WiP Wednesday

Things have definitely been busy around here!  Can anyone say "Christmas Crunch"?  Every year, I tell myself that I'll do more in advance of Christmas, so I'm not making things at the last minute.  And every year, I don't follow my own advice!  Oh well.

Right now, I'm working on these mug rugs for Kendall's teachers.  My daughter loves her teachers, so I wanted to make them something special.  I thought it would be cool to incorporate an apple into something quilty, so when I saw Charise's paper pieced apples, I knew I had to incorporate those into mug rugs!  A while back, I bought some of this Dick and Jane fabric, but didn't really know what to use it for.  What better way than to use it for teacher's gifts?  I used some Punctuation for the back - again, what better use?  I just have to put the bindings on, and I'm done with these!

As far as other WiPs go, I need to make a pillow for my nephew, three dolls from the Wee Wonderfuls book (one for my niece, and the other two are for my girls), and a stocking for my little boy.

In recent finishes, I made this lined drawstring laundry bag (using Jeni's pattern) for a custom order.  A couple months ago, I participated in a craft fair.  I had one of these laundry bags for sale, and someone liked the bag, but she needed one in yellow and gray fabric.  So she contacted me after the fair, and we talked about fabric choices.  Here's the finished product (which I love, by the way).  I used fabrics from Simpatico and Bliss.

In other news, our family is sick, yet again!  Two weeks ago, Tucker and I went to California for a little visit, and I think he picked something up there or from the plane, and brought it home.  My middle one, Cami, has it the worst.  She's so pitiful, but looks so cute and cozy cuddled up under the Christmas quilt I made last year.

And Tucker is busy tearing up all the Christmas decorations.  His favorite thing to do is take apart the train tracks.

Kendall will be 5 (how is that even possible?) on Christmas Day, so we're busy planning her party.

That's it for me!  Check out more WiPs over at Freshly Pieced!

 

Crossing off the list!

Last week, I finished up a quilt for my friend's baby, which was on my 2011 To Do List.  I started this back in January at the LAMQG Weekend Sew (blogged about here), but I didn't even touch it again until the Weekend Sew a couple weeks ago.  Oh yeah, and the baby was born in March.  At least I'm only a couple months late! 

So here it is - Baby Brig's Quilt!  I followed the Building Blocks Baby Quilt tutorial from Moda Bakeshop, and I used only Cloud 9 Fabrics from the "My Happy Nursery" collection.  Brig's mom told me that she was going with brown, green, and elephants as the theme, and this fabric was perfect!  As Aunt Spicy said, the fabric is different - not in a bad way.  Just...different.  I'm really looking forward to their "Monsterz" collection coming out later this year.

Here's some closer up shots of the quilting.  I did a wonky herringbone design, and I really love the way it came out. 

And I thought it was interesting that because of the pattern on the back, the quilting virtually disappears! 

Here's the label - I just took one of my scraps, and wrote on the wrong side of it.  I like how you can just barely see the polka dots.

And a shot of the binding...same story - machine binding, no pins, all the way.  Oh, and you can see on the picture of the label above, when the fabrics on the binding changed, I changed out the thread color. 

I was very adamant about the thread color on this one.  I had a perfect match for the blue, but the brown isn't a normal brown - I had 3 different browns, but none of them matched just right.  Thankfully I found an exact match of Mettler thread (823) at a local shop, so I was super happy.

Since I'm talking about thread color, I didn't use my new fave color for this quilt, which is Mettler 844.  There's a good amount of a grayish-brown throughout this line of fabric, and I just happened to have a great match!  It's Mettler 621, and I bought it by accident a while back and just never returned it.  Handy, huh?

I think it's safe to say that I'm officially a thread nerd.

LAMQG Sew Day

This past Saturday was our monthly sew day for the LAMQG.  I took in my fabric for the Birdie Stitches BOM, and fabric for a baby quilt I needed to start working on.  I had imagined getting alot more finished in the time I was there (4 1/2 hours), but because of alot of cutting I needed to do, I didn't get as much sewing done as I had intended. 

I got all the fabric for the Birdie Stitches cut.  That's a lot of little 2 1/2" squares!  Plus, all of the middle fabric for the blocks.  I was only able to get two blocks totally sewn together and I just had to move on after that, because my brain was about to explode.  So I'm at least ahead of the game for the February and March blocks (you can see my January block here)!

For the baby quilt, I'm using the Building Blocks Baby Quilt pattern that I saw on Moda Bakeshop.  The pattern is assuming that you have a layer cake of fabric, which I don't.  So there's ALOT of cutting involved for this one.  Still, I got 7 out of the 20 blocks assembled.   (I'm not showing all the blocks, just in case Daiquiri happens to read my blog, so it's just a little sneak peak)

I'm really loving this!  The fabric is the My Happy Nursery line from Cloud9 Fabrics, and it's just so soft and the prints are beautiful!  And how cute are those little elephants?  I hope baby Brig loves it!

Unfortunately, I didn't do alot of roaming around to see what everyone else was working on at the sew, so I was happy to see Nichole's pictures of some of the projects.  Check them out here, if you're interested!