sandwiches — no matter what the size. It even has a hard time with stitch length equality with my little zippy pouches.

I love my sewing machine. It’s a fabulous hand-me-down from my great aunt Willi — so I knew it was a good machine. I got it and it was pretty much brand new, though it was at least 30 years old. It’s done me well and I’m keeping it for threadbanging crafty projects (like quilted greeting cards, mini portfolios, sketchbooks, DC1050 from Amazon (because they are the Wal-Mart of the internet of course) — so it should be here in the next week. I cannot WAIT for: Start stop button instead of pressure foot, 50 awesome stitches (perfect for my wallets and bags), computerized (EVEN) stitching and a self-threading needle.

I’m beside myself with excitement! If you’ve followed my blog for a while, you know that I’ve never had a NICE new machine. I’ve had a new machine (from Wal-Mart) and I’ve had some nice machines (that are 30 or more years old), but not a nice and NEW one — with a 25-year warranty, might I add.

You will see an update sometime soon with a metric butt-ton of new wallet 2.0s, new and improved teeny tiny wallets and little zippy pouches.

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We are moving again soon. And this weekend is the last weekend that I don’t have plans before the move, so I’m getting my last hurrah out of my system because all my crafty stuff has to go in storage as soon as possible.

I started going through my craft stuff and decided to finish off some UFOs this weekend.

I started with some bags …

(pink little zippy pouch)

(geometric little zippy pouch)

… and some more — 17 to be exact — quilted cards …

… but then I found a whole mess of white fabric, which I had no idea I had — my granny had left it in a bunch of unfinished projects she ultimately didn’t get to finish and her craft supplies were gifted to me.  So, I decided it was time to finish my vintage scrap fabric (courtesy of Adria) strip quilt.

I’m still in progress today. I could have finished last night but I really don’t have room in our tiny apartment to lay out the quilt, and this is one that I have to lay out and think about.  Here’s a photo of the progress. I’ll post a tutorial once it’s finished.  It’s really quite easy, but takes a bit of thinking.

Here’s what I’ve done so far:

• Decided I wanted to do a strip quilt that kind of zig zagged with the scrap fabric Adria gave me — this, but without the border and with more variation in width and length of fabric.
• Cut all the fabric scraps to 2″, 1.5″ and 1″  wide pieces. One inch is probably too small, but to get the most out of this fabric, I had to go that small.
• Sewed all of the 2″ wide scraps together to make a really long strip, and did the same with the 1.5″ and 1″ scraps. Did this last year and pulled out the finished rolls of strips yesterday to start putting this together.
• Figured out that I wanted to make a 50″x50″ quilt. Originally I was going to go with twin size, but I realized I wasn’t going to have enough vintage fabric to do what I wanted to do.
• Cut 50″ wide strips from the long strip of each width I’d sewn together.
• Laid them on the floor to make 50″ wide — this required cutting the strips in halves and thirds.  See above — the bottom piece is the full length that I want and is used for measuring.
• Cut 2″, 1.5″ and 1″ strips out of white fabric and added them to the ends of the vintage strips to make up the width difference so they measure 50″ again.

Here’s what I’m doing today:

• Deciding where I want the vintage strips to line up in the quilt, then cutting the end of the white off (where it goes past 50″) and adding it to the OTHER side of the strip (so there’s white on both sides).
• Trimming everything to 48″ or so wide since inevitably there will probably be a math error on my end.
• Pinning 3 strips at a time together and sewing them into a wider strip.
• Repeating until the quilt top has been finished.

And that’s my day today! Patchworking and probably running 6-8 miles.  If I finish the quilt top in just a few hours (hoping so — I got where I currently am now with this quilt top in 3 hours yesterday), I’ll work on some more bags. I found the motherload of scraps I was saving of Wonderland …

… so I’ll probably be making some more zippy pouches out of that.  I’m loving the zippy pouches.  I need to make some more wallets, but I like to make the zippy pouches so much more.  I figure I’m doing this for fun and not for money, so if this stuff sells, great, if not, I’ve got Christmas presents taken care of.  Or maybe I can keep something for myself for once.

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Um, I may have gotten the t-shirts for this in the spring of 2009.  Like March 2009.  Regardless, I finally finished it.  It broke my sewing machine twice.  Twice.  Therefore, not making any more quilts (at least quilting them).  So if you want a quilt, I’ll make the top, but you’re on your own for getting it quilted.

I also hate t-shirt quilts. I think they’re boring and stupid and I am not sure why people love them so much when there are so many beautiful quilting fabrics or vintage fabrics out there to make a quilt from instead. I’ve made 3 t-shirt quilts now — but the first 2 were really deconstructed. And the first 2 were because I wasn’t sure if I was going to like quilting, so I didn’t want to BUY fabric until I knew if I liked it or not.

Anywho — the twist on the regular t-shirt quilt here is adding the lyrics to Lateralus by Tool on the back of the quilt.  I just quilted straight lines to make it easy.  And I used scrap fabric that coordinated for the binding.

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A long time ago I created a TON of blocks for what was going to become my ugly string quilt. I quickly realized that entirely too much work goes into making a quilt for me to purposely make an ugly one. And my blocks weren’t turning out as nice as I hoped (ie. nothing was lining up because I have no patience). So instead, I used the blocks I’d made to make potholders using this tutorial.

In case you’re extremely curious as to how to make string blocks, I used this tutorial to create these blocks.

EDIT (December 2011): If you’re going to make potholders that work, be sure to use Insulbrite instead of regular batting.

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This week’s humpday blog love goes to my friend Adria, who ironically thinks I’m mad at her because I haven’t had a chance to talk to her for a couple weeks. But no, I am not! And I realized my blog love post was about her blog this week (I schedule them all in advance) — so I’ve edited to include this blurb!

Anyway, my friend Adria and I go way back — all the way to 7th grade when she came to my school. That’s right. MY school.

Adria is SUPER crafty and she’s the one that got me into quilting and sewing last year.  She and I also went through terrible breakups at about this time last year and are both with fabulous men currently. She also has a weiner dog … well, he’s a chiweenie-min pin mix — McGruff!

Here are some of the fabulous things she makes … I’m lucky enough to get a lot of her fabric scraps, which is how I’ve made such lovely things on the cheap.

So you should probably go check her out, and leave her some lovin’!

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Yay!  I finally finished it.

A while back my grandpa had given me a bunch of quilt blocks that my granny (my great grandma) had made some time ago before she died in 2002.  She was kind of the queen of WIP, so I’m still collecting some random crafty things she’d started and going through to see what I can do to finish them or turn them into something else.

Mom and I went antiquing in March and found another set of blocks that went well with the ones my Granny had made since there weren’t enough to make an entire quilt. Even with these, it’s a pretty small lap quilt, but it’s really pretty anyway.  I ended up tea staining all the blocks since some were more aged-looking than others — they’re all about the same now.

As you can tell by the crappy quilting, I did it myself on my machine. I have a ton of quilt tops waiting to be turned into quilt sandwiches, but I need to send those off to somebody professional to do them. I probably should have done the same with this one, but I was impatient and wanted it to be finished — not to mention, I wanted to be the one to do it since my Granny had hand-pieced the blocks.

I have a couple more blocks she’s done, but I’m trying to figure out what I want to do with them still. This is a really neat quilt, and I’m really glad I have it.

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… a growing pile of new camera cases I’ve been crafting. Look at all those fun fabrics. Lots of my favorites in there … and a lot of them are the last bits of some of my favorites. I’m looking forward to making things from the leftover scraps.

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I’ve been obsessed with Wonderland by Momo ever since it came out. So, I’ve started working on two new projects with what I’ve got left.

I bought a jelly roll a while back and decided to make Thea’s Puzzle Quilt (a pattern by Amy Butler). I’ve got the middle section done, so I just need to create the border of solid color that goes around it — and for Mark’s sake, I’m going to do brown instead of pink (apparently he hates pink … and I’m hoping that both him and the quilt stick around for a while!).  Then I’m going to add an oatmeal-colored fabric for the border and possibly the backing.

Above is a close-up of my favorite block. I love how the scissors pattern is echoed a bit smaller in the patchwork fabric.

I’ve also been wanting a DayRunner for a while, but I didn’t want to just buy a pre-made one. It’s not as fun if you do things the easy way! So I bought the “guts” for a DayRunner and figured out a pattern (which I will post eventually after I do a testrun with it on the road).  Of course, I used Wonderland.  Here’s how it turned out.

I need to sew a button on the front yet and I need to add some binder rings and sew those in, but otherwise, I’m loving it.

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