Gifts Galore!

My 7 year old daughter has been invited to 4 birthday parties this month! I had to come up with an idea of something I could give as a gift that wouldn't break the bank. I saw this project on one of my favorite blogs. It only cost me $3 for the stuffing. I used scraps from my stash, and used a coupon at Joann's! Now I have 3 more to make. I embroidered the little girl's name by hand to personalize it.

Cute, huh? I couldn't have asked for it to turn out better!

My son's friend recently found out he has a heart condition and needed to have a procedure done at the children's hospital this week. When trying to think of something I could do for them, I thought he'd like to have a quilt to take with him. This quilt is a Turning 20. I was in such a hurry to get it to him before they left for the hospital that I only have this picutre I took as I was laying out the blocks. I will be "borrowing" it back next week to get more pictures of the finished product. He loved the quilt and his mom said I'm going to have a hard time getting it back for a few hours.

Last but not least, I am teaching a class on Tuesday with this block. It's called Star Rosettes and it's paper pieced. It was really fun to make and I love how paper piecing comes out so crisp. I have 8 other blocks in this color scheme that I'm doing a sampler with, so this will be added to the stack. Only 3 more to go!

Ticker Tape Doll Quilt

Recently I taught a class in a quilt group that I belong to on how to use up your scraps. I got so excited about using up my endless supply of scraps that I decided to make a goal for 2012 to completely finish one scrap quilt in each month of 2012. Maybe then I could actually make a dent in my scrap bins. Now, I just need a way to organize them. They were all organized neatly (or so I thought), but when I started using them they exploded all over my sewing room! Here's my finish for this month so far (I know I started with an easy one). It's a ticker tape doll quilt for my niece Rory. I think I'll finally package it up and mail it to her today. I got the idea from one of my favorite blogs here. I really like how the purple binding framed it. It think it's fun to work with scraps and see what kinds of fabrics are in your stash and how they kind of naturally go together.

I also came up with this idea that I'm in love with. They are little log cabins with my smaller strips. There is no measuring and no set widths. I just started with a square and then added strips around and around until it was larger than six inches across and up and down and then squared them. Some are really straight and some are not depending on if I felt like squaring them up as I sewed. These are really fun to do!

Sometimes the fabrics are random and sometimes I had a plan. Like this one that is just purple and pink.

This block is another one of my favorites!

My other WIP with scraps is this rail fence. I think this will be the next one I try to finish. As you can see I have a hard time working on one thing at a time. Here's to the new year and making a HUGE dent in those scraps!

Reagan's Quilt

What a way to start my blog! This is the first quilt finished in 2012. Made especially for my new niece REAGAN ALYSSA!!! She was born yesterday (Jan 18th) and is a beautiful baby. The fabric is the Zippee from Connecting Threads. I love their fabric, love the feel of it, love the price, and love that there was no work involved in searching out different fabrics (usually not my favorite part of quilting)! I ran short on binding, I don't know if I didn't cut enough or was just missing a strip, but I was about 6 inches short and ended up piecing the rest with the very small scraps that were left. I think this may become my trade mark because it seems to happen to me more often than I'd like to admit.

I'm pretty proud of the stippling since it's only the fourth quilt I've free motioned. I was also excited about the color of thread I chose, it worked perfectly, it's not too overwhelming and doesn't blend in too much.

I pieced the back with the leftovers from the fat eighths.

Since I'm new to this blogging thing I will work on getting the pictures in the right order. I wanted this one to be first. The pattern is "Tiny Turning Twenty." It used twenty fat eighths, instead of fat quarters. It went together pretty quickly, and there is just something about a "tiny" anything. I showed my first Turning Twenty quilt to some friends and they didn't say much, but when they saw this quilt they "oohed and ahhed." I don't know if it's just because the of the smaller blocks (anything smaller is cuter) or if it was the fabric. Whatever the reason I was really happy with how it turned out and I hope that little Reagan enjoys it for many years!