Quilting
2012 in Pictures: Week 5
Multitasking
Birthday Quilt In Progress
In the Office with Mama
Samantha’s Artwork
HELP! Jedi Have Locked My Head in a Box!
Bare Feet and Grass Stained Knees
Daddy & Daughter Birthday Celebration
From 2012 Project 365
The Fabric I-Spy Book Tutorial
Have a pile of scraps waiting for a good use? Need a quick last minute gift for the toddler or preschooler on your list? How about sewing up a Fabric I-Spy Book? I originally created this tutorial for the Holiday Bake, Craft and Sew-Along over at Skip to My Lou. If you’re looking for more Christmas cooking and crafting ideas, there are some great recipes and tutorials over there that you have to go check out!
This Fabric I-Spy Book is a perfect gift for toddlers to preschoolers, and it’s a great way to use up those scraps that you’ve been hanging on to! The book is folded accordion-style so your little one can read it like a book:
or unfold it to seek and find on multiple pages all at once:
Can you find a white measuring tape? a dalmation with spots? #18 celebrating? two barbecue grills? a swimming dinosaur with rainbow dots? a mama with six little babies?
Ready to get started? Gather up the busiest, most colorful fabric scraps you can find and click here for the downloadable pdf tutorial: Downloadable I-Spy Book Tute.
Enjoy! If you make one of these, I’d love to see!
Fresh Comfort Quilting Bee Blocks — All Done!
I let myself get terribly behind on quilt blocks for the Fresh Comfort Quilting Bee, but I’m all caught up and all finished now! It was a wonderful year of piecing together blocks. I learned so much! The blocks above are Wonky Log Cabins for Heather. She’s planning to use them in a quilt for her husband.
The blocks below are going into a Zig-Zag Quilt that Joanna is sewing. You can find the tutorial for them on her blog: Zig-Zag Block Tutorial.
Finally, these last two blocks are for Debbie’s Christmas Quilt.
September Fresh Comfort Quilting Bee Blocks
Joseph here is a little late. He was supposed to be done and on his way back home last week. His tardiness, however, was completely out of his control.
Liz of Handmade by Liz Taylor hand embroidered the center pieces of the blocks for her turn at The Fresh Comfort Quilting Bee.
Joseph was mine to piece into a log cabin block. Liz is making a Christmas quilt from all the blocks that she receives. She asked us to each complete one traditional log cabin block with the embroidery that she sent along and one additional log cabin block with fabrics in red, white and a tiny bit of green.
I love how my main block turned out. This second block, though, is a little loud. I hope it blends in well with the rest of the quilt.
This is going to be an amazing quilt. I’ve been trying to plan out a way to copy this idea for a quilt for our house for this Christmas. I haven’t yet figured out how to squeeze more than 24 hours out of a day, though, so I suppose I’ll have to put it on my list for next year.
Pillowcases 5 & 6 and a Couple of Quilt Blocks
Pillowcases numbers 5 and 6 are all done. 34 to go! These two sport some of my favorite Michael Miller prints.
And, I’m finally caught up on quilt blocks for the Fresh Comfort Quilting Bee. Bibi send us these adorable prints and asked us to sew up Dutchman’s Puzzle Blocks.
Of course, I had to make a matching one for myself, too!
It’s My Turn!
June is my month to send off fabrics and have quilt blocks sewn for me at the Fresh Comfort Virtual Quilting Bee. I chose Monaluna Chickens for Robert Kaufman as the main fabric and asked for the other quilters to fussy cut the chickens and feature them somehow. Everything else about the blocks, I’m leaving up to them! I’m planning to sew up a whimsical quilt and maybe some accessories for my kitchen when I get them all back.
I did a couple of blocks myself before I sent the fabrics off. I started with this fun wonky house block with a giant chicken in the yard:
Then I sewed up a more traditional Shoofly block with chickens peeking out from each side:
May Quilt Blocks for the Fresh Comfort Quilting Bee
Carrie asked for 3″, 6″, 9″ and 12″ blocky squares this month. She wanted traditional as well as wonky blocks. I had a lot of fun with this one! The block above is a 9″ wonky bento box block. The ones below are 6″ and 3″ improvisational blocks. (That blue, green and purple stripe fabric refused to be ironed flat!)
And, as usual, I sewed up two blocks using the same patterns for the quilt that I’m working on putting together.
Next month is my month to send off fabric and receive blocks! I’m so excited! I have all the fabric picked out, and I’m working on a few sample blocks right now.
Fresh Comfort Quilt Blocks for April
I am really enjoying the Fresh Comfort Virtual Quilting Bee. Each month I get to learn a new technique or try out a new idea for a quilt block! This month, Tacey asked us to do Opposites Attract blocks for her quilt. The idea of this block is to pair a busy pieced area with a quiet area featuring one main fabric.
For the first block, I did randomly pieced pinwheels using the main fabric for the bottom quarter of the block. For Tacey’s second block, I pieced together squares of the coordinating fabrics around a strip of the main choice.
Samantha fell in love with Tacey’s fabric selections, and I happen to have a few yards of the main fabric in my stash so you may see this combination again in a quilt for her in the future!
And, as usual, I made matching blocks in the same patterns to keep for myself.
Fresh Comfort Quilt Blocks for February & March
I got a little sewing done this week! Just a few quilt blocks, and I had to do them in short blocks of time, but it was really nice to sew something. The two quilt blocks above are the ones that I did for me this month. The month of March is Barb’s at the Fresh Comfort Virtual Quilting Bee. Barb sent beautiful batiks and linens for her blocks and asked us to use Oh Frannson’s Map of the States Block tutorial. This was my first experience paper-piecing anything, and I think it was a great place to start. I’m so happy with how the blocks turned out!
In February, Hilary asked for log cabins. I love the color palette that she chose for her fabrics. Here are the two blocks that I did for her.
And the log cabin blocks that I did for me.
An I-Spy Quilt for a Sweet Little Boy to Cuddle
A nine-year-old little boy from the local church where we’ve worshipped for the last several years passed away a little over a week ago. His name was Montana. Although we weren’t close friends with the family, we worshipped with them and our children went to Sunday School together, and my heart breaks for them. I can’t even begin to imagine what a difficult time this is for them. Montana had a four-year-old little brother who’s left to grow up without his big brother now, and I really felt the leading to craft something for him–something that might bring him a little comfort.
I’ve posted before about the I-Spy Quilt that I made for Jamie and how much he loves it. Collecting all those different blocks left me with quite the collection of blocks leftover, and I knew right away that would be the perfect thing.
The finished quilt measures about 40″ X 50″. A good lap-quilt or nap-quilt size for a preschooler. I like that the I-Spy blocks make it fun, too. In fact, Jamie and I played “Can you find the race car, dinosaur, football . . . ” with it before I threw it in the wash when it was all finished.
I left out batting and backed it with minkee. I love the way this makes a nice drag-around-the-house quilt that’s easy and compact to fold, but still feels soft and warm.
I also added a label to the back to remind Dooley of how very much he’s loved by family and friends.
