Pink and Yellow Chevron Table Runner

My quilt guild does a swap every year in December where we put some fabric into a baggie and exchange them. We make something and give it back to the owner. This year I got a lot of polka dot fabrics, one that kind of reads as a solid, and a floral. I ended out sketching out a little chevron pattern and turning it into a table runner. Some of the fabric pieces were small so I had to keep changing the size of my starting blocks, but I think it turned out cute, and the gal who received it liked it! We were "allowed" to add one more fabric to what we received, and I chose to interpret that as adding one to the front, and then using another piece from my stash for the backing

I just quilted along the lines created by the pattern, and I lightly drew the lines out into the border so I could follow them and not have crooked quilting in my border.

Also, I've been trying to figure out what my "thing" is in quilting, or what makes my quilts unique to me, my personal signature. I know someone that puts a red square in all of her quilts, and someone else who puts a tiny piece of contrasting fabric in her bindings. The last few projects I've worked on I've switched a few fabrics out for other ones somewhere in the pattern, you can clearly see in this project I put in five triangles of the red dot in place of the fabric that should be there. Anyhow, I think this might be something I continue to do, as long as I can keep doing it in a thoughtful manner (for this one I carefully thought about where to place these and tried to do it in a way that causes the eye to move across the quilt) instead of just because. It's not "super unique" or never been done before, but it feels genuine for me :)

Christmas Tree Advent Calendar

This is an Advent Calendar I made last year in a Craftster Swap I organized.

I made this Advent Calendar for my partner in the 2011 Advent Calendar Swap! (If you click "show images only," you can quickly see all the great advent calendars and gifts made in this swap!) My partner said her color scheme for her tree is purple, pink, light blue, and bright green so those are the colors I used for the ornaments.

Here is the base of the tree. I made a half tree template out of poster board and then cut out two on the fold of the green fabric (which was a new Ikea sheet that I had used part of in a different project). I cut the bottom so that there was a 6 inch piece in the middle that jutted out 1/4 inch so I could sew the tree trunk onto it. I had the awesome faux wood fabric from kittykill that I've used in  a few projects. After sewing the trunk onto each side I sandwiched it inside out with a piece of batting in the middle and stitched around. I put a hanging loop in the top of it before I stitched.

After turning the tree right side out I top stitched (edge stitched?) all the way around the outside, including the turning hole. I placed my ornaments on the tree and marked an x where I wanted to put the velcro. Then I stitched the rough side of the velcro on and was done with that part!

For the ornaments I cut out one circle with my pinking shears from felt and one circle with pinking shears from patterned cotton material. I stitched the loopy side of the velcro onto the back of the felt and then folded the cotton circle, wrong sides together, and placed it at the bottom of the felt circle. I zigzag stitched around just the bottom half of the circle, so the folded part of the circle became a pocket. Then I stitched a bit of twill tape onto the top to look like an ornament hanger and wrote the day on it.

Oh yeah, I had only put a hanger on the top to begin with, so I added hangers onto each point of the tree because they were flip-flopping around. But I did it with a dumb color of thread so I ended up covering the stitching from that on the front with cute buttons!

Hopefully it's fun to decorate the tree a little bit more each day!

Ouch Pouch

 I recently made this Ouch Pouch for a secret santa swap after seeing this one on my friend's Pinterest.

I made a basic pouch using the Straight Sided Triangular Cosmetic Bag Tutorial from Craftster and just made it a bit wider and taller.

Before stitching in the zipper, I quilted the outside pieces to pieces of batting in a square spiral pattern. Then I made some templates for my letters, cut them out, and used some Wonder Under to attach them. Then I stitched around the raw edges and completed the bag.


I had to stuff it with some goodies to be a good Ouch Pouch, right? My friend does martial arts and her pin mentioned that she would like one of these to take with her to her classes.


I put in lip balm, hand cream, aloe vera gel, bandaids, alcohol wipes, antibacterial cream, hand sanitizer gel, tissues, ibuprofen, and lip balm.

Machine-less

I've known for a couple months now that I needed to get my machine serviced, but like any good junky getting her fix on,  couldn't give it up! On Saturday I had a Portland Modern Quilt Guild sewing day at Fabric Depot, which happens to house a Montavilla Sewing Shop, my repair shop of choice. After struggling with my machine all day, and after loading everything up in my car in the pouring rain and getting ready to go home, I thought it might behoove me to go in and talk to the repair shop. Twenty minutes later I had learned about some new machines, dropped my sweet Janome off, and found out it would be a couple weeks before I would get it back! Considering how much I have to do right now, that is kind of bummer news.

Luckily, I have arranged to borrow a machine for awhile, so tomorrow I should be in possession of, if not my machine, at least a machine.

I did get quite a bit done on Saturday though. I finished 3 blocks for my Craftster swap and got 5 + more cut out. I also worked on a secret project for a friend that I am not sharing yet. I also got some opinions from various sewing buddies on a couple of baby quilts (not to mention all the chatting and shopping that goes along on a sew day!)

Here's two more Square in a Square blocks, this time for a different swapper than before, and in boy colors with fussy cut novelty fabric centers. The third one I have cut out is frog material, but I decided I didn't have enough of a variety of scraps with me to finish it.

This next one is Elizabeth Hartman's Mod Mosaic Tutorial, which I previously used to make a quilt for my cousin's baby (annnd just realized I never posted here. Nice). It's a time consuming block because of the narrow 1 inch "sashing" between blocks, but the results are totally worth it! I sashed mine in white, and the tutorial examples are also sashed in white, so it was pretty neat to work with a darker color!

Project-palooza!

I have soooo many quilty projects in the works! Besides my 12 projects for this year that I listed at the beginning of the year in my Craftster 12 Project Along Thread, 4 current or former mods are having babies, so I have to make more baby quilts! Also, 3 of those new babies have older brothers, only one of whom I've made a quilt for before, so I feel the need to make some older brother blankets or quilts. Plus a friend is having a baby.

In addition to these full quilts, I joined 3 groups in  Craftster's Quilt Block Swap 2. I organized Round 1, and to be honest, some people didn't follow the rules very well. I have high hopes for this round though, and am happy to have some fun projects to work on.

Each group is made up of 5 people, and we send (3) 12 1/2 inch blocks to each of them, so since I am doing 3 groups, I have 36 blocks total to send out! I already have 3 blocks finished for my friend Linda, who chose Scrappy Log Cabin in a non-specified, but colorful scrappy way. She wants to sash in white so no white in the outer ring...I realized some of mine has some white in it, so I hope that's ok, I was trying to avoid solid white/white on white and didn't think about the blue and white print.

I also need to finish up a little Matryoshka wall hanging I am making for a friend. I ran out of soap for personal use (ran out of soap to sell a long time ago!) so offered  soapy friend, Mandy, a swap. She sent me some awesome bars lickety split, but I haven't finished her wall hanging yet so need to get on it!

Of course I can't currently find the picture of my Matryoshka I paper pieced, but this is the pattern I bought from etsy--Matryoshka Paper Pieced Block. My friend Heather posted it on FB a while back and I had to buy it.

My first Dresden

I made my first Dresden Plate for the latest round of the Invite Your Partner swap on Craftster. My partner had some on her Pinterest and one of her comments on it was that she thought a pillow would be nice for that design. Done and Done! She liked purple, green, and blue, and to start with I was pulling fabric in all of those colors, but then realized I could easily pull together 20 different green prints from my stash without expending too much effort. Not sure if I should be proud or ashamed of that

I used the Easy Dresden Ruler to make these, and it was definitely very easy! A nice neutral dark gray for the backing, and I was pretty pleased with how it all came together. I did a ton of quilting on it, more than I usually do. Initially I was going to do more quilting in the gray (outside the Dresden) but I stopped with just one line and decided I liked it that way.

ETA: Here's two close-ups of the quilting that my partner took. I couldn't find mine.

Since making this one I've made two more dresden plates with holiday fabric. I'm going to finish a third one and make a holiday table runner!

Novelty Fabric Swap!

I think I mentioned a couple posts back that I am running a Novelty Fabric FQ Swap over on Craftster. Our Gallery is here if you want to check it out. Click on "show images only" to filter out posts that don't show sweet fabric goodness.

The way this swap worked was that I partnered people in groups of four, and each person bought 1 yard cuts of 4 different fabrics, and cut them into Fat Quarters, and then sent one FQ to each of their partners, keeping the fourth set for themselves.

So far, I've received some awesome fabrics from two of my partners!

I love the deer fabric! It's awesome!

100_5086 by maremare312, on Flickr

100_5087 by maremare312, on Flickr

And the hand-dyed fabric!

100_5088 by maremare312, on Flickr


The penguins are too sweet, I will have to hide this from my youngest nephew or he will want to "go night night" with it.

100_5090 by maremare312, on Flickr

100_5089 by maremare312, on Flickr


We're already talking about another round of this swap, possibly with holiday fabric as the overall theme. If you might be interested, be sure to create a Craftster account now if you don't have one already, as you must be a member for a month before you can sign up for a swap.

Mini Sampler Quilt

I made this mini quilt for the Mini Art Quilt Swap 5 on Craftster.org (gallery here). One of my partner's themes was "Whimsical Sampler/Album Quilt." While I loved the idea of a sampler quilt, I had a bit of trouble with the whimsical part. I finally decided that I would go through all my novelty fabrics and pick out some fun ones to include for the "whimsical" part of it. I found clouds, birds, hedgehogs, love bugs, butterflies, cherries, snails, turtles and more!

I found an awesome pattern for the Sew Small Sampler Quilt on the blog Wedding Dress Blue. I decided to not set the blocks on point, and to use white sashing instead of the settings squares.
Each tiny square was 3 1/2 inches after I made it, 3 inches in the finished quilt! I do love tiny piecing!



Because I think it's fun to look at the seams (I generally iron my seams to one side, but a little ways into this project I realized for something so small it would behoove me to iron my seams open).



Backing



A close-up on the quilting. I stitched in the sashing using natural colored thread, and then decided there was just too much white space, so I did some in lavender and blue,created by my friend Cherri and my go-to quilting pattern.



Aaaand my two favorite blocks! Shown with a bobbin to demonstrate the tinyness.





This project gave me the idea to do a Novelty Fabric swap on Craftster, if you'd like to see all the fun fabric coming in, our gallery link is here

Crafting and Dieting!

My mom and I are eating healthy via the Flat Belly Diet! After an initial 4 day "Jump Start" of 1200 calorie days to de-bloat and get the salt out of our system, we're both down 4 pounds. Even though that's probably mostly water weight, that's ok!

Besides being low-salt, this way of eating is kind of Mediteranean based. The focus is having a MUFA (mono-unsaturated fatty acid) with every meal or snack to get a healthy fat in that provides a feeling of fullness. Yummy things like avocadoes, nuts, seeds, olive and canola oil, and olives are all required!

I realized that I need to get my crafting into high gear. I have a swap to go out Oct 30th that I have, oops, two different partners for! Today I think I just finalized what I am sending. Luckily each one is only 2 mediums and a small, so I should be able to take care of that, as long as I get started soon. Some of the projects are crochet, so if I meet up with the Portland Crafty Vixens tomorrow I will have a portable project to take along! No details yet since I don't want to spoil the surprise if my swap partners are stalking me!

My friend Kim shared some awesome patterns with me for toddler pants, so Sandora and I whipped up 3 pairs the other day for the boys. We have a bunch more fabric to make into pajama pants but wanted to get it right before we cut out too many of them. They turned out really well except Dane and Aidan's are a wee bit low rise! Oops. Oh well, I already adjust my home made pattern pieces for next time! Although when I saw Dane last night he looked inches taller than the last time I had seen him (a week ago!) He can now reach on top of the tv, as demonstrated by his ability to bring the remote to grandma! I'm going to measure him carefully before I finish any more pants for him, don't want to dress the poor kid in high waters!

Projects!

Projects to start:

scarf for me out of that sport weight yarn I like

wall organizer for me (have fabric)

purse for me (have fabric)

purse for Amanda (have fabric)

play mat for the boys

Current projects:

semi-complicated scarf for my mom, I lost interest a little when I had to frog it and re-start with a bigger hook. It works up fairly quickly, but it's not really a pattern I can do in front of the tv. It's gonna be awesome if I ever finish.

inchies! nuff said, for some reason have to be really in the mood to work on these

scarf for a swap, she wants blues and blacks. I think Iwill do some kind of a wave/ripple pattern with color changes every 4 or 6 rows or so.

random crocheted and other projects for wishlist swap

sewn project for swap, don't have partner yet

getting recipes together for a swap "healthy kit" have everything purchased

Finished projects:

Just finished booties and calorimetry for a personal swap with my friend Kim


These are her pics, I spaced on taking any!



wall organizer for swap