Finished Christmas Dresden Quilt

Is it true?  Am I coming back to post a finished picture of this quilt?  Yes, yes I am.  Here it is!!

I think that I will post the picture backwards in this post.  Ha!  From finished project to the finished top..

From a finished dresden that needs to be attached to backing...

To trying to decide if I should do a white center on the block or a Christmas colors center circle....

To the beginning where I have no idea what to say next.  Haha! But I have so much to say.  I purchased an acrylic dresden ruler when I started this project.  I have used it many times and it was totally worth it.  I knew that I had always love and had a fascination with dresden's so it was super fun to have a great tool to use to make them.  I don't care for attaching the centers of the blocks.  It is definitely not my favorite part.  However, I learned to make a cardboard center piece, sew around it like an English Paper piecing piece, iron and pop out the middle to get the exact shape.  

In the end I did decided on the white interior.  When the Christmas fabric was there it seemed just so muddled and hard to see the outside shape really well.  I tried to machine quilt the middles with a continuous circle.  Yep, that was a total fail.  I don't really care for how it turned out and there definitely must be a better way to do it than I did, but it was fun to try.  

The border fabric is some of my favorite Christmas fabric I have ever sewn with.  When I found it at JoAnn's one year, they didn't have a full yard.  It was the first time I have ever asked them if they could find a place that had a few yards.  I knew then that I would just cherish it and use it for everything.  It just had the right amount of deep red with a small gold print that it would go with most Christmas fabrics with more traditional colors.  They found a place with a whole bolt....all the way in Salt Lake city on Redwood Road.  I had some errands I needed to run that direction, so I packed up my child, drove up and got the rest of the bolt.  Now what..probably 5-6 years later, I am glad I did it.  I still just love it each time I cut it and attach it to something.  

Hope you enjoyed.  

Fall 2017 Springville Art Museum Quilt show

Every year the Springville, Utah Art Museum has a quilt show.  I try and go every year because they are just so much fun.  For a long time in our house, we did Friday Museum days.  We are surrounded by hundreds of free, family friendly museums.  It is so fun.  I would take my kids to a variety of art shows, cultural museums, children's museums, history museums, old villages and buildings, forts, etc.  We loved it.  I couldn't keep up after my daughter Kindergarten year because I had to work a friday afternoon class the past year.  However, we do make special trips to see the things I am most interested in.  This years quilt show had a whole floor of red and white quilts on the children's exhibit floor.  They had the opportunity to create quilt blocks with shapes on paper.  It was so much fun!!  I got to walk around taking pictures and enjoyed the quilts while they had a great activity to do. 

They finished right as I finished looking at and admiring the 30 plus quilts.  It was a super fun day.

Then we headed up stairs to the 10 or so galleries that were full of quilts upstairs and the kids each picked their favorite quilt to take a picture with.

It is so inspiring seeing the artistry of these various quilters.  I hope that I can enjoy many more years of creating and being inspired by others.

Hope you enjoyed. 

Valentines Day quilts #2

As I was typing up my post about my best friends Valentines quilts, I started thinking about how we both purchase fabric at the same time that year.  I purchased a couple panels, a charm pack and a couple yards of fabric for backing and binding.  My panels also sat in a pile of unfinished projects for many years.  As I was pulling out my Valentines quilts this year to decorate, I was realizing that it is one of my largest collection of quilts.  Christmas, Fall, Halloween and the 4th of July certainly compare in the sheer volume of fabrics that are fun to buy, sew with and finished projects.  But, I think I secretly love Valentines Day the most.  Why?  Because I love bright colors.  Anything pink as well.  I am a sucker for pink.  When my husband and I were first married, I wore mostly pink.  I have tamed down so much now that I usually wear black or white with an under color.  Life just changes a person I guess.

Here are a few of the panels that I put up that I just love.  Sandy Gervais did a lot of the fabric lines that I got these panels from.  At the time it was a cheap, easy way to get a quilt up.  I now prefer actually sewing and piecing a quilt even if it means that I have a month during the year that is not as full in my quilt area as other months.

I seriously love the fabric on the edge of the 2nd panel.  I love the print, the color and how it really makes the two little love birds color just pop.

I started following canoeridgecreations on instagram a couple years ago.  I have loved watching all her posts.  She posted a free tutorial online that I immediately just grabbed right up and sewed up one day.  It is such a nice, little, easy to sew mini-quilt.  I used lots of scraps that I have.  (Mostly stuff from my daugher infant room that I swear I now know I bought 5x's too much fabric for but even with everything I make from it, the pile never gets smaller!!!)  This is absolutely one of my favorite quilts I have ever made.  I stipple stitched in the heard area and did a straight stitch through the white to finish off the machine quilting.

Picture taking is not my favorite thing.  I am not that good at it.  The lighting is often off and the pictures are often crooked.  Sorry.  These posts are a journal for me, so while I take plenty of time to create what I love, I spend...not as much time on the picture taking. Haha!!

Many years ago I started making a long table runner to my piano to put underneath all the stuff I keep on there to teach piano.  I now have one for every month and it is soooo fun!!!  Then I started making a few table runner's for fun because they are so easy and quick to pull together and finish.  I put the second posted on my kids books bookshelf.  I made the first table runner the a Sandy Gervais line of fabric.  The second one I made from the fabric I decorated my daughters infant room with.

Do you see my chatbooks??  When I realized in 2016 that I couldn't keep up with this blog let alone a blog about my family and their lives, I knew that I needed to do something that would help me keep up with journaling.  It is important to me that I keep track of our lives in some fashion.  It helps give me a sense of purpose.  Honestly, chatbooks are so incredibly cheap and easy.  When I either add up to 60 photos manually or through my instagram account, it automatically prints.  I have 3 days to check it out and make sure that the cover photo is what I want and edit pages I might want to take out or keep.  My kids LOVE reading them.  I find them all over the living room as they relive moments in their lives.  Best decision I made in a long time.  If you haven't hear of them, check them out.

Back to the post at hand, not only do I have quilts to hang, table runner to lay across things in my home, but Valentine's Day was the second holiday I really created pillow covers for.  Back in 2014, I posted a post about a dresden Christmas Quilt I was making.  I am shortly going to post a finished picture of that quilt, but I absolutely love dresdens!!!  But they just take so long to cut and iron on that I decided that I couldn't handle making a full quilt of them for Valentines Day.  So, I made a 16in pillow cover with a dresden.  Of all the pillow covers I have made it is definitely my 3rd favorite.  (Wait until you see my new Halloween one late next week!!!  Oh, and my fall one...or my embroidered/quilted spring one.  Yep, I can't wait to post the millions of pillow covers I made this Christmas.)  As it was actually the first dresden I ever completed, I take a lot of pride in it...even if the middle circle was a complete fisco and not a real circle anymore when you look closely.

I have been collecting red fabrics with gorgeous prints for many many years.  I have yet to make a fun quilt with them, but I did make this pillow cover three times for 2 other people and myself this past Christmas and I just love this one!!  I didn't use a white background to applique it on, I used a muslin. I think it just made it have such a warm color that I wonder why I use white so much.

Whoo blurry!!!  I will try and take a better picture of this pillow cover soon.  This was a leftover block from my pieced-block-panel quilt.  Not my favorite at all, but worth a mention.

Ya, clearly this pillow cover is not on a 12in pillow form.  But I couldn't find my other 12in pillow form so I put it on the 10in until the other one reappears.

Couple all those with the two I made a long time ago....

and I am near complete with my Valentines Quilts.  You can find the last two here and here in other posts in the blog before.  True to form, now you can finally see a finished project because in the original post it was just the top.  These were both some of my first experiments doing machine quilting on my domestic machine.  But the chocolate/pink quilt was my first quilt quilted with a darning foot.  I will never go back to taking everything to a long arm quilter.  It is so much fun to do it myself.  I have the intention this year of branching out and perfecting some more stitches because I default to the stipple stitch nearly everytime.  

And to say thanks for reading, here is the bottom of one of the panel quilts made into it's own mini-quilt!!

Hope you enjoyed!!

Valentines Day quilts

My best friends birthday is Feb. 3.  Every year I try and made something for her birthday.  It is a really fun task.  Back in Jan 2015, I went by her house to have a sewing day with her.  One year when we were first married we had gone fabric shopping and had each purchased from Valentines fabric.  I had worked through half of mine.  She had got a top partially done and had been putting the top up to decorate for a couple years, but had never got it quilted and bound. So we finished all the tops of both a mini-quilt and also a table runner for her kitchen.  I took the quilts home that night and over the course of the next few days, I finished quilting and binding them.  They turned out so fun!!

We made the table runner from my favorite table runner pattern, little charmers II.  I linked a google search site I found the pattern.  I am not a affiliated with them.  It is super easy and just made with a 5 in charm packet. 

There were three small interior block pieces left over when we finished the quilt.  So I surprised her with a second extra table runner when I dropped them off for her birthday.  I loved the colors of valentines day.  I loved the fabric prints that people make for Valentines day.  I wish I could remember the fabric lines of these quilts so I could post their names, but they came from a line in either 2008 or 2009.

Hope you enjoyed. 

Grey/Orange/Blue Crib Quilt

Russ cousin had purchased a variety of fabric.  She had say down to make a scrappy quilt from those fabrics.  However, she didn't own a machine and she had fabrics of every type of material from minky to cotton to polyester to flannel to knit in the stack.  So, she bought it by my house.  I laid all the pieces out that she had cut.  I squared them off to make the quilt square, added some backing to the knit pieces to they wouldn't stretch and whipped up the quilt before her 4th baby was born.  I am still in awe that this as so long ago.  Not only has she had her 5th child, but that child goes to school next year!!

I love the fabrics that she chose and the white fluffy minky on the back really made it such a fun quilt. It was yet another great memory to find this quilt I had forgotten I made and revisit the pictures. 

Hope you enjoyed.

Baby birdhouse mini quilt

Tues morning I headed to the fabric store to find some fabrics to go along with this pattern that I had found in easy Quilts pg. 70, Summer 2011 edition and left open to make...back in 2011.  I saw this magazine when I was frantically cleaning out my storage room after a mouse infestation we had over the holidays.  Somehow, I luckily avoided my fabric getting caught in the mix of the mouse disaster.  They didn't nest in it, they didn't shew it or poop or pee on it...even though they ran around next to it.  But yuck, after I finally killed the 7th one, we have been mouse free and a clean house again.  I think they may have come in a box of mason jars from my cousins garage on their farm that I had stored in our storage room for a bit.  Apparently this week was the week to make it after all this time.  I am soooo glad that I went to look for this magazine this weekend because I finally found all the other patterns I have been searching for that I would like to finish and make. 

I was all packed up for an 1+ drive out to my best friends house to sew.  Her birthday is this weekend and I thought it would be fun to sew something up for her and spend time together.  I sent her picture after picture as I was in the fabric store looking for the right combination of fabrics and this is what we decided on. 

We sat at her kitchen table and cut up all the applique pieces and got them ironed on.  I made the pattern 148% bigger than the original, so it came out to 12" by 28" final quilt top. 

The flower on the top of the bird house I thought was a dragonfly the whole time, but it turns out it is just a flower.  Haha.  I find that to be funny.  It had taken me too long to pick out fabric that I had to leave to head home before we got the quilt quilted and bound.  So I came home yesterday and got it all finished.  I think that it turned out super great and can't wait to see it to her with her family for her birthday party. 

I especially love the knot in the wood in the birdhouse stand.  The wood fabric was a find at the quilt store as I was standing waiting for the lady at the cut counter to finish cutting other fabric. 

When I was first putting the border fabric on the quilt, I was thinking that it just didn't match, but it really just give it such a whimsical brightness that is soooo much fun!!  

This was such a fun quilt sew and I am super glad that I had the time to make it on the week of her birthday.  Hope that you enjoyed!!

Sports crib quilt

When my Brother and Sister-in-law were expecting their first child, they asked me if I would make them a crib quilt. They had seen this quilt at babies are us, but didn't want to pay the price of the bedding there.  So, they sent me a picture, I pulled fabric from my fabric stash and now 5 1/2 years later I am finally posting a picture of it on my blog.  

Until I as sorting through pictures, I had completely forgotten about this quilt.  However, I love how it turned out and am glad that they asked me to make it.  They just had baby #3 and I feel like time has just flown.  It was a really great thing to revisit this picture and remember how grateful I am for the time I have spent sewing for others.  

Hope you enjoyed.  

Red and White sampler quilt

Back in 2015, I started following Tales of Cloth on instagram.  She is one of my favorite people to follow.  I love her English Paper piecing patterns and the things that she is constantly working on.  I had wanted to do a quilt along for a long time.  I had also wanted to do a sampler quilt for a long time to have the experience of making lots of different types of blocks.  When I saw her post on her Red night Sky quilt, I knew it was the one that I wanted to do.  My aunt had asked for a Red and White quilt for Christmas that year, it was all perfect timing.

My favorite part of following each block was reading the history of each block..its origins.  The lady on Tales of Cloth said that she got a history degree and she really enjoyed the history part of finding each block she added to her quilt and doing a tutorial on those blocks.

I made two of each of the blocks for a grand total of 98 blocks.  It was a long long process over the course of 3 months.  However, it was totally worth the work.  I followed each tutorial and made each quilt block.  The last 6 blocks, I did hurry through to finish.  But that was so that she could get it for Christmas.  The following pictures were the only ones that I took sadly, but they definitely give the scope of the project.  I end up making one queen sized quilt for my aunt, one twin size for me and then I took the left over blocks and made them into some pillow covers.  I purchased all the fabric from Connecting Threads and washed it with a color catcher just in case before sewing.

My daughter keeping me entertained while I sew and reading a book out loud.  

I am terrible at math.  Instead of trying to figure out how long and wide to make it, I just laid out a queen bed spread and made the block match.  This picture was taken just 3 hours before a my sister in law was in a horrible car crash.  I thought I would have all night to finish the quilt and instead spent the night rushing to the E.R. to wait hours to pick her, her step son, son and ex-husband up at the hospital.  Thankfully they survived a crash where they didn't see traffic stopping over a hill and rear ended someone at 65 MPH.  Seat belts save lives people!!  They walked away with no broken bones.  It was a miracle.  

The top all finished.  I don't have an actual finished picture.  I know, I know.  I am a terrible quilter only taking in the middle process pics, but I just did a stitch in the ditch to finish it off so it didn't look different than this.  I used the red as a binding.  

Christmas 2016, the year following the quilt build, I made these pillow covers.  I absolutely love how they turned out.  

Hope you enjoyed.