Gifts

I've been working on a couple of gifts lately - birthday, not Christmas.  This is the first of two birthday gifts that I really wanted to keep for myself!

Made for a teacher at Becket's preschool - their mascot is an owl - I had to feature my favorite owl.  I recently finished a quilt top with this style block and a pieced edge, so I just shrank it down and added some lovely linen.  Gifted with some hot chocolate mix and a few candy cane JoJos. 

LOVE making a little 9X6 MugRug.  Instant gratification!

Gifts for a Friend

The first day of school, our little group of friends gathered for lunch and a birthday celebration. Laura and most of her family love to cook, so I thought she would enjoy a couple fun potholders.

I followed Elizabeth's tutorial regarding the insides (two layers of batting and some canvas). I have insul-bright, but agree that the crinkly thing is pretty annoying. I tested it out on a pan that I had in a 400deg oven. It worked, but you wouldn't be able to hold the pan for more than a minute before you started to feel warm. Not bad, and much better than the nasty crinkles.

These came out like the runner I made recently. Orange/aqua for one and those fun birds on the other. (For my own reference, they're a little under 8.5" square - a good size for me) I backed both with a gray Ikea home dec print that I love. I think she really liked them!

My Ticker Tape Workshop

I finally made it to a meeting of The Chicago Modern Quilt Guild on Sunday. Which is good, since I was in charge of the Ticker Tape workshop!


Jennie was awesome and volunteered to start up that blogger site for our guild so everybody can easily see what we've been up to without joining the official Ning site. Most of the photos here are from Jennie, Susan, and Karen - they did a great job capturing our fun!

So all those quilters in my last post are rummaging through the awesome pile of scraps we brought. I asked the women to being along their scissors, a glue stick, a mini quilt sized piece of solid, and some scraps to share. What better way to bond with fellow quilters than over each others scraps!

I talked briefly on how I made the Ticker Tape Parade for the auction, showed my tiny sample and a few tips on quilting up their mini once it got home. Then we went at it! My favorite comment - it was like the start of a yummy dinner, when all the chatting stops and people are just chewing. We got very quiet as the treasure hunt began.

Some gathered blues and greens, one hunted for black and white prints, Emily has a niece who needs a pink and green creation. (Emily decided to come to the meeting at the last minute, so she just brought her whole, huge scrap bin - it was great!)

I went with the random - I LOVE THAT FABRIC - approach. I did arrange my pile in a color order I liked but am totally unable to commit to a layout so quickly. I was the only one who didn't nearly finish while there. I was busy talking and looking at everybody's stuff, anyway.

I think Mary was done first. She also went random, and did a cool layout. Oh and all the extra scraps at the end were saved by Ebony, our super awesome program coordinator, for a future Iron Quilter event. Like Iron Chef - super cool!

Frieda had the most awesome house shape going - she said she would be adding some threadwork on top. It is going to become a hanging for her front door or entryway.

Jen wins for fasted completed - hers was bound and quilted by Monday! She also has only been quilting for 6 months and her mini is fantastic.

I was surprised that only a few of us had white for the solid. There was essex linen, yellows, blue, pink, greys and black. Susan finished quilting and the extra white stitches really add to the texture on that black background. Super cool.


Check out the links I have in the post for more pictures of ticker tapes and the show and tell. It was a great time - so glad they let me lead this workshop!

Hanging Stuff

My table runner has a new home. See that glaring sun that's trying to fade all my lovely fabric?

I noticed that the pinwheel runner was the perfect size to shade the side of the glass hutch. So up it went with 3M's command poster hanging strips. They stick to the cloth!

And although I didn't buy any fabric last week, I did get a treasure to hang in my space from etsy.

He says he can hear the Forest whisper
by Hidden Eloise at Hide N Seek.

Isn't she wonderful!? As I mentioned to Julie, get something fun for your sewing space - it helps with the fabric buying withdrawal.

It's like fruit flies, really...

Making all those Figgy Pudding minis - it was like breeding fruit flies to study, doing so many little projects quickly showed me a few things.

Most of them had to do with finishing off and binding. Crazy Mom Quilts has an awesome tutorial that I used, and Julie just did another recently.

Julie's mention of marking your 1/4" in the corners helps keep corners nice and even. And the way Amanda Jean explained how to join your binding ends was so helpful! I don't know what my problem was, but it never worked out for me until I started doing that measure-over-1/2" thing. Now my joins lay perfectly every time.

My own tip to add in, which is probably impractical on a large quilt but perfect for a mini, was marking the squared outer edge onto the quilted top. I lined the binding edge up to that mark and sewed. No wonky shapes on these!

Then I just used pinking shears to clip along the edge - careful not to get that fold! This eliminated one of my most hated things, the little unravely strings that fly all about while you hand stitch the back.

Go visit Julie or Amanda Jean for all their awesome step-by-step pictures if you want some more binding tips.
And now just one more picture that I took before the tea, of all my little {children} quilts in one place.

The best laid plans of a quilter....

I have a plan for the 5th grade auction quilt that is probably much more complicated than it should be. But I think it will turn out really awesome. I've compiled this outline for the teachers to see, and also all you blog buddies out there. If you see a fatal flaw, please let me know now!

The auction is February 20th, so I'm hoping to get this done before the 19th.... Here's the little sample I and the kids made last month.

I'm going to alternate Ticker Tape blocks {thanks for sharing Amanda Jean! who else is still in shock, mourning, and denial that she won't be blogging anymore?! Hurray for her, sad for us} with a solid. This sample is linen, but I'm going to use Kona Ash for the big quilt. The finished project should end up about 65" square.

I have 6" squares - marked off to 5x5 - for each child to design. I was going to label them after completion, but worried I would mess up a child's name and then ruin their work. So I have written all their names already. There are 83 of them. I'll bring along some extras in case the roster had a typo or some other disaster befalls a square in the class room. The teachers can also do one, and they will be grouped on a back corner - not enough room on the front.

I have a HUGE pile of gorgeous, graphic fabric. I added Heat-n-bond, peeled it, then whacked the stack up into small squares and rectangles. In the classroom, each child can hunt for favorites, then I'll quickly set their creation with an iron to make sure their design stays.

Once pieced, I'll free motion, raw edge quilt each placed rectangle {nanananana I'm not listening to how insane that may be with 83 billion fabric bits} the solids will probably be stippled.

I decided to pre-cut the fabric bits based on how my test quilt worked....for one, kid school scissors barely cut paper. They weren't going to make nice edges on fabric! Then, when I gave a pile to each kid and said 'fill it up and make something', this was the result:

Caleb the 7th grader literally filled it up and didn't bother to cut much of anything.

Kenton the 5th grader made some crazy tiny bits. I would have needed a padded cell if they all made little bits like that!

Becket was too small to cut with the sharp scissors, so I did cut his pieces. I preferred the clean shapes and loved how he layered a few. He worked for quite a while to get his just right. This was more what I was aiming for. You can see the blocks I made in the corners of the sample at the top.

The total effect is going to be pretty cool. I can't wait to see what the kids make of this!

Mini eleven: Figgy Wreath

The last one! My sister in law decided she wanted to keep the snow man mini , so I only needed to make one for my Mom (to make up for the extra mini I kept!)

I've had this paper piece pattern (I've bought several of her patterns - love them!) in my quilts-to-do file for quite a while. Now they're popping up everywhere and I thought it would make a pretty Figgy Pudding wreath.

Since I didn't need to keep with the vertical and fits-the-chair thing like all the others, I was able to make this guy a bit bigger at 18" x 15". My mom really liked the brown Christmas tree one, so I went with the dark background for the paper pieced geese.

Knowing I was making it for Mom, I used two of her favorite prints. The poinsettia and that wonderful red damask pattern.

I had to sneak in just a few more Munki Munki snowmen. They look at home with the strips on the back.

Mark finished up all the pictures of the Advent Tea. Here's a link to his SmugMug page if you're curious what all the tables were like.

Now, go look at the cool pattern Julie just put up with my beloved Figgy Pudding. I have plenty for extra fabric to make my own. And I was just thinking that this would make a great charger for the settings for next year!

OK deep breath

I head out for the morning run to the grocery store. My route takes me past the 5th grader's school.

There are 2 ambulances, 4 huge fire trucks, and firemen on the roof. Little bit of a freak out there! I, along with all the other moms that saw this as they ran their morning, pulled over and decided if we needed to have a major panic attack or not.

It turns out - not. My son's class was partying it up in the grass - doing the macarena dance. There was a fire in the boy's bathroom, put out and contained. But now there's smoke and water damage. The kids were all loaded onto buses and sent to my 7th grader's school where they will hang out in the gym and be fed some kind of lunch. A dream come true adventure day I'm sure!

I went over to enter for some Flea Market Fancy goodness. You should, too. I feel better now.

mini nine, mini ten....and more!

Last evening I committed to making two more of these Figgy Pudding mini quilts. But that's my own fault.

I'm in the final bits of preparation for the big event on Sunday, and that meant getting the seating plan done and deciding who gets to take home which quilts.

There was much moaning and wailing as my husband and oldest laughed at the spectacle and wondered why I was doing this in the first place! Because it's fun, that's why. Please ignore the meltdown I'm having, thinking about all these little quilts leaving.

So, I talked to my mom and sister in law and suggested that I could make their favorites again, and I would assign two more of my favorites to their seats. That way I can keep three of these little things that I just CAN. NOT. part with, and they get a totally custom mini. I think they're OK with that - or they heard the hysteria in my voice and agreed so as not to upset the psycho.

Mini nine is 'Whirling Skaters', from my whirlygig love. I made a 2.5" wide template so that I could easily cut each piece from a jelly roll strip.

I thought this fabric looked like it had been twirled on already by lots of happy skaters!

Mini ten is a small, shrunken portion of the free pattern that Moda had with the Figgy Pudding line. Totally lazy, I didn't want to do the quilty math to get the tree sections the size I needed. So I just drafted it to scale and paper pieced it. That worked out perfectly!

My new thing on this quit was to use an invisible thread. I didn't want any more busy swirls in the dark background, and I though a dark thread would be too distracting in those pretty, light blocks. It went much better than expected - I thought I'd have lots of breakage and tangled messes. Not a one!

The sun is finally out today, so I should get some good pictures of the table cloth quilt. I'll also be spending some quality time with my little quilts that will be leaving. I have to make sure I don't embarrass myself on Sunday by tackling the women as they go.

mini eight: colors

I showed my Mom and Dad the Snippets quilt I did a while ago with two turnovers. My Dad especially liked it - the even geometry of the layout appealed to him as much as it had to me. So, I had to make a mini version for my tea table.

It was actually a bit easier - I find half square triangles from squares nicer to deal with than starting with triangles to begin with.

My mom helped me out and hand stitched the binding on this and one other quilt. She got attached and has claimed this as hers!

I have the big tablecloth quilt done, but need some non-gloomy weather to get good photos. I know I'm nearing the finish line, besides the fact that I am totally unable to come up with a good name for this little quilt, I went out and bought a bunch of fabrics and patterns for some new projects! I'll share those later this week, too.

(I turned off these comments since I keep getting spammed on this one message!)

mini seven: gnome

Gnomeling pattern by Sonja Callaghan

Why, hello there! A sweet little gnome and his mushroom

Snail pattern by Jennifer Ofenstein

Visited by a friendly woodland snail.

I wanted to do at least one paper pieced quilt, and with the gnome thing I had going so far, these cute guys were the obvious choice.

Once again, Figgy Pudding (with a linen mushroom stump and random stash white) I created the creatures, then played around until I could get them to look like a quilt. I really like the little windows-onto-the-woods thing I ended up with.

It's about 14"x16.5" and I don't know if I'll be able to give this one up!