Bee Blocks So Far, and Quilt Basting

Here are the blocks I've received for my turn in the Bee Beautiful online quilting bee. I love how they look together!

I will eventually get 4 more in the mail from my friends, and make one myself.

Also--I basted my quilt today. 

I didn't have enough pins though, so I basted the last corner area with needle and thread.

Now that I think about it I wonder if I did it "wrong." It will probably be just fine. :) I am still pondering the quilting question for this one. I may end up straight line quilting it 1/4" away from the sashing seam lines. It's not my favorite way to quilt but I think it will look good on this quilt and not take away from the scrappiness and the variety of the blocks.

Making a Quilt Back

Yesterday I finally got the back all put together for my 9-patch quilt. These big quilt projects take me a long time; sometimes I feel like other quilt-makers are faster. But here's a bit on what it takes to put together a quilt back for such a large quilt. Nobody can accuse me of not posting enough about process, especially this month while I'm posting every day!

I went to JoAnn's to get backing fabric and found the cute Heidi Grace bird/leaf fabric (primary colors on white) and would have loved to back the whole quilt with it, but there wasn't enough. So I got the yellow and red prints too and a blue fabric as well. When I got home I decided to use the light weight denim that I already had on hand instead of the blue quilting fabric. Each piece of fabric had to be cut in half crosswise and then pieced together so it would be wide enough (over 66 inches according to the quilt-along post at crazymomquilts, I'm not going to measure it myself right now). I needed to make sure all the edges were straight and square, too. So I got all the fabrics ready and laid them out on my railing, then stretched the quilt out lengthwise on top of them to see if it was going to be big enough.

And... it's kind of hard to see in this photo, because I couldn't back up enough to show the whole thing really, but they aren't sewn together here, just lined up next to each other, and it was obvious that it wasn't going to be long enough once I sewed all the pieces together. Plus, I wanted to cut the red piece into two pieces so adding another seam would make it even shorter. I went to bed not sure what I was going to do. I was thinking about making a pieced strip to stick in there, but it wasn't what I really wanted to do.

The next day I decided I would use the red polka dot fabric that I had got from the JA remnant bin a week before I bought the other backing fabrics. I cut the red floral, started sewing the strips together, and then figured I needed the polka dot to be about 7" wide. And here it is!

I had to spread it out on the deck; I couldn't find a piece of floor big enough to photograph it this morning. Things have since been straightened up in my house and I am planning on pin basting it tomorrow. (I hope it's really big enough!)

Links to Share!

Here are a few things I've come across recently that are cool/interesting. Hope you like them!

Smashing Magazine monthly calendar wallpaper. Every month, Smashing Magazine has a collection of beautiful, free wallpapers that you can download, with or without a calendar, to your desktop. Last month I had the cutest little gnome couple on my screen; now I have a beautiful fall tree with leaves on the ground.

Melissa of Living a Creative Life has great ideas about going to bed at a decent hour, as my dad would say. I totally need to work on this.

Family feeding dynamics. I was getting a little caught up with telling my kids (one in particular) to clean their plates every night at dinner and it was causing some stress in our family. I love so many things about the feeding philosophy taught at this site--having sit down meals with your family, not feeling guilty about what you are currently doing, all food has nutrients, the division of responsibility between parents and kids with regard to kids' eating habits. You totally need to check this out if you have kids and you feed them!

Inspired Ideas magazine. This is a gorgeous, amazing, free online magazine chock full of beautiful holiday crafts. I love the white wreath idea and there is an adorable Mary Englebreit printable craft in there too. Check it out!

Holiday Gift Swap

I had a great time at the KC Modern Quilt Guild meeting last night. We had our holiday party and for the gift swap we were divided up into groups, then we had discussion questions to talk about so we could get to know each other better. We talked about our sewing spaces, what "modern quilting" means, what we want to learn next year, and more. (My goal is to learn how to do invisible zippers.) Then we opened gifts in our small groups according to age with the oldest going first. (I was not first, or last.) Here's the present I got, made by Stephanie:

Isn't she pretty? I think so. :) My little girl likes her a lot; we are calling her the "Christmas lady."

And then the youngster of our group got the last present, which was from me.

I had a hard time deciding what to make but here's what I ended up with. I sewed all the applique on ticker-tape style, after the 3 layers of the quilt were all layered. I wish I could have come up with something for that upper left corner but I guess it's ok the way it is.

My 6-year-old is in a VERY LITERAL phase of life right now and he did not approve of my crooked and messy lines in this project. He said, "That's not a star" about my star and then told me the whole thing isn't very good. It's ok though, I told him it was supposed to be this way, but he thinks everything should be as neat and realistic as possible right now.

Here's the back:

It has the look of a string quilt block, only I didn't use any foundation paper or fabric for it. My advice on this kind of back is not to trim it the same size as the front until after the quilting is done! I wasn't thinking quite right on that one, should have left the back a little bigger.

Oh yeah, I didn't point this out last night, but one of the tree fabrics is the feather fabric designed by Lauren--I'm glad she ended up with this and I hope she likes it as much as I do!

ready to finish my 9-patch quilt

I've been busy sewing, but I'm making things I can't share right now--we are having a gift swap at our next KCMQG meeting, and I'm also finishing some small projects to submit for publication in 101 Patchwork Projects (cross your fingers for me!)

Here's what I'm going to be finishing, very soon: the other day I went to my LQS and got this diagonal stripe; it's going to be perfect for binding my 9-patch quilt. I need to piece the quilt back out of the other 4 fabrics here. And I forgot to take a picture, but I got a really pretty variegated thread for quilting it.

PSA

Hey, just in case you were wondering, or even if you weren't, I changed my blog URL to http://www.sewinspiredblog.com

I'm still on blogger even though I'm not using the blogspot URL... we'll see if I decide to change that but I'm happy for now.

Anyway, you might want to update your feed readers or bookmarks. I have feeds for the old URL and the new one in my google reader and the new one updates right after I post, while the old one updates several hours later. Just letting you know!

question for you

I got an email recently asking me how often I change my needle on my sewing machine. Here's what I replied:

"I don't change needles super often... I try to change after I quilt a quilt, or if I can hear the needle popping through the fabric. I don't think you need to change your needle as often as "they" say if you're sewing wovens. Knit fabric on the other hand, you can ruin it easily if you don't replace your needles fairly often, after every 3-4 garments probably."


So what about you? How often do you change your sewing machine needle? Anyone out there who hasn't ever changed their needle?

Oh yeah, and I've been meaning to do this for a while, if you have any questions for me, sewing or otherwise, feel free to ask in the comments! 

vote!

Good morning! I just got back from taking the boys to school and voting. I wanted to share a couple of great blog posts about voting and women:

It's that time of year! Vote! by Meg at Material Mama.
and
Women's Duty at the Polls by Laura Ingalls Wilder, posted at Beyond Little House.

*****
Also, one more Halloween photo:

This was carved by my 10-year-old. It's supposed to be 3 skulls. I think he did a great job!

Halloween wrap-up, NaBloPoMo

Hi friends! I am so glad it's November, and that we are past Halloween! I like it, but it wiped me out this year. I've had a stuffy cold over the past week and that combined with Halloween activities at school and church and plain old trick-or-treating was just... a lot! I went to bed totally exhausted a couple nights this last week and am looking forward to getting all caught up on my sleep soon.

Here are some pictures:

"Paul the Business Gorilla." He is wearing his dad's fur hat from Romania along with a gorilla mask that has the bloody parts covered with electrical tape (no scary costumes allowed at school.) He used a bandaid to cover part of the blood, too.

Indiana Jones. He didn't want to wear his full costume at any of the events, it was even hard to get him to let me take a picture. (He loves the hat though and it will get lots of dress-up play use.) He was "Indiana Jones slash vampire" for trick-or-treating and wore the vampire cape I made last year with his Indy pants and shirt.

Here's the little fairy. I ended up finishing the hem on her skirt with narrow bias tape. She accidentally ripped a section of it off when I first finished it, but it was a pretty easy fix. I don't know how long this skirt will last though, we'll see. I finished her shirt hem right before we had to leave to go to the school party.

 I got the wings at JoAnn's, I'm glad I didn't have to make them.

She really loved jumping in the big bounce house at the church party.
********

A couple more things--I am going to be posting every day in November for NaBloPoMo (National Blog Posting Month). I did it last year, including the week we were gone on our cruise, so it should be a breeze this time!

And I have been enjoying the Quilt Festival over the weekend. I love that Amy has it set up with thumbnail images this time; it is so cool to look at her link-up and get a tiny glimpse of everyone's quilts. I have to say though that the best part is the conversations with quilters. I am trying to comment on every quilt (it might take me a few weeks to get through the list) and most people have emailed me back. I have added a couple of new blogs to my reader and am loving seeing all the quilts and reading their stories.

Oh yeah, one more thing--HAPPY BIRTHDAY, MOM!!! I LOVE YOU!!

blogger's quilt festival--a charity quilt

I made this quilt for a charity project that the KCMQG has been working on over the last few months. We are making baby quilts that will be given to NICU babies (to be taken home and kept) at a local hospital. I made the quilt top and did the binding on this quilt, and it was quilted by the wonderfully talented Angela Walters, who blogs at Quilting is my Therapy and does lots of amazing things with her quilting.

This main challenge for me when putting this quilt together was dealing with the limited number of fabrics. I like to use lots of colors and fabrics when I make quilts, and this quilt only has 5 different fabrics total. I really enjoyed making the improvised blocks--I wanted to make blocks that looked balanced and went well together, but I also tried to use up my scraps as I went. :)

Here are some close-ups of Angela's quilting. It is so beautiful! I need to find out what kind of batting she used because I really like how it fluffed up after being washed.

Here's a little sneak peek of most of the KCMQG charity quilts. Over the next couple weeks I'm planning on sharing photos of each quilt too. (We will have over 30 quilts to donate when we are all done... getting close!)

Apparently some of the Modern Quilt Guild leaders have some kind of friendly competition going on and I'd like stick my nose in and invite and encourage challenge the other Modern Quilt Guild folks to find a need in their communities and make quilts for a local charitable cause. Let's use our talents, our love of fabric and quilting, to bring some love and comfort to others in need!

Now if you don't already know about this, please visit Amy's Creative Side because she's hosting her 4th Blogger's Quilt Festival this week! It's a great opportunity to see amazing quilts and meet new quilting and blogging friends. Thanks so much to Amy for all your hard work putting this together!

spooky quilt contest--vote for me, please!

AnneMarie at Gen X Quilters is hosting a Spooky Quilt contest, and I've entered the Little Witch quilt I made last year.

This quilt was made for a mini quilt swap at sewingmamas.com; I should have made a twin of it to keep! I guess I can still do that one of these days if I really want to.

I would love it if you head over and vote for me. Or for someone else, if you like their quilt better. The winners get some cold, hard, fabric!

Also--last year when I made this quilt, I wrote up a tutorial on how to make the little wonky pumpkin quilt blocks. They are pretty easy, and cute too, I think. I'd love to know if you sew one up!

blocks

I spent some time this week making quilt blocks.

A few for my bees. I started my very first Dresden plate block as well, but it's not ready to show yet.

And I made 4 of these blocks. The others were made a few (or more) months ago. My husband's grandfather passed away 2 1/2 years ago and I offered to make a quilt from his shirts for Grandma M. I've been preoccupied with other things for a while but this project has finally made it to the top of my list again! I hope she will like this; I've been afraid that it might be a little too modern or not traditional enough for her tastes, but I think I'm sticking with it anyway. I will probably look for a nice dark red (and traditional) floral for the back though, which seems like it might be just her thing.

I'm linking up at Sew & Tell Fridays, go check out all the cool things people have made this week!

finished quilt top!

Here's my 9-patch quilt top, all done!

I made it following the quilt-along at crazymomquilts. I have batting for it but still need to get backing and binding fabrics!

Next up--blocks for Grandma Kathryn's quilt. (If you know her, don't tell, ok?)

I've made some progress on L's costume... found a tinkerbell t-shirt at Savers that I'll be cutting up and making into something really cool for her. I can't believe I found it, it's just perfect for her costume.

Also wanted to share--I really loved this post over at zen habits today. I love the idea of relaxing and focusing on doing what you truly enjoy.

KC Modern Quilt Guild

Last night was the KC  Modern Quilt Guild meeting. (Yay, we have a website!) We were lucky to have Cherri House as a truly inspiring guest speaker. She showed us several quilts from her new book, City Quilts: 12 Dramatic Projects Inspired By Urban Views, told us some great stories about her quilting life, and had time for lots of questions and answers, too. I'm so glad I was there to hear her speak, and to chat with her a bit afterwards, too.

This meeting was also the early "deadline" for quilts for our group charity project. We've been making baby quilts that will be given to families at a local NICU. So far we have 25 quilts (a few of these still need binding).

Aren't they beautiful? I will take individual photos of all the quilts eventually, but wanted to show how we had them displayed last night. There are a few more that we are waiting on, and then they will be labeled and delivered to the babies. I can't wait!

There are a couple other things I wanted to share from some of our super cool guild members:

This quilt was made by Alex of Teaginny Designs, and she's created several free tutorials for making the little vehicle blocks. Check out her Busytown quilt, too! 

Also, I wanted to show you Lauren's Halloween birdy fabric.

Isn't that cute? You can buy some, if you want, at her Spoonflower shop. (There are 4 other colors.)

Next month at our meeting we will be having (the first of 2? maybe?) a holiday party complete with handmade gift exchange. I need to figure out what I'm going to make!

my first pettiskirt

Here's my first attempt at a fluff-free fairy pettiskirt for Halloween:

Don't you love her hat?

I used the free tutorial from Sewingmamas.com, but I changed the proportions. The waistband layer is 1.5 times her waist measurement; tier 1 is 2x the width of the waistband layer, and tier 2 is 2x the width of tier one. This is plenty of skirt for this little girl. I had a 24" piece of the shiny fabric from the remnant bin, and I used all of it. 

Here's the spinning shot:

The waistband layer looks a bit lumpy; I used a quilting solid I had on hand for that and it doesn't drape like the fabric recommended in the tutorial. Anyway, that will be covered by a shirt most of the time she wears it so it's not really a problem.

Also, I need to figure out what to do about the hem. For now the insane fraying is kept slightly in check by a wide zigzag. I tried to do a sort of wide rolled hem on the serger and it didn't work at all. Anyone have any suggestions for me? I could buy some narrow lace or something to sew onto that edge, but I'd love to hear your ideas.

fabric, Halloween ideas, 9-patch progress

I've been making progress on my 9-patch quilt. I just might be able to have it done in time for the next Blogger's Quilt Festival. (It starts at the end of the month, are you ready?) I got the quilt top all pieced together yesterday, and pressed all those sashing seams too. There are 2 borders left and today I got the pieced borders all together, still need to take them to the ironing board.

The other day I got some more Meadowsweet fabric. It's so pretty. One day I hope to make a strawberry quilt for my girl with this strawberry fabric and maybe some of her baby clothes that had strawberries on them. (If I can bear to cut them up, sigh.)

And I've been thinking about Halloween. My middle child wants to be Indiana Jones and I'm hoping to find pants and a jacket at the thrift store. I found a hat on Amazon that I think will work for him. My oldest still hasn't decided what he's going to be, but we'll figure something out, I'm sure. And for my girl, well I was pretty sure she was going to be a girl garden gnome but then I got to thinking about how it would be cute if I put fairy wings on her with a gnome costume, and then I just decided she will probably really love it if I have her be a fairy. I wanted to make this skirt but I found some shiny lavender fabric in the remnant bin at JoAnn's today.

I think I will make a tiered skirt from it and hopefully that will be good. I also found light green wings today; I might decorate them with some purple too. I have an idea for a top; you'll have to wait and see what that might be.

How are your Halloween preparations coming along? Are you making any costumes this year?

finally, some finishes!

I feel like I've finally made a kind of dent in my UFO pile! I finished up my little leaf quilt earlier this week--love it!

And I finally got this all done for Quilts for Kids. I washed and dried it after this photo was taken and now its all soft and crumply.

This isn't a finish but I'm making good progress! This is half of the rows all pieced together. You can see I didn't press all the seams yet but I will, don't worry. After all 10 rows are together there will be a border of pieced squares and one final 2.5" white border. It will take me a few more days of work, which is going to be interrupted by something else that has a deadline, but I'm going to finish it! Soon!

I was at Target the other day buying a white t-shirt for an unspecified art project for the 5th grader, and I stopped by the dollar area and found these leaves and decided to get them. Yesterday I strung them on thread, with a knot tied in between each leaf to keep them spaced out sort of evenly. I did it in two pieces and used doubled strands of threads. They're tied together in the middle.

I am so excited to be able to link up to Sew & Tell again, it's been a while! Stop by and see what others have finished this week!

dutch oven cooking, and a quilt dream

I've had these dutch ovens since my forest service days. Well, maybe I only had one back then. My roommates and I had a few really fun campfire cookouts at our CCC era forest service summer home. Great big tin foil dinners and apple crisp made in the dutch oven.

We recently got the dutch ovens cleaned up and ready to use; they had been neglected and rusty but it wasn't that hard to get them back in cooking order. 

The pizza was really good but a bit overdone in the center. I definitely want to try making it again.

And the brownies were perfect. Box brownies with added chocolate chips. My husband did most of the work, all I did was mix the brownies. Maybe we'll make something yummy in them again this weekend?

*****

The other night I went to sleep thinking about this quilt. So yesterday I went through all my favorite quilt patterns saved from old magazines and found it:

It's from American Patchwork and Quilting, December 2001. I just love the color scheme, the blues, yellow/golds, raspberry pink and a bit of green. I love the scrappy background fabric too but honestly if I make this I'll probably use one solid fabric. And I really love that soft pink border.

The finished sawtooth star blocks are 5" square, and the pattern provides instructions for making 244 of them. Yeah, that's too many. I'm thinking about it, maybe I'll make a small version of it, or maybe I'll size up the block to 6 inches. I did the math and I could make a similar size quilt out of only 147 six-inch blocks. That sounds a lot more doable than 244. Does anyone want to do a quiltalong? Maybe in a couple months?

where I'm at now... UFOs

I finished quilting the pink and green quilt today.

At the end, I was working on making the loops bigger. Maybe you can tell if you look close, down in the bottom left corner there. I haven't made the binding yet; I'll probably do that on Monday.

Here's another project I've been working on. Previously seen as a pile of fabric here.

I wanted to have this finished before I showed it, but it's not there yet. I need to sew the binding down and do another round of hand quilting just inside the binding edge.

Here's the twin quilt: 

This was a gift for a friend's birthday last month, and I had to make two... because I wanted one for myself and also because I make my half-square triangles in pairs and would have had extras if I only made one. Actually, I have extras anyway.

So--I think I'm going to extend my UFO week until the end of Monday and see if I can actually finish a couple more things and shrink my works-in-progress list. I am going to make myself a skirt next week though, and it's a new project. I already bought a sweater to go with it....

half way quilted

Plugging away.

I got the pajamas made too, didn't get a picture yet.

And I bought stripey binding fabric today.

Oh yeah, if you want to enter to win some cool games, go visit Jan's blog. My boys and I reviewed Mastermind and Mastermind Towers for her--pretty fun!