A Trip to the Local Quilt Shop

This past Saturday I got to spend some time with my mom and sister at a really cute quilt shop in Jefferson, Wisconsin. That's a little over 30 minutes from my home in Madison. I do most of my fabric shopping at JoAnn Fabrics, so it was really nice to be in a little boutique!

The shop is called Tea & Textiles and they give you a little goody bag and a packet of tea when you check out. It was lovely.

We went for the sale they were having on fat quarters. $1 each!!! You had to buy 25 to get the sale price, but between the 3 of us there was no way we wouldn't do that. I bought 28 just myself!

Their whole back room was filled up with tables like these, covered in bins with fat quarters. The woman watching the back room told us she had 17 people in this room right when they opened hoping to get the best cuts. I loved what I came away with, so I can't imagine what might have been there earlier in the day. I don't think the little shop gets too much business on a regular day, so having 17 people just in their back room must have been a huge rush.

Here's what I came away with:

Some Christmas prints to (finally) make stockings that won't fall apart for me and my husband. I threw out our old ones, so I guess I have to make new ones. Alex likes the red fabric better than the white, so his will be red lined with white and mine will be the opposite.

Some blues to add to my already blue-heavy stash. I couldn't help it, they were so pretty!

This is my miscellaneous stack. Some pinks, some vintage, some multi-colored ones. I wanted a little variety and some prints that I could use for backgrounds or fillers. I really like the one that is second from the right - white with little yellow/orange flowers. I'm pretty sure I had a pillow case in a fabric just like this when I was little.

And my stack of teal and coral! I started seeing all of these in the shop and my mind was made up that I had to make a quilt out of these colors. I'm not sure if I'll use the floral prints, but I'm thinking teal, coral and white in some type of pattern. Now I've just got to sift through my stack of quilt designs and see if there's one I want to use or if I should design something new. I'm sure this will be much farther on down the road since I have plenty of other things to keep me busy (my Over the Rainbow quilt is currently pinned and awaiting quilting)!

After we were done at the fabric store we were all going out to celebrate my brother's 25th birthday. Time got away from us a little bit at the store and my brother called us just as we were leaving, wondering where we were. We were supposed to pick him up to take him to the restaurant. We had to push back our reservation by 15 minutes (not so bad!), but all I could think about on our way back was this picture I had seen online earlier that day:

Thank you, Boromir! I couldn't have said it any better. :) 

Little things

It's been quiet here lately, and I'll admit I haven't had time to do much sewing. Between cleaning and organizing our apartment and getting back into the swing of things after the holidays, I feel like there's no time left in the day! So, January has been dull for me on the creative side of things. I plan on having a much better February!

All that being said, I have managed a few small things in the past few days. I put together the January block for the Color Bee Shocked Bee. Our host for the month had a little goof with her measurements on the fabric she sent everyone, so the outer border is from fabric I added from my stash. I think her quilt will turn out quite unique since she'll have a lot of different fabrics from everyone in the bee. I'm really looking forward to seeing it all put together.

I have also added the border to my Over the Rainbow quilt top, so that is ready for basting. I also sewed up the back for it. I know everyone loves to have a pieced back (or maybe it's just trendy right now??), but for some reason they just don't sit right with me. I used one on my Dots on Dots quilt, but I'm not very fond of it. So, this quilt just has one fabric for the back and I'm happy with that. :) I'm hoping to have it pinned and ready for quilting by the weekend.

The last thing I've started is a rag rug. My husband was actually helping me cut up all of the little pieces. It was really fun to see him using a rotary cutter and quilting rulers!! We are using old T-shirts that are worn out or the wrong size to make the rug. I'll keep this one in cool colors, but I do have some red shirts I'll need to do something with. Any ideas??

Dots on Dots Blog Hop and a Giveaway!

Hello everyone! Thanks so much for stopping by for the dots on dots hop. I've been looking forward to this hop for a while now, so thank you to Corrie at Quilt Taffy for hosting and to Mdm Samm for all of her work and guidance as well! If you're looking for the full list of participants, you can find it at Corrie's blog (linked above) by clicking on the dots on dots button on the right hand side of her page. Here's the list of everyone sharing the day with me:

Why Not Kwilt

Stichin by the Lake

Beth @ Plum and June

The Recipe Bunny --> you are here! :)

Sunshine Girl

Aunt Marti

The Fuzzy Hat Quilter

Rose Prairie Quilts and Farm

Cliodana

I'm sure you're in for a treat with all of these blogs, so please hop along and cheer along as we take off on the second day of the Dots on Dots Hop! Here's what I put together for you:

I had a lot of dots fabric to choose from for my block...

So many that I guess I really couldn't decide which ones to use, so I used pretty much all of them. Those fabrics turned into this design:

Which then turned into all of these half square triangles (all for just one block!):

Which then turned into this layout:

And eventually made its way into being this 12.5" unfinished block:

I have a whole quilt planned of these - 20 blocks - but I only have 8 sewn together. I've been super busy planning a wedding (which just happened this past Sunday), so my time to sew has been non-existent. It's one of my crafty goals this month to have the whole quilt put together, so cross your fingers that I get it done!

Here's what I have so far:

As you can see, the blue squares and the middle orange or yellow squares change from block to block. 1/2 of the quilt will have some form of aqua/orange combo and the other 1/2 will have a darker blue/yellow combo on them. The outer fabrics for each block stay the same. I was hoping to get one more done of the darker blue center, but just ran out of time. :( 

I really like putting these together because the fabrics are so colorful and festive! I also like that the dots are all different sizes. Some are big, some are really small, and on some of the blue pieces the dots form circles. For some reason it reminds me of the circus, which I always loved as a little kid, so that's probably why I like this odd combination of dots and colors so much. I had thought about giving this quilt away when it's all done, but I think I'm going to keep it as a guilty pleasure quilt all for myself and make something else to give away - darn! :) 

Speaking of giving something away... I have a giveaway for all of you! More dots fabric! These are some of the fabrics I was considering using, but didn't. I have 2 fat quarters of the green with white dots fabric, and 1 FQ of the rest: orange with white dots, orange with splotchy orange dots, white with really tine pink dots, and pink with really tiny white dots.

**GIVEAWAY CLOSED**

So, now what you need to do to enter is leave a comment on my blog post below. Please, please, please make sure I have your email if you're a no-reply blogger. Otherwise, I won't be able to let you know you've won! I'll pick the winner via random computer drawing on Sunday, September 16th because that's my husband's birthday. So, comments will count until Saturday, September 15th, through 11:59pm central standard time. No pressure to become a follower, but if you'd like to keep tabs on the next set of things I create, please sign up and follow along. When I reach 200 followers, I might just be tempted to have another giveaway just for you!

And now, just to leave you with something fun, here's a picture of my cat Sasha. She decided to lay down on the stack of finished dots blocks while I had my back turned. Never fails - she has the whole rest of the apartment to find a cushy spot to lay down and she always lays on the quilt pieces. Maybe my next quilt will have to be for her... :) Happy hopping everyone!

Lots of Dots and Other Things

The Dots on Dots blog hop schedule just went up the other day, and I'm really excited for this hop. Maybe the most excited I've been for a hop, which I think is hard to beat since I've been in some great ones already - Red, White & Blue and Think Christmas! You can see the full schedule for Dots on Dots here.

I went a little dot crazy for this hop. I signed up thinking, "Oh yeah, I have a lot of polka dot fabric I can use for this!" Then, I went to my stash, and found that the pieces I had were much smaller than I thought, and I had plans to make a full dots quilt top! That just wasn't going to do it! So, alas, I had to go fabric shopping. I know - you all feel so sorry for me! :)

This is where I went a little overboard. Here's all of the dots fabric that I have now. I've managed to cut everything that I'll need for my quilt top. I'll be making 20 12 inch finished blocks and the quilt will be 4x5 blocks with borders. That's a comfortable couch lap quilt. (My husband told me the other day that he'd like a quilt to wrap up with on the couch that isn't the Super Mario quilt. He doesn't want to accidentally get something on my masterpiece. Bless his heart, but this means I need to make another quilt! - Darn!)

So, I've got the whole quilt planned out, now I just need to actually make all of the blocks and sew it all together. Designing the blocks was one of my August 2012 crafty goals, so I've got another one down - that makes 3! Woo hoo I finished more than I did in July now!

I've never done a whole quilt just out of polka dot fabric and I think this is going to be really bright and festive. I've got some dark dots and some light dots and some bright dots - all kinds of dots going into this one. So, stay tuned for that. My day is September 11th. :) 

On another topic, I decided how I was going to put together the Think Christmas table runner. Layout #1 wins with the same cream-colored sashing I used inside the blocks for fabric. The back is a red and green holly print. Once I got it all sewed together then I wasn't sure how I wanted to quilt it. So I asked the most un-biased quilty person I know - my husband - what I should do. I asked "machine or hand quilt?" And he responded, "Do whatever you didn't do last time." Spoken like a true non-quilter, haha. So, I'm hand quilting this runner, and it's actually going very well and is a lot of fun. The only thing I've ever hand quilted before was my door hanger quilt for the Red, White & Blue blog hop. For that I only hand stitched part of the 12 inch block. So, this is taking me a little longer to finish, but I still hope to have it done by the end of August to help out with my August 2012 crafty goal count. I'll be giving this one to my Aunt Nancy in October when we go for a little visit to Michigan. So, even if it's not done by the end of August, it will be done before Christmas this year. :)

Happy crafting!

Merrily Sewing Along...

It feels like I haven't had a decent post in a while even though I've been furiously working along on several projects. First on the list is to finish the beachy quilt for my friend. I'll be basting, quilting and binding later today after some much needed sleep and church later in the morning. I've spent a lot of time with it and my seam ripper getting things to match up, but I'm happy with it now. I've also decided on no borders and I'll just use the binding to edge it out. It will be just long enough for her to pay out on the beach with it, or 2 people can sit comfortably cross-legged on it for a picnic. :) I think it'll work and finishing it off should go pretty quickly.

I've also revamped my craft room. My mother-in-law gave me some plastic drawers and I quickly put them to use to organize all of my fabric. Previously I was using 2 large suit cases and a tiny little book shelf. Now, I've got 4 drawer units, including one just for in-progress projects (I'm very excited about that!!) which will keep the cats from getting into things. I've also got one drawer for each color (apparently I need more orange and purple, but have plenty of blue!). And have another set of drawers for miscellaneous fabric and coordinating sets. :) I'm so happy with this new set up!

Lastly I've been designing some blocks for the Think Christmas blog hop. I wasn't originally signed up, but I had so much fun with the Red, White & Blue blog hop that I 'hopped' (I know, very, very bad pun) at the chance to join when Lesley reopened the list. I don't have much of a stash of my own, especially for holiday prints, so I called up my mom and asked her if she had something that she might not want any more.

My mom has a great eye for fabric and let me tell you, she brought me soooo much good stuff! Way more than she ever needed to bring me, but I'm definitely going to put it to good use. We kind of joke that she has enough stash for 2 people, which I'm definitely happy about and so is she. She gets to downsize the things that she's not using without having to throw them away or give them to strangers and I get to inherit coordinating prints and some really cool vintage fabric. I love it, so THANKS MOM! :) My favorite fabric that she included is a Scandinavian print that has little red, green and yellow designs on a white background. That will definitely make an appearance in the hop, so stay tuned for that!

Happy crafting everyone!

A Special Package

Yesterday I received an overly generous thank-you package in the mail. It was much more than I expected to receive, and I may have squealed once or twice (or thrice) in the process of going through everything in the package. So, a big Thank You to Kris at krislovesfabric (go check out her blog, it's fantastic!) for this special package.

First, she sent me a very nice card. I just wanted to share what it looks like since it's so quilty in design. I love it and may have to look into getting some of these of my own.

Second, she sent me an awesome book - "Sew Fun , So Colorful" - which is right up my alley. It's from Me and My Sister Designs and I'm already hunkering to make several quilts included inside. (I squealed over this for sure.)

Third, she sent me lots of teal/aqua fabric and a piece of fusible interfacing to try out. Teal is my favorite color and somehow she picked up on that by reading my blog. I love each and every piece, and I may have squealed when going through them all. My favorite is the white polka dot fabric right on top. It is so playful! I'm going to have to come up with a special project for these fabrics - something that I'll love and cherish for a long time.

So, thank you again Kris for the fantastic package. Happy crafting everyone! :)

P.S. I've got all of my stippling done on my Mario Quilt and am just finishing the detail in each character. Hopefully the binding is getting sewn on tomorrow! :)

I definitely married into the right family!

It had to have been fate or divine intervention that I was blessed with such great in-laws!

My side of the family is pretty resourceful when it comes to handmade items. My mother used to make doll furniture and many other things with lumber. She also quilted, made us clothes as kids, and was/is a tremendous baker. She, of course, passed all of her craftiness on to my sister and I (and even my brother has a touch - more on the woodworking and car repair side) so we continue to make lots of handmade items.

When I met my husband, I had no idea I would join another crafty family! His Aunt Sherie cans anything and gave us an awesome chili sauce. His Aunt Debbie is a scrapbooking queen and makes the best cards. His mother Tammy taught me how to knit. And, his Aunt Sue just passed on to me everything that you'll see below. She's also a great knitter and sewer and cook. This group of sisters even made their own family cookbook (which I love!).

So, I went to Aunt Sue's house tonight and came home with a HUGE stash of fabric. She gave me some really special pieces, including quilt blocks that her grandmother had sewn together from the girls' old clothes. She even gave me this little sewing suitcase of her grandmothers. (I haven't figured out how to get it open again yet, but I will some day - inside there are a bunch of completed blocks for a quilt Sue was making for one of her nieces. All I need to do is assemble it!)

Here's a pic of about 1/3 of the things she gave me:

The teal fabric on the left is all coordinating prints and solids for a quilt. She spent lots of time trying to find every color in the very back fabric so they could all coordinate. I love these colors (teal is my favorite!), so I'm really excited to do something with these fabrics!



Here's some closeups of the fabrics that really stood out to me as some of my favorites:

First I saw these...

Then I saw this one...

And then I fell in love with this one...

Check out these quilt tops Aunt Sue already has put together. There are 3 small tops pretty much all done - some just need borders. She did a fantastic job on all of the applique work - something I've never had the guts to try. She had planned for this one (in the close up picture below) to be a present for her sister Sherie. She also gave me the buttons that are supposed to go in the center of the flowers. They are hand made clay buttons that will really add a nice touch to the quilt. I'm excited to finish this project for her so she can give it to her sister. It must have taken a long time to do all of the applique and the piecing.

 Along with all of this, she also gave me batting for baby quilts/changing blankets, about a dozen quilting pattern books, and even more fabric (some bright colors that I'm going to save for a very special quilt project!). 

As if that wasn't enough, she let me borrow her quilting sewing machine! That's right - the tag says BERNINA! 

I've never sewn on a machine this nice before. My husband did just buy me a great Janome machine that I LOVE (thanks hon!!!). My Janome has the perfect amount of bells and whistles for me. It was the best birthday present and I've had a wonderful time sewing with it so far. I know I'm going to use my Janome for a long time to come.  What's great about this Bernina machine though, is that it's specifically made for quilting. It's waaaay more high-tech than anything that I would ever need to have, but it's going to be a real treat to try some new stitches and patterns with it! Not to mention that Aunt Sue also gave me the table that the machine sits in and all of the attachments, sewing feet, etc. It's going to be hard to get me out of my sewing room now!!

So, this weekend my mother and I are going to a quilt retreat in Dodgeville, Wisconsin. (What better way to celebrate Mother's Day???) So, I'm really excited to learn some FMQ techniques so I can put all of my new toys and fabric to good use! It's going to be a great summer! Happy Quilting!

Design Wall

I love having a design wall! Why didn't I put something up before now!?! I've really been meaning to get something up for a while now, but for some reason I never got around to it. Finally, while I was going through my tiny fabric stash, I came across some old brown flannel I used for a baby quilt for my godson Avrey. 

The brown looked much cuter in the quilt than it does on my wall. Actually, here's a picture of the quilt I made a little over 3 years ago. I tied it with dark brown yarn instead of any top quilting and the blue and yellow flannel prints have cartoon zoo animals on them. I really had nothing else to use this fabric for, so I'm really happy it works up on my blank craft room wall! Now it actually looks like a craft room! (I just need to get it a little more organized...)

I was actually a bit skeptical that any fabric would stick to the flannel. I gave it a test run on a few pieces, decided it would work, and stuck it to the wall with thumb tacks. It's not as wide as I would like it to be, but I think it works for now. 

I laid out some more of the scraps from the Super Mario quilt into some granny squares. I really want to make one of those quilts, but I don't know if I really like these colors with a gray and black center. Part of me thinks I should just have each type of fabric make up the whole block instead of having an outer ring and the darker center. Or maybe it should be more white in the center instead of gray? I'll have to do some playing around with it. The more I look at the way I have them laid out now, the more they grow on me. I think I might just leave them as is. Oh, decisions, decisions!

The real test will be whether or not my cats will leave this alone on the wall. My guess is no, since they already try to swat at picture frames, nails, lamps and anything else around the house. I'll just have to leave the door to this room shut so they leave it alone. Poor cats - all of this crafty stuff lying around and they're not supposed to get into any of it. What a cruel world they live in. Anyway, I'm sure you'll be seeing more of this design wall as I get used to it and as I play around with my granny squares idea. I'm looking forward to seeing what I can come up with! Happy quilting!

Super Mario Quilt #3

This post is an update on my progress for the Super Mario Quilt. I now have all of the little squares cut! It took a few nights' worth of time and effort, but well worth it. This picture shows most of the colors for the quilt and all of the tedious cutting. :)

It was10:00 PM by the time I had everything cut. My goal was to get everything cut AND to put together the first character block, but that didn't happen. I did lay out all of the squares so now I have them in order to sew together.




Then, I decided I wasn't too tired to try to sew at least a couple lines together, and maybe I could even get the whole character together. (Wrong!) It was more tedious than I thought to sew together all of the little pieces. You don't really have a chance to use the pedal on the sewing machine because by the time you start you're at the end of the piece! So, it was a time consuming process. I did manage to get 2 rows sewn together. Once I have the rest of the lines together I'll iron everything and then start sewing each row into the character block. The two rows pictured here are the top two on the red mushroom character square. I should be able to put more rows together tomorrow night after work, but I won't guarantee I'll have one whole character completed. If I do - we can all be surprised! :) Happy crafting!

Super Mario Quilt #2

This post is all about the fabric choices I made for the Mario quilt. Besides the 14 different bolts of fabric you see in this picture, I also purchased 9 additional fat quarters of different shades. That is the most color choices I have ever needed for one craft project! I figured out that I needed 23 different colors for this quilt (I could have pulled it off with 21, but once you get to that many colors, what's two more?). Black, white, and light blue are the most prevalent and each of those needed over 2 yards. The other fabrics pretty much were all 1/4 yard or less. That made my time at the cutting counter significantly longer than it usually is, but it makes putting the quilt together so much more fun!

I am cutting out 1 1/2" squares for this quilt so the finished size of each square will be 1". That means each character square will be 16" when completed. When my husband was helping me design the quilt and telling me which characters he wanted on it, I'm pretty sure he had no idea how tedious the project would actually be. For the black fabric, I cut out over 1,800 little black squares. It's mind-numbing work that I can do while I watch TV, so I really don't mind that much. I'm just hoping all of my corners line up! Once I have all of the fabric cut, I'll compose another post so you can see how many squares it is really going to take. I'll try to have one character square put together when I do that post as well.

On an up-side, this project does help me pass the time while my husband is off traveling. He's gone the rest of this week, home for the weekend, and then gone again next week. So that means I have plenty of time to put things together. I was hoping to keep this project a secret from him, so that he'd be surprised when it was all done, but I don't think that's going to happen any more. He asks for an update on the quilt, and if he doesn't see me working on it when he's home he'll wonder what's going on. I hope he'll be surprised with how quickly I can get it done. It's the top stitching that will be the only wrench in the process. I'm not sure what I'm going to do with that yet. I might try to find someone in Madison that I can take it to, otherwise, I might try to do some hand-quilting on my own or see how much I can really put through my little sewing machine. Anyway - until next time. Happy crafting!

Super Mario Quilt

My husband saw a quilt that was Mario themed and decided that he needed t have one. It's been on the back of my mind for a couple months now. I've been trying to complete some other craft projects before getting knee deep into this quilt. Not to mention I still have my double Irish chain quilt to put together. He would really like to have this quilt as a gift for Christmas, so I'm going to try my hardest to get it worked out.

I have never been good at calculating how much fabric I need of every color, and this quilt I knew would be difficult. I don't want to waste time and money at the fabric store picking things out without knowing how much I need. So, I did a Google search and - voila! - found what I was looking for.

This site was so helpful, I'm sharing it with all of you. Go here if you want to learn how to calculate how much fabric you'll need of each color for your next quilt. I like this because it tells you how to do triangles too! I'm just doing an easy pattern of 1" finished squares, so my math wasn't too complicated. I'll add on more once I drag my husband to the fabric store to approve of color choices picked out. Wish me luck in getting this completed by Christmas Day - only 48 days and some change to go! Happy crafting!

Double Irish Chain Quilt

I realize I have been on a bit of a craft binge lately. Previously I was all about recipes and food, so I guess I'm trying to make things even. I'm sure I'll have another tasty blog about food sometime soon. I'm bound to make my lasagna for one of these cold nights!

Anyway, I spent about 5 hours at the Wisconsin Quilt Expo with my mother yesterday. All of the quilts there were very well done. I suppose you don't make it to the judging wall/maze unless the preliminary jury thinks it's well done as well. So, I probably don't have a chance in getting mine in that show next year, but it has really inspired me to continue working on my quilt. Here are some pictures of my favorite quilts from the show:

This frog quilt was AMAZING! I'm pretty sure the tag said it was made out of recycled materials where the proceeds went to help save the rain forest. Regardless - even it if was made with un-ecofriendly material, it is sill GORGEOUS! I think this is made from all appliqued and pieced work - something I will probably never try, and definitely not on this scale! I can't believe this only won 3rd place!

Of course I loved the Badger quilt. There were many other Wisconsin themed quilts - from cities to sports, but this one was my favorite. I liked the song lyrics and football chants that were embroidered into it. Embroidery is probably something else I won't really do. I'd need a fancy-dancy sewing machine for that. Maybe someday...







This sunflower quilt was my pick for "Viewers Choice." I loved the detail work with the quilting patterns and also the diamond shapes on the border of the quilt. Apparently this technique is really easy and you just need a special ruler to cut the fabric - I think it's called the double diamond ruler? Sometime soon I'm going to make a tree skirt and a Christmas table runner that uses this technique. I would have bought the special ruler at the quilting show, but apparently every single booth sold out of it about mid-way through the second day. Oh well. That just gives me an excuse to go to a craft store later! :)


















So, all of this talk about quilts means I've got to show you a sneak peak of the one I'm working on. Here's the pattern for the pieces and colors I'll be using. The quilt uses black, light and dark green, light and dark blue, and light and dark turquoise. I'm making this for our bed and hopefully I'll have it done for us to use by Christmas - top quilting included.

 Here is the pattern for the quilting that will be on top. I haven't decided if I'm going to hand quilt it or machine quilt it yet. For hand quilting I can at least do that here myself. For machine quilting I would have to find somewhere that would let me use their long arm machine or top quilt it for me. We'll see what actually ends up happening.

And, here's a sneak peak of the top left corner of my quilt. I've got most of the pieces cut out, but I just couldn't resist putting things together to see what it would really look like. I really like the combination of colors and I think it will work well with the dark brown tones we have in our house.

So, I'll keep you posted on how this long-term project goes and any other little things I come up with. Happy crafting!