Baby Shower Gifts

I attended a baby shower this past weekend for a friend of ours who is expecting a baby girl this summer. Miraculously I had a stash of flannel material just waiting to be used in a crib sized rag quilt. This is the second rag quilt I've made, and it was even easier than the first time around. Rag quilts come together very quickly, especially the smaller sized throws. I cut the squares for this on a Sunday, sewed the x-blocks on a Monday, and finished sewing and clipping the edges of the blocks by Wednesday.

This is the front with the actual ragging. When my daughter was about 9 months old, she could spend an hour playing with loose threads and tags. I'm hoping this new little girl will also find all that ragging equally fascinating.







Here's the back of the quilt. The seams look like a traditional quilt from this side. I'm pleased to see that I'm getting better at making all those rows and points more precise now.

About the only drawback to making a rag quilt is the vast quantity of linty threads that you find on everything after you've washed it. I washed and dried this one twice and it was still shedding threads. That should let up by the time it's washed a time or two more. And with a baby, that may be in the first week of actual use.

I had plenty of flannel material left over to make a couple of taggie burp cloths. These are a great portable size that can do double duty as a snuggie in a car seat. I make the tag loops big enough that little fingers won't get caught in them, but small enough that a little hand won't get caught either.

And some leftover x-blocks that didn't make it into the quilt were made into simple squares that could be used as wipes, washcloths, or whatever. (I told the dad-to-be to use these to wash his car when the baby no longer needs them.)










And finally I decorated a couple of onesies with some appliqued fabric scraps.

I'm amazed that I completed this entire project completely with materials on hand and didn't need to purchase anything. (For once!)

Patty's Pillow

Remember that sneak peek I gave you last week of a work in progress? The one I wanted to finish the following day?

Ha. That was clearly an optimistic deadline for this particular project, which was meant for a friend who is getting married next month. This weekend we hosted a brunch in her honor. Three 4 year olds, a one year old, a second grader, and seven adults. It was chaos, but in a good way. My only regret is that I wasn't able to finish my gift for the bride-to-be before everyone arrived. No matter, in the end I completed it Saturday afternoon and wrapped it up to take to the bachelorette party that night. And then I promptly forgot it and left it on the coffee table at our house. Sigh.



But I was really thrilled to receive the wedding invitation in the mail last Friday. The couple chose a lovely combination of colors that included plum, purple, and pistachio. Much like the colors I picked out for the bride's pillow before I even knew what her color scheme might be. Booyah!

Anyhoo, I'll just take it with us to her wedding.

Shop Update, March 8, 2012

I made some felted heart ornaments from the Fair Isle patterned wool leftover from my patchwork rug.



These would make beautiful decorations for a nursery!

Lately it seems like I've been doing everything other than quilting. After my venture into free motion machine quilting went awry in February, I've been focused on reorganizing my sewing area and supplies. The quilt lab is now in prepped and ready to go, so just maybe I can finish that last quilt and finally start a new one.

Work in Progress, March 7, 2012

A sneak peek at something I'm working on and hope to finish by tomorrow.

Shop Update, March 1, 2012

I just added a pretty throw rug made from felted wool squares to my Etsy store. It's made from a felted wool blanket and several felted wool sweaters in spring colors. 





It makes me think of Easter, and now I have a craving for Peeps and chocolate bunnies.

Totoro!

My daughter is a big fan of Hayao Miyazaki's animated movie My Neighbor Totoro. Totoro is a big gray forest troll who befriends two girls and helps them in a time of crisis. It's a lovely little movie and I thought Ally might like to have a totoro of her own.

This Totoro plushie is about a foot tall and made from a super-soft gray felted lambswool sweater. All of his features are also made from recycled felted wool clothes. I did use polyfill stuffing in him as I thought my usual felted wool scraps would be too heavy for a toy.

The main body is machine stitched for durability. After I made the main body I appliqued Totoro's arms and fat tail with a blanket stitch. His arms and tail have additional stuffing (scrap polyfill quilt batting) in them for a dimensional effect.

Totoro's whiskers and claws are done in black embroidery floss. Really, he's constructed  using the same techniques I use with all of my primitive crafts. That Cheshire Cat smile just kept reminding me of my jack o'lantern penny rug. 

In the end, I ended up making what may be the world's first primitive plushie based on a anime character.

Free Motion Quilting Fail, or Why I'm Sewing Christmas Stockings in February

I have a quilt that I've pieced and assembled into a quilt sandwich (top, flannel sheet batting, and backing) but I haven't quilted it yet. This particular quilt is calling for something different than my usual cross-hatch or parallel row quilting and I want to use a more organic quilt pattern on it. Something with loops or wavy lines. Something I haven't tried yet. I've been waiting to master the art of free motion quilting before finishing this particular quilt. (And to perfectly honest, I've been procrastinating on learning how to free motion quilt by trying to organize my fabrics and felted wool before the produces of "Hoarders" came knocking at the door. Now that I've dragged all that stuff out and haven't found a good way to organize it, I'm tired of messing with fabric and want to complete some unfinished projects, like that quilt. The piles of fabric and wool can just stay on the floor for a while longer.)

In theory I know how to free motion quilt. I've read articles on it and watched videos on YouTube showing how it's done. I have a darning foot and my machine allows me to drop the feed dogs. However, as often is the case, *knowing* how to do something and actually *doing* it can be two different beasts. I started practicing free motion quilting yesterday morning and had some difficulty with it. The foot kept bouncing around and I thought it was much harder to maneuver my test piece around than it should have been.

Poking around on the web led me to a website devoted to free motion quilting, Leah Day's The Free Motion Quilting Project, which has some GREAT teaching videos on it. (Even if you don't quilt, take at look at Leah's website and see the beautiful quilting patterns she's produced and illustrated.) In particular, I found this video on modifying your darning foot to be very useful. Following Leah's suggestions, I hacked my darning foot and voila! That annoying bounce disappeared and I was able to maneuver my fabric around much more smoothly. I spent another hour practicing and felt much more confident in my ability to free motion quilt.

Then this morning I sat down to practice again and had nothing but problems with thread tension. Snarls with excessive loops of thread on both the top and the bottom of my practice piece. I adjusted the tension up and down, trying to get rid of those ugly bird's nests, but nothing seemed to work. 

I've learned from past mistakes that you can't force a project that doesn't want to cooperate. It's best to set it aside and try again later. And that's how I wound up sewing a couple of Christmas stockings and attempting to make fleece socks today instead of free motion quilting. The stockings had been in my work-in-progress pile for awhile, so at least that counts as cleaning up!