Scrappy Tiles Baby Quilt

Happy Friday everyone! It's been a while, but I do have a happy quilt finish to share with you today.

My mother-in-law asked me to make a quilt for her to give as a baby present back a few months ago. Last year, when I was pregnant, I spent some time working up a quilt design, but never got to make it. That design was for a big lap size quilt. So when she asked me to make it, I decided it was the perfect time to try out the pattern in a baby size. And here it is, my Scrappy Tiles baby quilt.

This quilt is constructed using a traditional block structure - 12" finished blocks in a 3 x 4 structure. But it's a little bit counter-intuitive when sewing the blocks together, as the white sashing is in the centre of the blocks, and the print tiles on the outsides. In order to match the colours in the tiles, it takes a bit of prep work, planning colour layout and fabric choices. Once that is done, it's super quick to put together.

Lately, I have moved away from primary colours for boys quilts and this is no exception. I really love the colours I used in this - the yellows and oranges balance the greys, greens and blues.  And the overall effect is a little bit soft and muted, which wasn't the original intention, but works really nicely I think. There is a lot of Lotta Jansdotter's Echo line in this quilt, as well as plenty of scraps.


I used the last of my IKEA hippos bolt of fabric for the back. Sadly these aren't available any more - such a pity, they make wonderful quilt backs.

My MIL wanted baby's name on the quilt, so I embroidered it in the bottom right corner as Sam is such a short little name. I think a longer name would probably have had to go on the back.

This quilt was pieced and quilted, as always, with Aurifil 50wt thread. I used pure white here, although I did consider my favourite silvery grey thread too. I originally planned to straight-line quilt this one, but I wasn't loving the effect after the first few lines, so I unpicked and decided to do a random stipple instead. I think it was the right decision. I know straight lines could work really well, but the softness of the stipple against the geometric shapes provides nice contrast. The binding is a grey, dotty poplin.

 The quilt measures 36" x 48" - perfect baby cot size.

I think that I will try and write up a tutorial for this pattern, if people are interested in it. I also want to do the original lap size quilt I planned with it - here is a mock-up of what I originally was working on. I think this would look great with solids and Kona Charcoal as the sashing:

That's a project for another day though, as I have 2 large quilts needing finishing, and the small matter of some keyhole surgery to get over in the next couple of weeks, but hopefully I will be all recovered by Christmas, and I will be happy to put 2013 behind me from a health perspective. In the meantime, I'm happy that Sam received his quilt last week and by all accounts, it was a big hit with mum and dad which is great.

Linking up with Finish It Up Friday over at Crazy Mom Quilts.

Pinwheels Pram Quilt

Despite the fact that I managed to miss the wonderful Bloggers Quilt Festival for the last couple of rounds, being in that fog of late pregnancy and new baby sleeplessness, I am happy to be linking up to the Fall 2013 festival! If you're visiting for the first time, welcome to my little blog. Please do come back and visit me again! Without futher ado, read on to find out more about my little pram/baby quilt.

Our friends had a new baby boy a few weeks ago. Of course, you know what that translates to in my sewing-obsessed head: they needed a quilt for their new little boy. I'd put it on the long finger for a little while but when my hubby arranged to go and visit them this weekend, I decided I needed to get sewing pretty quickly this week.

I used Lindsay's method for making my HST blocks - its really quick and easy, with minimal cutting. You cut 2 large squares to yield 8 HST blocks. Her pattern cut to 18", but I had cut into some of the FQs I was using, so I cut mine to 12.5", which yielded me 8 x 5.5" HST blocks. I LOVE this method of making HSTs, and will definitely be using it again.

 I used a cream solid against each of the 6 fabrics I picked, I think the softness of it works well. The fabrics are a mix of different designers & lines that I put together myself with a little help from my Instagram friends :-) The navy, blue and orange were are so fresh for a little boy (I think) - it's nice to go for a colour palette that's not too traditional. The large dotty print was the inspiration print for this combo.

The backing is an IKEA kids fabric which Fiona gave me a good while ago. I love how cheery and boyish it is on the back, you could easily use this as a double sided quilt.

The last time I was in IKEA I couldn't find the bolts of kids fabric in their kids department which bothered me a bit, as I love them for backings and they are such great value too. Have they discontinued those little fabric bolts does anyone know?

I quilted it in a free motion stipple using my favourite Aurifil 50wt thread in white and it came out of the wash gloriously crinkly and soft. I pin basted this quilt too, and I am definitely going back to the pins for basting. I loved not having the sticky edges from the basting spray. 

The binding is a navy dotty poplin. This is a very little quilt - only 30" x 40", so really it is pram or crib size. I have a quilt about this size for my baby girl, and I use it all the time on her car seat, and now that she's bigger, its a perfect size to put her sitting on when she's down on the floor. I hope that baby Tadhg gets lots of use out of it and that his mum and dad like it :-)

Prince Charming Baby Boy Quilt Finish

My sister asked me back a few months ago if I would make a quilt for her sister-in-law's new baby when he or she arrived, and I very happily agreed because I love making baby quilts. We decided to wait for the baby to be born as they didn't know if they were expecting a boy or a girl, and I'm not a huge fan of gender neutral quilts when there are so many lovely fabrics out there for baby boys and girls.

Baby Tom duly arrived a few weeks ago and I soon got started on his quilt. If you follow me on Instagram or Facebook, you'll have seen my progress pictures as I worked on this. (I love, love, LOVE Instagram - I just love being able to snap a picture and upload it straight away, with very few words needed! So, well, so...instant!! If you're not using it, and you have a smart phone, I'd definitely recommend it, it's fun and totally addictive. If you do, I'm @sewfairyface, say hi!)

I decided to a boy version of the Princess Charming quilt I made last year. I love working with charms, and, having a pretty big supply of large scraps in novelty prints as well as an extensive (*ahem*) stash, it allowed me to showcase lots of them.

 

 I just love the combination of owls, zebras, whales, beetles, birds and other "critters", alongside the cars, bikes, trains and trucks. There's even a pirate in there! I used the two Ann Kelle train and car prints as my starting point for the colour palette, with blue, orange, green and brown as the dominant colours and I am happy with how the colours balanced out, it feels bright and vibrant and cheery, just perfect for a little boy. 

 Similarly to the quilt I made last year, I embroidered baby's name on this one. As Tom is such a lovely, short little name, I decided to do a more elaborate letter style so it wouldn't be lost on the white panel. I used perle cotton #8 for this, in a vibrant turquoise colour, and I used a stem stitch which gives fantastic definition and presence.

I'm always slightly nervous doing hand embroidered letters, there's a lot of potential for them to go wrong, and if they're not good they ruin the look of a quilt and detract from a polished finish. But, happily, with slow and careful work, I got this looking pretty close to how I imagined it. I had some little circle appliques left over from Mr D's Circles quilt, the very last pieces I have of Laurie Wisbrun's elephants and the monkeys from the original Hooty Hoot prints, and I was thrilled to use them here.

I backed it with a blue print I've had in my stash quite a while from Sheri Berry's Child's Play with Kate and Nate for Northcott. I wish I had bought more of these prints when they were out, it was a really lovely line.

I also inserted some strips of the backing fabric into my binding - I've seen this look on other quilts previously and liked it a lot. I randomly pieced 4 strips of differing lengths in, one on each side and I love how it looks like the binding has disappeared in parts from the back.

 This quilt measures approx 38 x 50 and is a lovely baby size. It's gone off now to my sister to be gifted to baby Tom and I hope he will enjoy it and get lots of use from it. Linking up to Finish It Up Friday over at Crazy Mom Quilts and Lets Hear it for the Boy at 733 Blog.

P.S. Don't forget to enter my great Seamstar giveaway here - it runs till Monday 12th August.  

Baby boy quilt finish

As well as having my own gorgeous little new baby girl, I also have a new baby nephew, born just 7 weeks before my darling. So, obviously, he needed a quilt from his auntie Sarah. I picked out the fabrics after he was born  - already dreaming of bright and cheerful spring colours with boyish tones - but was unable to do too much with them.

Last week I pulled them out again and very quickly cut and pieced them.



I used Elizabeth Hartman's baby charm quilt pattern and its definitely one I'll be using again for last minute quilts, so simple and easy and because its about 33 x 40, very quick to baste, quilt and bind too. I decided to embroider his name in the bottom corner, using a simple running stitch in perle cotton. I traced his name using washable marker and it worked very well. I fused a small piece of very lightweight interfacing to the back of the fabric before starting to stablise the stitches a little.

After quilting it using a random stipple with some little hearts around his name, I picked a blue heart poplin print for the binding:



And a green hippo print from IKEA for the backing.

And in no time at all, it was done and ready to give to my sister today just in time for his Christening.



It's good to have my sewing mojo (or my sewjo as I saw it referred to during the week!) back again. I'm busy getting my list of projects for quarter 2 of the Finish A Long ready to post on Monday. Hope you're having a great weekend!

First Quilt Finish of 2012 - at last!!

At last, finally, I have a quilt finish this year. It feels like a long time. It has been a long time! I finished up the last quilt of 2011 on Christmas week - more than 5 weeks, eek!

But I think it was worth the wait and I hope you do too :-)

This is a quilt for a baby boy born last week. I was asked to make it in yellow, white and blue, and while this combo of colours is quite traditional, I really loved working with it (much more than I anticipated.) The lemons and yellows are so cheerful and happy and absolutely lovely to have peeping out at me every time I looked at my sewing stack in the kitchen on these gloomy days. And the blues, well, what can I say, you know I love my aquas. Interestingly when I went to my stash for blues, there are very few true blues there, most of them are in the aqua/turquoise/teal family, but I think that is ok, and it keeps this quilt very fresh.

The pinwheel blocks are approx 7.5" finished size. I am really happy with the point matching on this one. When making my HSTs I took my time, gave myself an extra 1/8" while cutting and piecing so that I could trim them to a perfect size, and you can see it in the blocks. It was so much easier to piece the top than other HST quilts I have done because it was so much more accurate. HSTs are a LOT of work, but I always think they are worth it in the end. The quilt measures 39" x 47" finished.

I love the movement in the quilt and pieced my blocks so as to give a slight optical illusion to the pinwheels spinning.

I also, for the first time on a full size quilt, handfinished the binding. I wasn't convinced I was going to love it but I got friendly with my thimble, stitched away in front of the tv a couple of nights, and I *might* be a convert. I went with a slightly wider binding than I normally do and I must admit I like it more than I thought I would.

The backing is a cream fabric with a tiny blue and yellow floral print and works great with the front.

I quilted this one with a meandering stipple and a few loops. It was so much fun to quilt because the size is so manageable, compared to the big quilts I did at the back end of last year. I used Aurifil white thread on the front and cream on the back. Now that its been washed and dried, the quilting has sunk into it nicely and its beautifully crinkly!

 This one is wrapped and ready to post off in the morning and I hope baby will love it!

I'm linking up to {Sew} Modern Monday, Manic Monday and Fabric Tuesday with this one!

Pin It

Fresh quilt start!

It feels like there has been a lot of writing and organising going on here the last few weeks, and not so much sewing! I was determined to change that this week and took myself to my stash to pull fabrics for a new quilt. Then, last night and this morning I got cutting and did a little piecing. Oh, there is nothing nicer than a fresh rotary blade in your cutter and miles of lovely fabric to cut!!!

This is a baby boy's quilt. The person I am making it for wants blue, yellow and white. I love the combination of colours - so fresh and gorgeous! I had to order a number of yellow fabrics as I'm not strong on these in my stash, but I had lots of blues. With the limited colours, I wanted to have lots of interest in shades, prints and values and I think I assembled a nice mix in the end!

Then I trialled a couple of blocks. Pinwheels, I just love them. So simple, so classic but just lovely with the right fabrics because there is so much movement in them.

Do you hear that satisfied sigh? That's me, all ready to get chain piecing tonight when the kids are gone to bed! Now, time to go off and do what I've been avoiding all day: tidy up, put away the shopping, spend some quality time with the kids and supervise the homework (that doesn't fall in the quality time category....maybe I will leave that job to Himself when he gets in from work!).

Hope you're having a good day! I'm linking up to WIP Wednesday over at Freshly Pieced.

Frogs & Snails, Free Motion practice and other random sewing news...

This is a bit of a mixed bag (and a lucky bag for one super lovely bloggy friend) of my sewing news for the last week. Bear with me, its all a bit random!

First up, another weekend, another quilt top! I'm not getting a whole pile of time to spend sewing these days, but when I do get to it I am being super productive. No faffing about, just the very model of efficiency! So, here is the latest sewing result - my Frogs and Snails quilt for a new baby boy. I'm making this one for my MIL who wants a present for her grand-nephew. Its a small, cot size quilt and a little bit akin to an I-Spy quilt, as a lot of the half square triangles have interesting detail for a baby boy. There are owls (of course!), cars, traffic lights, buses, whales, bugs, kangaroos, spots, stripes, stars and of course a frog and some snails :-) No puppy dog tails though!

I could have gone a number of different ways with my HSTs in terms of layout, but after playing around for a little bit yesterday afternoon with different combinations, I thought this worked best and I really like it. I have a lovely soft piece of blue and white gingham print fabric for the back and i nf the gods smile on me, I might even get it basted tonight.

I'm also working on cutting two other quilt tops - one for a baby girl in red, pink and aqua with these lovely fabrics:

And one for a baby boy in these lovely orange, brown and green fabrics!

 
Also on the agenda this morning was catching up on Cindy's free motion practice-along so I could link up to Free Motion Friday, even if I am a little late. I watched the video and got my little scraps of fabric and batting ready. And then I almost collapsed laughing when I saw the result.

 

Bloody, horrendously awful. You know I like to show you my craft fails from time to time, this one is definitely up there in the rankings - serious wobbling, stitch length all over the place, rubbish tension (look at the pic of the back) and general crapness.

I even made a 2nd attempt.

 

Its a little better, but not by more than about 2%. And that's because I moved the fabric around at the end of each wave so I was working towards myself, to give me more control. And I remembered to breath! Still didn't work :-)  Moral of the story? Need to practice!!! Now, I do think I should probably go a little bigger on the fabric I'm using - there's not much scope for control on a scrap this size. And I need to look at my tension issues, so the manual will have to come out for next week. But it was definitely fun and I can't wait to try this week's drop art. Think I will have to go reading up a little before tackling it. Because, imagine if I could do it? How cool would it be!

In other news, I am getting started with my stalking of my partner for the Modern Christmas table runner swap. I pulled out my stash of Christmas fabrics from last year - aren't they nice? But I might need to add some to them to get a colour palette my partner LOVES, off to do my research this afternoon.

And I got CeLynn's fabrics for October in Sew Bee Blissful. She wants us to make these super cute owl blocks, I can't wait to get started on them. Really love her fabric choices:

Last, but by no means least, I want to say thank you to everyone for linking up to my Summer Sewing wrap up! It was amazing to see what you all got done, isn't it the best feeling to look back at all your achievements? I've had a few requests for a Winter sewing list to keep you all on track - are you interested? If so, I'll get working on it and post it sometime in the next week or so, just let me know in a comment. Now, back in May I did promise a little giveaway for people who participated and I have consulted with Mr. Random. I had 7 people complete from start to finish (love you all!) and of these he picked:

 who is my lovely bloggy friend Susan! Susan, I've emailed you :-) If you haven't checked out Susan's blog before, you are missing out. She is super talented, and very funny, and she is swap mama to the above mentioned Modern Christmas Table Runner Swap, which is an inspired idea. Go get over there and say hi!

So, there's my random news. Hope you're having a lovely weekend!