Zig Zags and Flavor Flav

A couple of weeks ago, I posted about a zig zag quilt I was working on.  Well, I'm happy to say that I finished it up this past weekend at the Sew Day for ECMQG!  I basted it in time to take with me to the sew, and was able to quilt and bind it there.  It feels so nice to actually cross something this big off my list!  I sent it off to my friend Anna today.  I hope she and her baby likes it!

I really enjoyed making this quilt.  I love the colors and the clean, simple style.  Anna made it easy on me, and picked the fabrics for the whole thing, which was really nice!  She chose Essex Linen in Dusty Blue and Ivory for the zig zags.  And for the bike, she picked Michael Miller Bicycles, because her husband used to be a professional cyclist.  Love that little personal touch!

She also chose this great gray houndstooth fabric for the binding.  I thought it tied everything together nicely.

As for the quilting, I just did some simple echo quilting, in coordinating thread color.

The quilt finished at about 42 1/2" by 50 1/2", so it's not too small, not too big.  The baby will grow into it nicely.

Moving onto other things, at this week's ECMQG meeting, we're supposed to have a handmade name tag.  I  came up with this challenge, after seeing other guilds doing it, but I struggled with what to do.  I've been dying to make this Japanese X and + block that I've seen - I can't remember the first place I saw them, but Amy over at Badskirt Amy did a tutorial on how to make it.  So I decided to just go with that for my name tag, and my idea was to embroider my name in the middle + part of the block.

So that's exactly what I did!  A few months ago, I won a giveaway by Sew Modern (seriously, I miss that store) of a FQ bundle of these Dottie fabrics (by Jay Cyn Designs for Birch Fabrics) in different colors.  I'm a polka dot freak, so I thought using these fabrics for my name tag would be perfect.

I also embroidered around the + with coordinating floss, and quilted just a simple echo in the rest of the block.  I wasn't sure what to use for the binding, and thought twice about using yet another dottie fabric, but now that it's done, I really like it.

Let me tell you, this baby is big - as far as name tags go.  Like, Flavor Flav big.  It's not a giant clock necklace, but it is an 8" square.  Have you ever seen a name tag that big?  Probably not.  I didn't really know how to go about hanging it around my neck, because this thing is definitely too big to pin.  So I was browsing around for some inspiration and I remembered that Monica also made a giant name tag for the Portland MQG (we like big tags and we cannot lie), and realized that she used a selvage.  I thought that was a brilliant idea, and used the selvage from the bicycles fabric above.

Besides it being so big, I'm really happy with it, and I just wanna make a ton of these blocks!