I bet you could make one of these faster than me...

A finish on Friday?!  I didn't even plan it this time.  (this should have been done soooo long ago).  Happily linking up with Crazymomquilts today~

Here is my Diamond Hex pillow, all done!  And a good thing too, the workshop for Long Island Quilters Society is on Monday.  If you're free Monday during the day and you're in the New York area, why not consider coming out to join us?  Email me and I'll put you in touch with the guild's program coordinator.  There are still plenty of spots available.

When the guild contacted me for a lecture/workshop in October and I started thinking about a sample, I immediately went to my comfort colors-- blues, greens, browns.  But then I asked George what colors he would choose, and he pulled pink, pink, pink.  I trusted his instinct and this is perfect for Valentine's season and the beginning of spring.  Sure, it's only 18F in NY today, but I'm thinking warmer thoughts..

March 28

As the weather gets warmer and Jack gets bigger, we are slowly venturing out of our nest..
I'm reluctant to leave the comforts of home though, and still many friends are coming to us instead of vice versa (sometimes regretfully, as I wasn't brave enough to meet up with Nifty as she took in the sights around NYC!). 
Last weekend though we were treated to a much appreciated visit from Bernadette.  After an attempt  to go out with the boys (it was quite disastrous), we headed home.  As I gave George a bath, Bernadette played with my pile of hexies and started piecing..

When George was done, he decided to help.

I love that he feels all of my friends come over just to play with him.  (And I am grateful that my friends indulge him).  After stitching for a while, we went outside to play soccer and he made obstacle courses for us to practice through.  Ha!  I wonder how soon he'll figure out that I have absolutely no soccer skills.. we had fun trying though.
I have spent the rest of the week working to finish what Bernadette started.  I don't know what it is, but I just can't get enough of these hexies..

  

***Thank you all so much for your enthusiasm about my book.  Once it arrives I'll give you a peak inside..

A bit of Thursday

We've got this quilt on the bed right now (baby spit up on the other one..):

And I find myself spending a lot of time thinking about it at 12, 3, and 5 in the morning as I pace back and forth around the room trying to get Jack to burp or fall back asleep.  It was a good quilt.  Some awesome memories in the t-shirts:

Where I studied in Kyoto, 1999-2000.

Heaven on earth (class of '01, Washburn~).

I have also been pondering the fabrics but I have a separate post brewing on that topic...

And so I decided to take one of George's old-but-loved tees

And play around a bit..

He is helping-- pulled out a big pile of fabrics for me to choose from.  Too sweet.
Have you been crafty yet today?

Baby Quilt

Whew~
Once that "I'm having a baby" post was out of the way, I could start planning, testing, and asking for some feedback on baby quilts.

I have been pinning scrappy stash busters all year so naturally that's where I started to browse when I wanted to find a pattern for the baby quilt.

At first I liked this one, but I thought it might be time to finally do this pattern, and then I found this.

And that's where I stopped and decided to do a test block.

The fabric I initially pulled looked something like this:

And then I wanted George's input and he helped me decide on these:

I started cutting squares based on Blue Elephant Stitches' guidelines and my first test blocks were promising..

so I kept going and by this afternoon, I had this:

I like it.  It needs 9 more blocks to be the right size and I think I want to add in more dark brown and less dark orange.. maybe a few of the lighter blues?  And the tree fabric?
Please send input.. I have to prep classes all day tomorrow and it will be nice to at least have email interruptions of your comments and suggestions.  Thanks.

Pillow process

I saw these sprocket pillows on Poppy Makes blog last week and thought it could be a fun project to sew together with George.  I did a rough fabric pull (about 18 prints) and then let him choose the ones he wanted in the pillow.  He wreaked havoc on the sewing room as I cut the spokes, and then he helped arrange them on the design wall.  I thought he'd help sew them together, but he was busy drawing pictures and wasn't interested in the sewing machine until I decided to quilt the pillow front (that can of spray baste catches his eye every time..).  I wanted to make a floor cushion for his room so I wanted it to be a bit sturdier than the Cluck Cluck Sew tutorial calls for.  I added a layer of batting and quilted the front and back, but left the side fabric strip unquilted. 
Things were going well (and fast!) until I sat with George in my lap yesterday to quilt the back.  I let him unscrew the regular foot and we put on the walking foot, and somehow (did I say something?) he said that he didn't want straight lines, but curvy lines instead.  Um, ok.  Whatever you want kid. 
So we took the walking foot off and put the free-motion foot on.  Of course George caught me a little off guard here, and I had no idea what sort of pattern I wanted to quilt with curvy lines. 
I did the worst possible thing-- I just started quilting.  With George on my lap and no plan, things went downhill fast.  10 minutes into it, I knew I needed to rip it all out and do it without him (and with a bit more of a design goal in mind).  I spent snippets of time throughout the rest of the day unpicking the mess and it was nearing midnight when I finally started over.  Thank god for twitter though, 'cause in the middle of the night when you need some quilting support and can't call anybody, it was nice to be able to tweet my problems and get support from friends online.
This is what it looks like from the back:

Grey thread, busy blue print-- you really can't see anything.  But from the inside..

Can you read backwards?  It was hard to get a good pic, but I quilted his name in there :)
Other fun things about the project:
I only had half a bag of poly-fil left over from god knows when, I've probably been carrying it around with me since 2002.  I was happy to finish it, but it wasn't enough, so I decided to use scrap batting to fill up the rest.  I read somewhere that somebody cuts up her batting scraps into little squares and uses it for dog bed filling.. if you know who I'm talking about send me the link because I'd love to give her credit. 

It worked out ok for this pillow, it's a little lumpy in some areas, but it's meant to be sat on, so I think it will all even out (or get smushed into place) in the end.  While George was stuffing it, I took a little video:

Not only was I short on stuffing, but I didn't have any suitable buttons to finish the project either.  So in the greatly satisfying vein of using what I had, I decided to cover my own buttons. 

Not that hard and I think I'd do it again.  It made me feel very "crafty."

The project was a fun one.  I don't usually make many pillows, but maybe that should change.  I love seeing handmade things around the house, and this was a lot easier and faster than plain old square pillow projects, which always stall at the zipper installation phase.  Anyway, I'm glad I made this one with George, and I hope it gets a lot of use in his new room.

A simple quilt with less than simple process.

You're probably wondering why it took me 4 days (actually, we're at a week now..) to put together a small baby quilt done in simple squares, so I thought this is a good opportunity to talk about my process..

this is a crappy pic, should I install better lighting in my sewing room?

Like I mentioned in my last post, this was a quilt idea that I had in my head for a long time.  So long, that I had been pulling fabrics and cutting squares sporatically over the last year.  I even sat down and cut borders and pieced some strips of random squares in a few mindless sewing sessions.  But now, when I decided to actually throw it up on the wall and make the quilt, I wasn't starting from scratch, but instead, with a pile of half-assembled pieces and a lot of holes in my quilt design. 

I started by sorting through my pre-assembled strips (and yes, at the time of assembly, i was heavily influenced by that Marston/Moran book..) to find the ones that read clearly "boy" because this quilt is for a friend's baby, and I haven't met her husband or talked to her at length in 10 years, and I didn't know how open they would be to having pink or hearts in their baby quilt (FYI, I'm all for gender mixing in George's toys, in case you were planning to make him anything ;)  ).  I had some strips of 6 squares, and a bunch of twosies. 

I started filling in the gaps with any bright fabrics lying within arm's reach of the cutting table.  At first it was just colored fabrics, then I sifted through the bin of 3.5" squares, and then I remembered the entire pile of novelty fabrics in a bin in the closet.. (seeing the dino print left over from george's apron reminded me).  I didn't really dig for fabrics, but I knew I had a lot of cute prints that would be fun for this baby and his parents to find as he grows.  I fussy cut into a scrap of  sock monkeys from V's retreat, added in a dino from the apron scraps, and just pulled fabrics from around the room, being drawn to something if it was the right size or had a fun print.  I gave George a couple of squares at a time and told him to put them up on the wall.  Sometimes I'd leave them where he put them, sometimes I'd come up with a creative "reason" that we should move them around.

Most of the time he was content to hide in my new Ikea scrap bin..

When it came time to piece my rows, I had to deal with the two 6.5" maverick stars I added, plus the pre-assembled twosies strips that were going horizontally and vertically.  I tried to press my seams so they'd butt up nicely when the rows went together, but it wasn't always possible.  Sometimes I'd sew a 4 patch and attach it to a twosie, then piece the remaining half-rows and stitch them together before adding them to the first bit.  (sorry, no photos of the piecing, George went to bed late that night and I was piecing after midnight..).  It ended up being a complicated process, a game sort of, but I didn't mind.  I was happy to spend time with the quilt as I assembled it.  Sure, it would have been easier if I just had a mess of squares to chain piece, but that's not how I work.

I pieced all the squares and then started in on the letters..

See, I'm a frugal (stingy?) quilter.  I wanted to know how big my center would be so I could trim the borders and use the border edges to assemble the letters.  I am not really one to plan things out with measurements and numbers, I would rather just feel it out.  I have a pretty good eye when it comes to estimating how much fabric I'll need, and even though I love scraps, I don't like to waste fabric. 

The letters came together pretty easily, but it has been a while since I pieced letters and I could tell I was out of practice. (my "L" has way too many seams..).  When the name was all done, I put two borders on and then pinned it back to the design wall.  I thought I'd go to sleep, but instead I pulled fabrics for the backing, laying out a strip of squares to piece in with a label.  Then I went to bed..

(backing photos in the reveal post..)

I think it's a really good idea to piece the backing before the top is complete because so often my quilts stall at the top stage because I just can't push myself to piece a back.  Does that happen to you?  I guess it's like forcing myself to clean the bathroom before I can take a shower.. ah, the little games we play to get things done..

I basted and quilted it today and all that's left is to stitch down the binding.  The family's coming for a visit on Thursday, I think it'll be done by then.

Simple squares

I've been working on a pattern (in my sketchbook) with 3.5" squares for nearly a year now.. This week I decided to take George and throw a bunch of them up on the design wall..

 Working on it for 4 days now, and it's starting to turn into what I had imagined.  Cheerful, lots of hidden surprises.  The squares aren't pieced yet, and ever time I leave the sewing room I close my eyes and hope that the wind (or ceiling fan) won't blow them all off the wall. 

I've been pulling fabric from the depths of my stash for this one, all those novelty fabrics that I never use, and as I look around the room, I realized that I have A LOT of fabric.  Not too much, but I really better start making more quilts, like, right now.  How did this happen?  I haven't been intentionally buying for stash in a lonnng time.  Does the fabric multiply while I sleep?  I should start sleeping in the sewing room to stop that from happening..

collaborative quilting

As much as I love this aspect of  the "modern" quilt movement, with all the virtual bees and group projects in guilds, today I want to show you a much more personal type of collaboration where two people work side by side to create one project, a little bit at a time. 

Removing pins is one way that George contributes to my process. Sure, it slows me down some, but sometimes it's nice to go slow.

And this is what we were working on (crappy pic, the sewing room gets terrible light in the afternoon).  These are my blocks for the Rosey Little Bee.  I had January '11 and so far I got back 8 blocks from the participants (there are 13 of us, so 4 more should be coming).  My favorite block so far is by Pam. Awesome, no?  This was a UFO I started last year sometime, inspired by a quilt I saw at the 2009 Empire Guild show in Manhattan (read more here).

I like how it's coming along.  I've got a handful of half-finished blocks that I've been working on slowly.  The one George and I finished today is the middle one on the right side.