chimesblog

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’!

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.

… 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.

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.

I’ve decided to drastically reduce the price of my Butterflies in Wonderland quilt on etsy.  This quilt is made from a now-discontinued line of fabric (my absolute FAVORITE) by momo from Moda.  The machine quilting is done in a contrasting yellow stitching and is in a butterfly pattern — which, when seen as a whole, turns into a centered flower pattern.

Original price: $300
Sale Price: $85

It’s almost killing me to do this — I love this quilt so much, but I’m moving soon and need some of my items to go.  I love this quilt and it’s hard to get rid of it, but it’s just got to go!

… I was on vacation in Chicago last week … but I managed to sweatshop some lovely camera/iPod/electronic cozies. They’re not quite finished, but here they are in the  making.

I decided that before I went to Chicago and to The Needle Shop (the highlight of my trip of course) that I had to work through the scraps I acquired last time I was there. So, enter, easy peasy camera/iPod cozies.

Of course, these will have button closures, but this is how far I’ve gotten for now, so I thought I’d share!

I’ve been reading the Denyse Schmidt Quilts book that Adria let me borrow and saw the heating pad project and just HAD to do it. I hardly make anything for myself, but it annoys me that I have my heating pad out in the middle of my living room and it’s so not cute. It had some weird 90s pattern on the cover.  Not a fan.

Well, now, it’s stylin’!  I used the original cover for insulation and quilted the patchwork piece to it. The original cover had a snap closure on it, so I didn’t have to mess with putting a closure on the new cover.  Pretty smart, eh?

Again, going through my scrap box and found some scraps that Adria had given me from her Hello Betty quilt.  I had enough left to make a large block and I decided to finally cover the 18″x18″ pillow form I’ve had lying around.

I did another wonky log cabin block because those are just too easy and addictive.

Here’s the finished product. It doesn’t go with anything I own other than the chair in which I photographed it.

I’ve been working through my fabric scraps and I came across the Heather Ross Mendocino scraps that Adria had given me a while back.  She had leftovers after making a really cool mendocino quilt.

Here are a few of my favorite ones … They’re 5″x6″

I’m going to add 5-6″ of white fabric around each block to make it look like they’re floating and make a larger quilt out of these.  So excited! 

If you want to see all the blocks, I’ve got them posted on Flickr.

One of my favorite blogs, a la mode fabric, just turned one. She’s having a fabric giveaway of absolutely adorable fabrics (what else would you expect?).

My favorite, of course, being the blush mendocino set.

Anyway, go here for details! Contest ends February 28.