A "Sweet" Baby Quilt

I've been a moderator over at Craftster.org for a few years, and I love making baby quilts when my mod friends have babies! I was really excited to make a baby quilt for sweets4ever’s new baby, and when she told me the color scheme for her nursery it seemed like fate. I had just completed the Quilt Block Swap Round 2, and the color schemes I had asked for two of my groups had the same color scheme as sweets’ nursery! For that particular swap, you pick a pattern and color scheme and receive 3 blocks from each person in a 5 person group. 12 blocks is about lap quilt sized, and I happened to be 3 groups! I used 15 blocks from that swap but I still have quite a few left!

I picked all the blocks that I felt had the right colors and worked together well.  The pinwheel blocks weren’t as big as the wonky log cabin blocks, so I framed them out in light gray and then pieced them together.

 I had more blocks I wanted to use than could fit on the front, so I put them on the back. The back is almost another front! I improv pieced the back, and included a section leftover from the quilt I had just made a former mod, retroeva! It's the small blue rectangle in the left column with squares of gray chevron, orange deer, and light gray.  I’m really excited that this quilt has blocks from lots of different Craftsters, and from Eva’s quilt. You can see blocks from alwaysinmyroom, Donniesgirl, sloth003, homerof2, and waggonswest. If I'm forgetting anyone, please let me know!

I think here, on the back, you can see the quilting the best. I did wavy diagonal criss-crossing lines inspired by some quilting my friend Jen has been doing.

For the binding I cut into some Orange Painter's Canvas from Laura Gunn, my favorite fabric designer! I like the pop of color it gives to the edges.

I am entering this quilt in the Blogger's Quilt Festival!

A "Sweet" Big Brother Quilt

My friend Jean (sweets4ever on Craftster) just had a baby that I made this quilt for. But that baby has an older brother! I had just started quilting around the time I became a moderator, and the older brother was born just previous to this, so I had never made him a quilt!

I thought it would be fun to make him one too so he wouldn’t be left out. I happened to have a really fun rocket panel in my stash, along with a remnant I had picked up of this ray gun fabric.

The colors seemed to work together, so I pieced this bright quilt top together by cutting the panel in two, rearranging it and bulking it out with some strip pieced checkerboard.

For the back I created a  simple chevron out of half square triangles to be a focal point, and used up some of the leftover strips to create some more checkerboard.

I quilted around the squares in the panel, up and down the checkerboard, and then I outlined 3 of the rockets in each panel.  All throughout this project I had been trying to figure out some way of using the blue stripe fabric, but never quite fit it in, but I realized it would work ok for the binding!

I’m not sure if I’m pleased or embarrassed that all of the fabrics for this came out of my stash!

New Soapies

I did something crazy the other day. I made four batches of soap. I've been making soap for at least eight years, but lately I haven't made any. Why? A combo of reasons, including the fact that the last few batches I've made have failed in some way, so I was leary of wasting the money on raw ingredients for more batches that might not turn out. I actually started out with all new ingredients on Friday and did a few other things to hopefully break my losing streak.

Everything went well and since I started out with fresh ingredients I don't anticipate any problems cropping up during the curing process.

Of course, since I was completely out of soap (in fact, recently I swapped with a friend of mine, Mandy, because I was out of soap for personal use!) I had to make one of my favorites, Oats n Honey. I typically make two versions of this, one unscented, that only has the natural fragrance of the oats and the honey, and another version that contains a synthetic Milk, Oats, and Honey fragrance. This time I mixed it up an instead of either of those options I very lightly scented it with a Snickerdoodle Buttercream sample that Brambleberry sent in my last order. I typically use 1/2 to 1 ounce of fragrance PPO (per pound of oils) in a recipe, but I only used 1 ounce of fragrance in this batch that contained 96 ounces of oil. However, It. Smells. Awesome!

I also made a batch of my Shea Luxury soap.This was a bar I developed several years ago when I introduced a "Spa" line of soap that included larger bars with fancier ingredients. I no longer make most of those soaps, but this one had to stick around! I use 65% unrefined Shea Butter in the recipe, and no fragrance. The finished soap is an awesome creamy color with soft bubbles. It's also a very hard bar because of the proportions of Shea.

 

I don't currently have pictures of my last two batches, but one is Tomato Leaf, which smells like a tomato plant growing in the sun, and Red Sedona, which is a  fruity, bright fragrance. Both of these have fun swirls, Chromium Green pigment in the Tomato Leaf and very light neon pink and neon yellow in the Red Sedona. 

I cut the soaps over the weekend after they sat in their molds for a day or two. My nephews "helped" and had a lot of fun. They also requested a share in the profits. Ummm, no!

These soaps will be for sale in my Etsy shop in about 3 weeks. I also plan to make Dragon's Blood, Black Raspberry Vanilla, and another batch or two next friday.

A do.Good Stitches Converging Corners Charity Quilt

I recently joined the Faith circle of do.Good stitches, which is a modern charity quilting bee organized on Flickr. December was my month to choose a pattern and color scheme and everyone in the group sent me two blocks.

 I picked Converging Corners from Film in the Fridge because I'd had it pinned for a long time and a fellow guild member had made one and it looked great! I asked everyone to make (2) 12 1/2 inch blocks in purples from lavender to dark purple to fuchsia, as well as periwinkle and aqua, and to mix it up, I asked that some of the white background pieces be replaced with light to medium solid gray fabric. The results were wonderful!

It took longer than expected for everyone to get me their blocks but all together it looked pretty sweet.

Even more exciting was that a friend of mine volunteered to long arm quilt it for me! She also generously donated the batting and backing. She quilted some beautiful feather designs all over it.

I'll be shipping this off tomorrow to our group leader so that she can give it to our charity, which is for girls who have been rescued from human trafficking.

Juicing

I'm starting add juicing into my diet more. Initially I was going to do a juice fast, but that idea didn't last long. I'm going to be replacing 1-2 meals a day with juce and eating as healthfully as possible at my "food" meals.

Last night, I made a tasty dessert style juice (ie, more fruit than vegetable). This was 1 naval orange, 1 blood orange, 2 grapefruits and about 1 large carrot. I know "they" say not to juice grapefruits because of its possible interactions with some medicines, but none of mine interact so I'm not worrying about it. Sadly my grandma did have to stop eating grapefruits years ago due to medication interactions, she used to love them so much!

This is my first juice for today, a kind of V8 style juice, and my first time juicing many of these vegetables: Tomatoes, carrots, celery, cucumber, red and green bell pepper, red onion, garlic, broccoli, parsley, cilantro. I tasted it like that and wanted it to be a smidge sweeter, so added one red apple. The first drink seemed very oniony/garlicy, but after that all I could taste was deliciousness! I'm pleased with this one, and it made a lot of juice, at least 3 of the glasses you see below.

I had bought some fruits/veggies to juice a week or two ago, so I have the tail end of that plus a quick trip I did this morning where I scored some great prices on a bag of yams, and bags of fuji and granny smith apples. I didn't like the looks of the cucumbers and I just used my last one, so I'll have to come up with something else for my next few juices since I don't plan to get more groceries until Wednesday.

My favorite, go-to juice is my Green Juice: cucumber, romaine lettuce, spinach, granny smith apple, carrots, lemon. It's so yummy! Sometimes I leave out the carrots, but they are so good and so inexpensive that I try to fit them in whenever I can.

I found a few recipes yesterday that used yams/sweet potatoes. I've never juiced those before but will soon!

Shopping List:
Cucumbers
jalapeno
tomatoes
romaine
spinach
greens
beets

Woodland Animal Fabric Basket

I made this basket for the Crafty Detective Swap on Craftster, and I have to say that I had a hard time letting it go! I love the owl and deer fabric! I might be making another one for myself.

With some Laura Gunn (my fave designer!) Painter's Canvas on the inside, it's a fun stash builder since it's a bit more interesting than a solid and comes in great colors.

I like the quilting I did on this one, I stitched on each side of the patchwork lines at the top (one walking foot-width away from the line) and then through the middle section. I like the additional quilting lines through the solid color at the bottom, I think it adds some nice visual interest and texture.

The wonderful tutorial is found here:

http://ayumills.blogspot.com/2008/05/tutorial-fabric-basket.html

She says to use "fleece batting" but I just use my normal low-loft quilt batting. I do recommend actually also using a layer of medium to heavy weight interfacing with the lining, I normally do and I did not in this instance and it was a tad flimsier than I would like. I also top stitch around the top of the basket after pressing the lining to the inside to get a nice line (make sure the handles are up!) as a very last step. (I guess she does have you do this, but it's kind of easy to miss in the tutorial).

When I previously made this I made larger sizes also, and recorded the measurements in this post if you want to do the same:

http://www.craftster.org/forum/index.php?topic=381759.0#axzz2OxSOPPDj