Swoon-Blocks Finished!

This past week, I have been chugging a way on my Swoon blocks, and I am so happy to say that I have finished all of the blocks!  I am so in love with how it is turning out.  I love this fabric line so much.

This is one of my favorite blocks.  I just love the red and the focus it gives the block.

This one doesn't have the contrast the others do, but I still like it.:)

My husband was out of town at the beginning of the week, so once Z went to sleep I sewed a couple of hours each night.  Friday we had a snow day, so I snuck in an hour before everyone else was up, 2 1/2 hour nap time (Friday, Saturday and Sunday), and I stayed up way too late Friday and Saturday finishing these.  I am so glad I did because it feels so good to have these blocks completed!  I am going to work on the sashing this week, and I hope to have it basted in order to quilt it at the first Front Range Modern Quilt Guild Retreat in two weeks!  I can't wait!

January Stichery Completed

 

 I recently finished the cross stitch for January from the Frosted Pumkin just in time for the new February installment.  I have never cross stitched on linen before so it was a lesson in how to count on linen for me.  I  haven't really done any cross stitch since college, and it was a brief sampler then.  The last major thing I cross stitched was a horse and rider silhouette against the sun in front of the sun on a sweatshirt in high school.  It was really hard to stitch because it was going through sweatshirt material, and it was tedious.  I gave up on it until college because I was so burned out.  My sampler wasn't speaking to me, so I gave up half way through it too.  I still have it, and it will be eventually finished.  I was happy to find modern cross stich patterns to try.  I am not happy with this one, but I am looking forward to seeing how much I improve over the next 11 months!

I have also been working on my Swoon quilt, and I have 4/9 blocks completed here.  I finished the 5 and 6 blocks over the last couple of days, but they are not in this mosaic.  I am hopeful that I can finish them all this weekend!

Swoon-4 blocks finished!

As of this afternoon, I am up to four Swoon blocks!  I have been having a lot of fun pairing the story prints to the background fabrics.  I love the scarf print in the outside rim, and I am going to try to use a little bit of it in each block I think.  I think it will help it all tie together in the end.  My goal is going to be to complete two blocks a week, which seems doable at this point.  It will ultimately end up on my daughter's big girl bed when she graduates from her crib.

You should definitely check out the flickr pool where there are such amazing blocks!  I can't believe there are over 850 people in the group now; there are going to be some amazing quilts!

Baby Girl Plus Quilt

This past week I finished a plus or cross quilt for a new baby girl.  I wanted to try this pattern because I have seen it floating around, and I really like the way it shows off fabrics.  Each of the squares finishes at 4.5".  It is approximately 36" x 45", and it is a good crib size quilt.  It was a lot of fun pulling out different fabrics from my stash, and using some scraps up to finish it.  I really tried to balance low, medium, and high tones with this one, and play with different patterns, while trying to create a "girl" quilt that wasn't pastels.  I am sending it off to the recipient this week, and I hope she likes it!

I am linking up with Crazy Mom Quilt's Finish It Up Friday!  Go check out all the other finishes over there this week!

Swoon!

Last year I was dedicated to finishing up quilts, so my reward this year is the opportunity to start new ones!  Yay!  I have been hoarding two fat quarter stacks that I used birthday money last April to buy since last April with the idea that I would make my daughter two matching twin sized quilts for her future twin beds when she moves up to a big girl bed.  Right now she is 28 months and quite happy in her crib still, and we don't plan on moving her until it is necessary!  So, I am planning ahead. 

I was determined to wait until I found a pattern that I loved for her bed(s) before I used up my precious Pips.  I love the single girl quilt, and I seriously considered that pattern, but I felt like a lot of the people would end up decapitated, which is never a good thing. :) I do plan on making one of those eventually, but not with my pips.  It is such the perfect pattern for a little girl though!  I do plan on making a throw using some of my scraps from this project and others that blend to put into this room eventually... 

This past December I finally decided on the Swoon pattern, and all of a sudden it became a quilt-a-long hosted by Katy. This was my fortuitous moment where I decided that I was supposed to make this quilt!

Last weekend we had a sewing day with the Front Range Modern Quilt Guild, which is a fabulous group if you live in the Front Range area of Colorado from just south of Colorado Springs to Denver/Boulder (you should definitely join!), and my friend Kari was making a block for the Swoon-a-long, which I had already joined but hadn't started cutting.  She figured out a way to make the block a little easier by omitting some of the seams, but the caveat is you need a little more fabric.  I decided this was the way to go, and I quickly jumped on board. 

So, I made this block on Monday and finished it on Monday!  I did have to rip and rip and rip, but I would have been doing that anyway.  I think that happens anytime you are trying to beat the clock of when nap time ends!  I really love it, and Kari has a abbreviated version of how to do it on her blog, which will make sense if you have the pattern already.:)

I am very excited about this swoon-a-long, and if you haven't already joined, now is the perfect time!

Goodbye 2011-Hello, 2012!

I didn't mean to be away from this space for so long.  Things became incredibly busy around here with working full time, going to a fabulous quilt retreat, having guests for Thanksgiving and Christmas, and loving on my two-year-old girl.  I have been sewing away, but I didn't have time to take pictures or upload them or much of anything on the blogging front, which means I have new things to share!

One of my favorite things to do on New Year's is look back at everything I have made over the previous year, so I am going to share that quickly here.

This past year I finished four quilts: scrappy disappearing nine patch, a yo-yo quilt, sewconnected and sewconnected 2.

1. Scrappy Disappearing Nine Patch, 2. Yo-Yo Quilt, 3. Sewconnected Quilt-Back, 4. Sewconnected Quilt, 5. Back of Wonky ABC Quilt, 6. Wonky ABC I-Spy Quilt

This year every quilt I made I absolutely love!

I also worked on several smaller projects throughout the year.

1. A Line Fall Dress, 2. Shearwater Kaftan in Loulouthi, 3. DSC_0147, 4. Memorial Day Weekend 038, 5. hexagon pillow, 6. Tablerunner, 7. FRMQG Mug Rug Swap, 8. back of tutu, 9. Pincushion I paper pieced, 10. School House Tunic, 11. Apron!12. Not available

This coming year I would like to complete the following projects:
-6 dresses for my daughter
-Dog Quilt-(almost finished!)
-Sherbert Pips Quilt-two of these!
-start my Farmer's wife quilt
-baby quilt for my new niece or nephew born in June 2012
-another baby quilt
-Geese in the Forest Quilt-started/ need to finish
-Christmas Quilt for next year
-String Quilt
-Spring tablerunner for my mom
-Finish one more wip

I am hoping setting these goals will help me get them done!  Happy New Year everyone!

Little Owl

 I made my daughter, Z, an owl costume for Halloween this year.  It is the first year that I made her one, but it was a lot of fun to make!  She is an owl, which I don't think a lot of people got.  Everyone thought she was little red riding hood, which doesn't make sense to me because her cape isn't red.  I forgot to add an orange beak to her hood which might have made a difference.  That is okay because she looked cute!

 I used the Children's Corner Lucy pattern for her dress, and I used the cape pattern from Growing Up Sew Liberated for her cape.  I then cut out many "feathers" for her cape and dress, fused them on using lite bond, and then sewed around each feather.  The cape is size 3-5, and she is two so it should fit for a while. 

She was so cute.  She said, "I'm an owl.  Hoot!  Hoot!", and then she would move her arms up and down to flap her wings.:)

The weather was perfect.  It was in the sixties when we started trick or treating and clear, unlike last week when it was snowing and we lost power for over 30 hours!  It is supposed to snow tonight, too.;(  I am glad it held off until after Halloween!

Blogger's Quilt Festival

 Hi, everyone!  It is time again for one of my favorite blogging times of the year-Amy's Blogger's Quilt Festival!  It is always so much fun seeing so many beautiful quilts and finding new blogs to love.

For this round of the festival, I want to share my yo-yo quilt that I finished this past summer. I first started this quilt in 2003, and it is the first quilt I ever started. I really didn't realize what I was getting myself into when I started making it; I just knew I wanted to make a quilt; I didn't have a machine, so it would have to be all done by hand. I am so proud that it is completely pieced together by hand without using a machine at all.

I could also call this my "traveling quilt" because it has definitely traveled. When I started the quilt, I was living in Birmingham, AL, then I got married and moved to Ft. Payne, AL where we lived for about a year. We then moved to Denver, CO, which is where we live now. It has traveled across the country with us as we have moved several times. I have worked on it while driving from Denver to Hobbs, NM to visit my brother, sister-in-law, and new niece, and it has been to Destin, FL several times over the summer to visit with my family. It traveled up to Newport, VA one New Year's Eve to go to a concert, and it has also been to San Francisco, Dallas, Atlanta, and New Orleans. I even worked on it on the ten hour drive from Denver to Yellowstone National Park several years ago. Many of my friends have seen me working on this from time to time over the last eight(!) years, which is so different than the quilts I have worked on with the machine. I like that it has traveled so much, and it was easy to take with me since it was hand sewing.

 The finished quilt is 56 yo-yos across by 56 yo-yos down with the yo-yos being approximately 1-5/8 inches across. It is 90" square, which I think makes it a queen size quilt. It has 3, 156 yo-yos!

It is the quilt that I am most proud of making, and I am so glad that I finished it!  Thank you so much for stopping by!

Be sure to go check out all the other amazing quilts on display by using the button below! 

Book Club #2

I finished another book club stitchette last night!  I really like this one with the boy and the girl sitting on the couch sharing a book.  I dressed the boy in orange and blue to make him an Auburn fan since it is football season, and I was watching the football game while stitching it.  I am going to find a wall to hang these on and slowly add to the collection over time.  They are really fun to make!  The pattern comes from Wee Wonderfuls. 

I am linking up with Stitched in Color below!

Book Club

I am jumping into the world of embroidery and finished up this little book girl early this week.  It is so nice to have something that I can work on late at night while watching TV, especially since my sewing room has been turned into a guest room.  It is hard to pull out the machine when you only have 30 minutes to sew!

I ordered these book club stichettes a couple of months ago, but it took me a while to get started on them; I don't know why since they are so much fun!  I am almost done with my second one, and it only took me a couple of days!  The pattern is from Wee Wonderfuls, and you can order it here.  When I went to link up, I saw that she has patterns for Summer, Fall, Winter and Spring, too!  I need the fall one because it has little girl with a pennant saying "Go!".  Wouldn't that be perfect on the front of an a-line dress in your team's colors?  I am definitely going to have to make a little Auburn girl!