Beb Quilts

I have finished more baby quilts!  

These first two were done for coworkers who were due with a boy and a girl within two weeks of each other.  I went for a monochrome thing for them.  

 

This was nearly all from stash. 

I LOVE the blue edge fabric here. 

I LOVE this backing fabric, too, even though it bled a little bit :/.  

THIS is the prettiest thing in the whole world.  It has the cutest owls, and lots of corals, and birds and pink (I know, wut?) and I love it and it is for my ONLY niece.  Welcome, only niece!  

Stop me if you've heard this one, but I misjudged the amount of backing fabric I needed and ended up using something I hadn't planned to, which is black-and-cream sophisticated animal medium-scale.  

I've got two more boy quilts to crank out and started working on a quilt in the same colors as this prettiest quilt in the world.  I'm coming to the end of a lot of fabrics I've had in my stash for a long time, which is strange but probably also a good thing, considering how much I get more. 

I'm still working on the 2" square leaders-and-enders quilt and the appliqué one as well.  Decided to hand sew the applique squares together, because I can do that sitting at my desk in the evenings, away from my quilting space. 

Happy crafting!

I have done things in 2025

 And it is March already.  Sheesh.  

 I measured and cut for HOURS and here's what it yielded:  

This is charms for baby quilts, 2" squares for a leaders/enders project, and background squares for the appliqué quilt. 

I needed a gender-neutral quilt for what turned out to be a little girl.  If this isn't an antidote to winter grey, I don't know what is:

 

I'd been saving that orange paisley for a very long time, and it finally found a home.  

bunneh

Welcome to the family, quilt!

Incidentally, this is the last extant photo of our beloved, dearly departed washing machine.  It saw us through many, many things, and died a loud and frightening death.  RIP, GE.   

This quilt is for a little brother of the baby girl who got the mint and lavender thing a couple of years ago.  My theme was "water" and I intended the dark fabric to be the borders, but then I cut some charms from the lighter fabric (with seals!) and then didn't have enough to use it for the back.  Doh. 

I am expecting my first niece in July, which is very exciting after five lovely and wonderful nephews.  Her quilt will have owls, corals, and joy.  There are also two monochrome-ish quilts, one purple and one blue, which are having binding sewn down right now.  I'll post pics when those are done.  

Happy crafting!

I did things in 2024

 Baby Blue Bunny Boy Quilt

 

The kiddo's coach was pregnant through their season, and she was seized by the quilting bug and suddenly we were quilting every night.  

We got it done, and she was very proud.  She gave it to her coach in October. 

This one was for a coworker whose baby was born in December. 

I flippin love this backing.  Don't have a ton left, but was fun to use. 

This one was for someone who I've worked in the same field with for a long time.  Baby was born in Feb and I got it to them in March. 

And now I've got a whole whack more of quilts to make, which is very, very exciting, and I've got a week to get another one done and have a plan with backing and batting and everything, and it's fighting me terribly.  It just looks bad, I think.  Garish.  Argh.  

Crayon Drawing Summer Quilt!

I finished Summer Quilt yesterday!  Tomorrow is the start of school, so I made it by ONE DAY, even if I had to fish it out of the dryer and put it on the kid while kid was already sleeping.  Still made it!  

It's one of my weirder ones, but I really like it.  I quilted simple horizontal lines across in white, pretty far apart - 4-8", usually, because the seersucker in place of the batting isn't likely to shift around much.  Oh, and I threw in a couple lines of dark purple embroidery thread quilting just for the fun of it.  I considered doing a lot more, but my aim was for a light quilt and everything I thought about doing would just have added weight. 

 

 

I lost some white on the bottom left because I didn't estimate the width well.  That was a bummer, but if I'd slowed down to add some more in, I would've lost some big opportunities for time and space to work on this - done is better than perfect, right?  

 

The binding was mostly oranges and pinks from the jelly roll. 

Kiddo picked out the backing fabric.  Not what I would have chosen in a million years, but it kind of matches and kiddo is very happy with it, so that's a win.  

An enormous wave of activities and busy-ness is about to crest over us, but there will be another baby in February, so I started another Koala baby quilt today.  And measured carefully and calculated that I have just enough fabric for two more koala quilts.  Five total seems like enough, but it's also just such a great gender-neutral fabric and the scale is so nice, and it's my favorite colors.  But there will always be other fabric, I know, I know.  

I also don't have a plan for backing fabric, but something will turn up!  Haha.  

Happy crafting!

Here!

Months of crickets notwithstanding, I have been doing some things!  Not a whole ton of things, but not nothing, either.  

So, "agonize" is too strong a word, but whatever word that's approximately two ticks less than agonize on a scale of ten, that's what I do when choosing fabric for boys/men. Is it too busy?  Too pink?  How masculine are bunnies?  

If it were up to me, everyone would just do whatever they liked and there wouldn't be gender-based strictures on people's use of color, but it is decidedly not up to me, so I try to respect target giftees' assumed internal regulations for colors they will and will not use.  

So it was with much amusement that I found out recently that my dad has been using a pouch that I made for my mom a billion years ago to hold all his cords.  

This pouch:

 

This purple-ass floral pouch is considered perfect, and he ordered another one approximately the size displayed in the photo, preferably with a pocket to hold a driver's license.  

Et voila:

A bold but potentially masculine green (idek, help) pattern with a driver's license pocket:

that I winged.  Wung.  Pictured with a real driver's license!  Hopefully they are a standard size state-to-state!  We'll find out soon, I suppose.  

 

Summer Quilt: I don't have enough backing fabric, Part How Many Quilts Have I Made?

I have been sitting on the backing fabric for this quilt for years.  YEARS.  So it's probably nearly impossible to source at this point and of course, of course, of course there's not enough.  Why did I think there was enough?  At some point in every quilt project I do, there's a point where I wave my hand dismissively, blow a raspberry, and say, "Oh, I'm all set for backing fabric." 

SELF.  YOU ARE NOT.  AT LEAST CHECK, PLEASE.  (While we are reminding ourselves of things, you should also know that the way that you get pictures onto this blog involves texting them to your e-mail address.) 

Years ago, younger child declared that they needed this quilt:  

Uhhhh... right.  One jelly roll, many stash fabrics, and even more full-width seams later, we have a top.  The liberty I took was mostly to decide that there would not be much angling of seams.   Horizontal seams means the quilt is done before kiddo moves out.  

Fun story: the day after I took the picture of the drawing that I managed to keep track of for probably 4-5 years, the wind blew it off my table and the dog soaked it in pee.  So this is the only extant version of the initial vision for the quilt.  

I have yet to piece the seersucker that will replace the batting in this quilt and that's not seeming like any kind of enjoyable picnic, so hopefully that will happen soon, although we just are wrapping up a free summer weekend and it didn't happen, sooooo.  

Oh!  Spinning!

A fitting title, because I nearly forgot to post about it and did forget to do it yesterday, the day that Tour de Fleece started.  But today I remembered, and spun some:

 

I have to hide the spinning wheel from the dog, so I may forget that this exists.  My plan for this yarn is to have one ply of this delightful multicolor and one ply of natural and then do something exciting with it, in terms of knittingness.  

 OH!  Baby quilt!

 

I also made this baby quilt, for a baby who has arrived and is truly delightful.  Fun fact: it is the first of my baby quilts to feature an appliqued badger.  Can you find the badger?  It is not hard! (Are badgers masculine?)

Happy crafting!

Plants need water, man.

 Mittens!

 It's all about mittens these days.  These are un-blocked as of yet:

They are one of four pairs I'll be making for the menfolk of the family.  I do love making mittens, and now that it's finally gotten cold, I realized the other day that wearing mittens when it's very cold outside helps keep your hands warm.  Maybe I forget that over the summer?  

Many mittens in this book start with purl braids, which take me flipping forever.  They're supposed to keep the edge from rolling - perhaps after blocking?  

Baby Quilt!

 Y'all.  There's another baby coming.  It's a boy, so I can't unload the enormous pile of baby girl family clothes quite yet, but I remain ever hopeful.  I'm also very excited to have a new quilt to make.  

This is all-stash.  There should be a badger appliqué, if that goes well.  I wanted a new color scheme, one I hadn't made a boy quilt from before, so three nice bold ones are a choice that makes me happy.  Backing will be a bit more of a challenge, though I remembered I have a nice yellow with stars and moons on it.  Is it bad if it doesn't match the front at all?  

 

Summer Quilt!

This quilt is just going to be weird, okay?  (And this is a sideways view - the stripes will be horizontal.)  It's based off a crayon drawing one kid did a couple of years ago.  I got a bargain on seersucker awhile ago too, to use in the middle instead of batting, but the quilt that I made like that before ended up a little heavier than I would have liked.  I suppose I could just use it as a backing, because the seersucker might do a good job of camouflaging the texture of the seams on the back of the top, but this seersucker happens to be white, and I haven't got enough illusions about our ability to keep a white-backed quilt looking clean.  

Long seams aren't my forte, but I think I'm getting better at them!  The walking foot helps.  I'm sewing two together, then four, then eight, which I think also helps.  Design wall space is at a premium right now, so I've got the top half all sewn together and probably about half of the bottom half stripes prepared.  There's a jelly roll involved, so that has been a nice shortcut.  

Happy crafting!

That's what you get for putting your craft area in a flood plain.

I've been doing some things!  Mostly non-crafty, but in small windows of time, I've been able to do some mending that has been on the pile for awhile.  The pile grew significantly, as I have children who wear skirts/children who leave dog treats in the pockets of raincoats that they then leave on the floor AND a puppy. 

Here's some mending I've done:

This skirt has some sashiko-ish embroidery on a weirdly-shaped patch.  I was lucky to have one fabric in the stash that matched the edging of the skirt perfectly.  The tear went right up to the bobbly edge, so the appliqué was fiddly, but I think I like the skirt better with the patch than without.  The sashiko stitches are done in dark purple and white, and I like how they go with the pattern of the original skirt. 

This is a raincoat - a hand-me-down that we immediately put two big holes in, when the puppy went for the treats.  The pocket is now a pocket to nowhere, but the raggedy holes are covered, and it's not terribly obtrusive. 

 

I used some leftover fabric that at least used to be waterproof - it may not be anymore, but it's still probably better than quilting cotton.  

And here's some good burying the lede: the Gnome Quilt is finished!!

The back is one fabric, with little woodland images and creatures.  

Here are some of my favorite blocks (pre-first wash):

The "love" patch is made with reverse appliqué of yellow over red, with black and red embroidery over it.  

 

And this block is one of the ones I used the cricut for - the glasses are from a file I bought off of Etsy.  Instead of piecing this face, I used a full rectangle of the background fabric and appliquéd eyes and a mouth on, because I didn't think fusing the glasses over seams would work well.  

I was planning to embroider a book under this one's arm, because it's a representation of our favorite librarian, but I decided at the last minute to go with the card catalog fabric instead. 

There are a couple of hats personalized with the cricut as well, and the blonde in blue has an asymmetrical haircut.  

I'm also knitting stuff - Christmas gifts, mostly.  This is a men's mitten.  

Happy crafting! 

FO: Stash Sandwich

 

I'm excited!  This big old quilt is finished - and I still haven't measured it.  But the lid of my scrap bin closes easily and I have only about 4 4" strips left over, so that's a big win.  

Here's a closeup of the back:

The back was made from a length of fabric I bought specially, plus a bunch of leftover strips, plus a big length of fabric I bought a couple of years ago from someone destashing yardage at the LQS, plus some leftover wide backing from Penguins and Moonglows.  

The back was a whole heck of a lot of work, but I ended up really liking it. 

I longarmed the quilting at a store where you can rent time on the machines, and while I don't think it looks particularly great, the effect overall is nice, and it is nice and flat.  When I was leaving, I made another appointment near the end of June to quilt the next one, which is not even close to being done.  I have 5.8 gnomes to go, several of which need redesigns or major decisions.  Maybe a deadline will help. 

Happy crafting! 

Life with a Pickle

 Exciting things have happened!  First, the cutest thing:

We think he's going to be one of those couch potato Australian Shepherds, as he is generally mellow and calm, unless it's midnight and you're trying to sleep.  He's getting better at sleeping through the night, albeit on my head, and is generally interfering with Crafting Time less and less.  

The next exciting thing is that I've now longarmed for the first time!

I attempted "dwirling," although the result was not really identifiable as such.  The free-motion was really all over the place, and I didn't feel good about it as I was doing it, but it's not obviously horrible on the finished quilt.  Plus, I'm going to wash the finished quilt for maximum shrinkage, which should hide the stitching a bit.  I do love how even the stitches are, I loved getting the whole thing quilted in one (long) go, I loved not having to wrestle it through my machine.  And the place I'm using has really, really good rates.  

In the future I should definitely measure both the top and back.  I rarely measure when working with a whole quilt, because I don't really have room to spread out a big quilt flat at home.  I do all measurements relative to the quilt itself, i.e. laying the back down on the bed and laying the top on top of it and seeing if there are at least 4" around the edges. 

Piecing the back was a chore - I sewed together the remaining 4" strips, first in random order, then ripped a bunch of that out and pooled into warms/cools and sewed those together.  I had a lot left over after making the top and bottom borders for the quilt top, so I pieced those into the back in such a way that they wouldn't mostly get cut off.  Will take a picture once the whole thing is bound, but you can see the warm strip in the pic above, which is between two much bigger chunks of fabric on the back.  

For binding, I planned to use more Kona Navy, which is what the triangle squares are on the top.  I'm very low on the Kona Navy I've had on hand forever, so I was glum about ordering some more even though I've used my quarterly buying day for the Fabric Fast I'm doing with the Quilters Knitting group on Rav.  Couldn't find another fabric I'd have enough of to do the whole binding and that looked as good as the Navy would, but then I realized that the super bright rainbow wide backing I'd gotten last year would go well enough with the rainbow-y-ness of the top.  It's not my favorite fabric, but so little of it ends up showing that I decided to go with it, rather than wait.  

 Finally, I've gone back to cross-stitching:

It was a bit accidental - I downloaded some patterns to support Ukrainian designers and then just happened to have some dark blue embroidery fabric on hand and then this kind of started and then kept going.  The pattern is here.  I definitely started it too close to the top, but with careful finishing it should be fine. 

So that's what I'm up to!  Hopefully I'll have a finished quilt to post soon.  

Happy crafting!