more quilt more post

Second dinosawa paw quilt:

It looks a lot like the first one, but it is a wholly separate thing!  There is only a tiny square of dinosawa paw (hoof?  foot?  what do dinosawas have?) fabric left.  

The back is red chicken wire.  And chickens are descended from dinosawas.  It works!   

 

 

Please do not be confused by the greenery - this was taken sometime in October.  We only have photos to remember the greenery by.   

 

Welcome to the family, quilt!

The kid helping hold the quilt is a smartass

 

Oh yeah!  Seeing this picture reminds me that I didn't have enough dinosawa fabric to do the binding of the second quilt that was actually stars, not paws, and the colors were a wee bit off.  I used up pretty much all of the star fabric for that, too, so there might be a bit or bob that end up in a scrap quilt, but it won't be much.  I do have plain black fabric that I could have bound with, but did I find it in time?  I did not.  

 

Happy crafting! 

And more

Okay, here is another finished quilt.  I gave it to the recipient last week then realized that her baby is actually the last due of the 3 I was trying to get done - she's not due until April, with a boy.  

 

The border fabric I got one Christmas ago, I believe, a yard in a bargain bin, and it produced one of my favorite baby quilts ever.  I had a long internal debate about whether it was gray or purplish gray, but I went with gray and I think it worked.  This is my favorite shade of green, so I'm highly biased, but the kids seemed to really like it too, so that's proof?  

Dark winter, I don't want to spend 10 minutes re-downloading the photo to rotate it, etc, but here is the back.  It is green with darker green lightning bolts, very cute, bought especially for this quilt during Christmas tear.  

 

 

Okay, more to come.   

Finished!

I do wish I could post more often, but getting photos to my blog is now an insanely byzantine process.  I'll bet if I wanted to spend 4 hours learning some new process I could do it pretty quickly, though I'm certain it would involve getting a new, expensive phone as well.  So I stick with this silly backwards maze of hacks and workarounds and only post once every six months and miss half the pictures I took and want to talk about and probably forget at least one project.  But at least that leaves me more time to actually make stuff.  Anyway!  

Here is a finished baby quilt.  (I still am not sure how to get Blogger to move my pictures around easily, so I'll get it into some semblance of coherence, if not order). 

 

It is for a boy who is due in March.  It has delightful whales/orcas/narwhals in the border and seashells and seals and stars.  I thought the light was ideal for photos today, but no - this winter has really brought it starting in November.  The sun has been out for about a total of 1.5 days out of the last 40.  We haven't been above freezing in weeks.  It's rather lovely that way and really makes you appreciate summer.  

 

Here's the back!  It's blue dots that I bought for something else.  I went on a pretty crazy tear after Christmas - got TWO gift certificates and left the kids at home and got lost in a time warp at the fabric store.  Got the nice border fabric but neglected to get a back to go with it, so I used this, which was meant to go with the jacks-looking blue fabric that I have more borders of.  It worked well here, though, and I will just plan to get stuck in the same way I always do when it's time to back a quilt.  

A closeup!  Still very dark.   

 

And here is another finish, a big one, though you can't really tell from the documentation.  All the pictures of in-progress are on my phone, which might as well be the outer reaches of the solar system given that I can't text to e-mail anymore.  But please be very impressed - this quilt is a Norm & Nanette with vintage fabrics - knits, corduroys, overalls.   

The quilting was a wild success, meeting my only goal of "oh god please don't ruin it."  The hooks, not pictured here, are the fasteners from overalls.  Cute!  Economical!  Invisible!  

Instead of dragging more photos around, I'll just make more posts.  Here they come! 

 

Dino-sawah

Okay, self!  Listen up.  You now get photos from your phone to your computer by going to the pic on your phone and sharing it with your google drive, then downloading it, then uploading it.  You click "share" and then you choose the google drive option.  Remember to delete them because you don't need them taking up space.   

I have a new strategy, and that is to put things where I tend to look for them first.  

I finished a quilt!  It has been a true comedy of errors and unclear communication, but I handed this to a still-pregnant person and consider that a huge win.  If I can do that with the next quilt, which yesterday morning was a pile of cut squares and a dream, and is now only needing 80% of the binding sewn down, then I will be one happy quilter.  

The entire time I was sewing down the binding of this, the old song "Alley Oop" kept going through my head, because I kept thinking of how he pronounced, "Dino-sawah." 

Very cute backing, courtesy of Hawthorne Supply Co.  

My next quilt's backing isn't nearly as cute and the binding could potentially be confusing to anyone who looks closely enough, but we're all just doing the best we can here.  

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!

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!

The koalas that keep on koalaing

 Another baby blanket is finished:

This one seems to have a slightly different color palate than previous koalas. 

Stash effectively busted for the back - this was a good score on sale, and I got a yard and a quarter and used up all but the very edges.  Not even enough left for 2" squares, which is great, because I need shelf space back.  I got some as backing for a koala quilt, even though as it turns out there's actually very little color overlap between the two.  They're all in the same color ballpark, though, so I'm not going to fret about it. 

 

Leetle bunny label. 

Welcome to the family, little quilt!

 

A nice wash with the previous quilts.  I hope to pass it off tomorrow, unless I forget or covid ruins all plans again.