Baby Girl's Quilt

I wanted to make a quilt for my little girl, and when I saw the Nursery Versery line with cute drawings of the Itsy Bitsy Spider, Country Mouse & City Mouse, and the Five Little Piggies, I knew that was it. 

I wanted to do a more traditional pattern to work on my technique a little bit more. When I finished the checkerboard top and the hexie daisy back, I decided on a concentric swirled heart quilting pattern so there wouldn't be a super obvious right and wrong side. 

front

I finished the ends with a quilted daisy chain. 

daisy back

craaaazy quilting

 Best part is, she loves it and played on it with her trains and blocks almost all day yesterday. :-)

Colorcentric - Quilt #5

December was a hard month for us. A really hard month. And it was my first month experiencing real winter. So, a couple of weeks before Christmas, I  decided that I needed a bit of a distraction and my husband needed a good present. He'd jokingly mentioned that everyone has gotten a quilt but himself, so I knew I what I had to do.

I wanted to keep this quilt a surprise, so that meant really working hard during my daughter's nap time and then putting everything away before he got home at night. The piecing of the quilt was super fun because it was like a big puzzle, trying to fit the pieces together.

But the quilting was a nightmare. I wanted to do concentric squares and rectangles, but just a few scattered throughout. The only problem was that after I quilted a handful of them, I knew I had to repeat it over the entire quilt because it looked so great. But I don't have a long arm machine, so mashing and pulling the quilt in and out of my little machine was exhausting. 

But totally worth it. 

 Since the front was so busy, I did broad stripes in leftover colors on the back to show off the quilting.

I was thrilled with how it turned out and so was my husband, so I thought the chapter was closed on a happy quilty Christmas until I got an email asking if this quilt could be included on the new Modern Quilt Guild website. After I picked my jaw up off the ground, I replied and anxiously awaited the new website's debut. And then, one morning, I saw it: http://themodernquiltguild.com/portfolio.

Adam & Jamie's Wedding Quilt

I have one sibling and wanted to do something *real nice* for him when he decided to marry his lovely girlfriend. I had just started quilting and was nervous about gifting a quilt but wanted to give it a shot.
They like sleek, modern decor, so I thought I'd combine his favorite color, green, with her favorite color, turquoise, and some neutrals: white, slate, and gray. Their wedding color was clover, and I knew I found the perfect shade of green when I came across an old yard of Robert Kaufman clover on etsy.

I was too afraid to wash my first quilt and sent it to Florida with my mom for her to do it in her agitator-less machine. The finished product (not pictured here) looks quiltier and more puckery, just how I'd hoped it would.

I did some fun little heart appliques on the sides, but since I didn't have a free motion foot yet, they had to be intentionally wonky hearts. I kinda like the funkiness. It's quilted with straight lines and slightly squiggly lines. And a fun thing about this quilt is that my bobbin winder stopped working when I had like three stripes left and a serious deadline, so my mom and I hand wound the bobbins. And then I decided never to sew again.

As usual, I like the back better (or at least as well as) the front. I pieced together remnants from the front and added some Riley Blake circles to represent wedding rings, and some chevron scraps and triangles from my first quilt for good measure.



Happy Wedding, Adam & Jamie :-)

My First Quilt

So, we're in a new city for one year while my husband finishes up his fellowship. Back in September, I decided to take up a new project while we're here: quilting. My mom gave me a basic Singer machine a few Christmases ago, and even though threading it left me baffled for couple of years, I thought I'd give it a shot. I ordered a Robert Kaufman quilt-con pack since I didn't know anything about matching colors, and then  naively thought that triangles seemed both fun and simple.

And then I discovered that triangles are the devil's shape.

And, as I've learned is usually the case when I quilt, I ended up liking the back better than the front.