Finished

So, I finished the quilt top I was working on and set it off to my friend to get quilted. Apparently I forgot to take pictures of the finished product, so you will have to settle for pictures of the finished top.

It is going to be in a quilt show in a couple weeks, so I will make sure to get pictures of it then. I have never had a quilt on display before, so I am quite excited (even though there was no criteria to get your quilt into the show - it's still exciting to me).

I also got another quilt top pieced (going to Gramma's really helps with productivity), and finally put it in the frames this weekend. I was a little scared to piece the back because the fabric has a chevron pattern on it, but I finally bit the bullet on Monday (yay holidays), and it was not nearly as scary as I thought.

Here's a close up of my seam.

Progress

On Friday I cleaned up my craft room (which for the last month and a half or more I have just been shifting the mess around). I now have all my flat surfaces, including my floor back. With that out of the way, I was able to start back into a project I started in October or November.

I keep the squares on a flannel sheet for easy transport
since they don't move around much on there.

I am making another quilt for Project Linus. This time I picked out pinks and aquas. I've had them laid out for quite a while, but I finally got them squared up, and yesterday I cut the sashing. I also started piecing things yesterday, but realized when I stopped for dinner that I hadn't set my sewing machine to a quarter inch. Thankfully I hadn't gotten too far. So this morning I ripped things out, and this afternoon after I got the rest of my house cleaned I started piecing again.

Inspiration

I have been following the Canadian Blogathon this week, put on by SewSisters, and it has inspired me to get back to my blog. (That and the guilt of my gramma telling me I don't blog enough). I have a friend coming over this afternoon so that we can craft together, but I thought since I have a little time, I would go ahead and post my latest project.

It started as a shoe box full of "squares" that I inherited from a quilter who retired. (I still maintain that's the best way to grow your fabric stash). I decided that I should do something useful with them, so my friend and I set to work. We scoured pinterest, and other sites, looking for quilts that made good use of small squares. (by the way I put squares in quotations earlier because they were mostly rectangles with sides ranging in length from 3 1/4 to 4 inches...I'm not sure what project they were originally intended for, but apparently uniformity didn't matter). Once we picked out a few ideas that we liked, we got out my shoe box and began sorting. At first I thought it was going to be a lost cause. I had a hard time finding a quilt out of all of the incoherent squares. But we just starting playing, and we managed to come up with something that worked.

We did a basic nine patch with coloured squares around the outside and a white square in the middle. We made both blue and brown squares. We tried not to over think things, or worry if colours matched perfectly. Once we had our blocks laid out we had to square up all the "squares". We ended up working with a 3 1/4" square since that was the lowest common denominator among all the squares we chose. After that it was just a matter of stitching things together.

I puttered away at it whenever I had some spare time (side note: it is so nice to have a craft room and not have to set up and take down from the dinning room every time I want to craft). I used some other inherited fabric for the sashing, and since I'm not really one for square quilts, I made the sashing between the rows half the size of the sashing between the columns.

I didn't just want to alternate blue and brown squares, so I played around and came up with this layout (I have a hard time letting go of symmetry). Once it was all put together I gave it to a friend to machine quilt. She asked how I wanted it quilted, but I am still stuck in a hand-quilting mind set and had a hard time thinking outside those confines, so I left it up to her. Less than a week later she returned it looking like this:

She quilted nested squares inside the nine patches, and in the sashing she quilted bubbles. I love it. Thanks Marg for your hard work and creativity!

I attached the binding and it was done. I had decided when I started the project that since the fabric was all free to me, I would give back and donate it to Project Linus. I hope it helps someone when they need it, and that they enjoy it as much as I enjoyed making it.

Quiet Book: Page Ten (Last One)

This my friends is the last page I made in my quiet book. It was a fun one, and probably involved the most creativity/the one I made up the most.

I made the head and facial features out of felt like the rest of the pages. The neck/face I zig-zagged on like usual. For the facial features I used a blanket stitch (which I did before the face got zig-zagged onto the page). 

The hair I made by cutting pieces of yarn. I attached it in three places (with my machine): the middle, and also off to the sides (so her hair wouldn't fall in her face.

I used a piece of ribbon that I stitched to one end of the page, and attached at the other end with the standard velcro protocol (fuzzy side on the page, scratchy side off the page). However, I wish I had done this one the other way around. When you are trying to get the hair elastics off, they stick to the velcro, and since the ribbon will always stay in place (it doesn't completely detach), I didn't need to worry about the scratchy side of the velcro being exposed.

Along with the hair elastics, I included a few clips as well (but ones that were fairly flat so that the book could still close well).

I even did her hair for her when I was done.

Quiet Book: Page Nine

The next page I want to show you is my abacus page. Since I have a math degree, I felt I couldn't make a quiet book without including some sort of math. I chose to do a sort of abacus.

I used the thin green ribbon I had used on a few other pages, with pony beads strung on it, and then laid a thicker black ribbon across the ends, and stitched it down. Beside each of the "rungs" of the abacus I put the numbers with velcro attached.

Again I put the "fuzzy" side of the velcro on the page, and the "scratchy" side of the velcro on the piece that detached. I also made used two pieces of felt for each number. I sewed the velcro onto one (with interfacing on the other side, and I hand stitched the numbers to the other pieces. Then I stitched them together.

This was the only page where I repeated an attachment method. I had run out of methods and really wanted to do this page, plus my book needed another page, so I repeated, but I felt like it was different enough (matching numbers rather than colours). I also made the colours of the numbers alternate, so even if they weren't matching the numbers, they could do an a-b-a-b pattern.

Quiet Book: Page Eight

The next page I did was the ladybug page. It was the one I remember most from quiet books from my childhood. The pictures aren't great, so you'll have to bear with me.

The ladybug has a zipper in it. The zipper I got from an old pair of pants. I needed a fairly short one so that the ladybug could fit on the page. This was my first zipper, so I was a little unsure about what I was doing, but I attached the zipper first, and then everything else, so I think it was a little easier.

Inside the pocket were black dots to go on the outside of the ladybug. Because everything was felt, I didn't worry about a way to stick the dots to the outside of the ladybug. That way where they went wasn't dictated.

This was probably one of the easier pages...not too many pieces, or things to attach. I put the zipper in the red piece, after I cut a sliver out of the middle to make room for it, then I attached the red piece to the page, and then the black piece on top of that.

Only two more pages to go, plus putting it altogether. Thanks for following along.

Quiet Book: Page Seven

The next page I did was a flowers page. The focus of this page was the buttons.

For each flower I cut out two shapes out of the felt, and one out of the interfacing. I don't recall if I straight-stitched around the edges first, and then did the button hole, or did the button hole first. I do remember the button hole was a little tricky since there were multiple layers, and they would move around a bit.

I stitched the flower pot on before the stems, but if I were to do it again, I would do the stems first, or at least leave the top of the flower pot until after the stems, because then it would cover up the ends. I zig-zagged the flower pot on, and straight-stitched down the sides of the ribbon that I used for the stems.

The buttons I hand stitched on. I went through my button stash, and two other friends as well, to find buttons that were the same size, so the buttonholes could be all the same size, and it wouldn't matter which flower went where. After that I just had to button the flowers on to the page.