A Place in Your Book

Mike and I are having a post-wedding potluck on Saturday and I wanted to make a little favor for our guests. I found the basic template for this bookmark on one of my favorite craft sites -- www.mmmcrafts.blogspot.com. It took a little manipulating to add the beetles and the words, but we wanted to make it personal. With Mike's help, we put these together tonight. Hope our guests find a place in their books for these!

Luther Quilt Finished

Whoa, this quilt is almost as big as our house! Actually, it's only a full-size quilt, but still larger than anything I've made so far. I don't think I want to make a t-shirt quilt ever again. There was a lot of bunching that was hard to prevent and my machine did not like going through the tacky lettering of some of the shirts. I broke the thread about a million times. It was kind of a pain. That being said, I'm very glad I made this as it will preserve a lot of memories. It's something I'll be able to keep forever.

Here's a view of the backing...

And another go at the faux piped binding...

All folded up and ready to go back inside where it belongs!

L-U

L-U

L-U-T-H

T-H

T-H

T-H-E-R

L-U-T-H-E-R

Luther, Luther, Luther!!

L-U-T-H-E-R, Luther, Luther, Luther!

After 5 years of wearing nothing but Luther t-shirts, I decided it was time to retire them and convert them to a quilt. It took 26 t-shirts to make this quilt, but I still didn't use them all. It was hard cutting a few of my favorites, but I thought this would be a better use for them. Making this brought back a lot of great memories from my college days. It's hard to believe it's been 5 years since I've graduated -- and 9 since I started college. Just crazy how time flies. This will be a neat quilt to commemorate my heydays!

Beetle Boy Quilt for Baby Berberet

We had our work baby shower for Stephanie on Wednesday so I stayed up late Tuesday finishing this quilt. Stephanie and John loved it even though it is so brightly colored. I love the back with all the bugs...

Blocks for O-baby

I made some stuffed blocks out of the leftover angels staircase fabric. These are fun to throw! Hope little O-baby likes them!

Angels Staircase Quilt Finished!

This quilt is my new favorite. I love the colors and it turned out perfect. I tried a few new things with this quilt: 1) Instead of pinning the three layers together to quilt them, I decided to use some sticky spray that holds fabric together with the backing. It was so much better than using safety pins because it kept the fabric from bunching and puckering when I quilted it. I will definitely be using that more often! 2) Instead of off centering the quilt lines in diamond shapes like I've done before, I decided to follow the seam lines, and quilted 1/4" from both sides of the seams. I like how it turned out. 3) I made a "faux piped" binding using this tutorial: http://tlcstitches.blogspot.com/2010/07/faux-piped-binding-tutorial.html It gives the quilt a really nice, polished look. I will definitely be using this technique again.

On to the pictures! Here is the quilt top:

A close-up of the "faux piped" binding:

The backing:

The presentation. All ready to be sent off to Maxi and then to her friends! Hope they all love it!

Angels Staircase Quilt

A friend of mine and Mike's old postdoc, Maxi, asked me to make a quilt for her to give to her grad school friends that are having a baby girl. After a week or so of going back and forth on patterns and fabric, we settled on the Angels Staircase pattern and It's a Hoot fabric by MoMo. It took me a good hour to choose which six fat quarters I was going to use. I had to choose from 40, so this was not an easy task. I am really happy with what I settled on. Here's a picture of all the fat quarters and the ones I decided to use on the quilt:

Once I chose the fabrics I had to cut them into 6" squares and 2" x 6" rectangles. As you can see below, I had the blue fabric as one of the main squares, but after laying a few pieces out, I realized the blue needed to be the accent color. I was lucky that I had enough spare yellow dot fabric to make up the squares and rectangles. I used a little of what was left over from Olivia's monkey and owl, so that was a life saver. Here are the pieces all cut and ready to go:

I spent about 4 hours piecing these staircases together. I had to piece the blue squares with the top rectangle, then the side rectangles to the squares and so on and so forth. I got into a groove, but it still took a significant amount of time to sew these together. I'm glad this is just a crib size quilt -- I can't imagine how much longer it would have taken to make many more of these! Anyway, it was well worth the time. I am loving the staircases. All that is left to do for the top is cut and sew the strips of white fabric that will border and go between the staircases. I need to order the backing and binding fabric, but couldn't do that until I knew which color was going to be the accent color. Hopefully I can find some yardage of the blue fabric as this is an older collection. I'm crossing my fingers.

Here are the staircases: