WIP Wednesday

I did most of my cutting for the starburst quilt-a-long. Here is my pink and white star (in a very bad picture) that I still need a few more white squares for and I have all of my fabric cut for my boy version. However, I tweaked the pattern a bit to make it look more like the swoon pattern, so I won't be linking that to the quilt-a-long.

Icky lighting on my phone...

I finished my first quilting bee block--a quilted pillow case. She pretty much said anything goes, so I searched around for a pattern and found this one with hexies. I tried them out and really like them (so much so that I joined a Hexagon bee too!) Here is a little sneak (well, a big sneak peak) of the finished pillow case. I am very happy with how the quilting came out and the scrappy piping is cute too.

I've had no progress on quilting my baby girl pinwheel quilt. I need more than 5 minutes to sit down and work like I usually do with my little ones around.

I also still haven't started on my Lemon Squares quilting. I still don't know how I want to quilt it either. I think I'm going to try my hand at a large all over stipple. The fabric is very flowery so I don't want to do any straight line quilting on top of the very square blocks. I am determined that I will at least clean up my living room so I can get the backing out tonight and figure out how I want to finish piecing it. 

I hope you all had a productive week :)

WIP Weekend

Normal people like to do their works in progress on Wednesdays, but I'm not that normal. Really, I just got so caught up in what I've been working on that I forgot to write up a post. So earlier this week I posted about the pinwheel I started with my Gypsy Girl charm pack and I finished the top the other night. I love the prairie points! I couldn't get them just right in the corners, but oh well, they look cute anyways. I'm currently working to free motion quilting.



The "We Bee with it" bee this week. The host this month requested a block for a pillow rather than a quilt, so she left us to our own devices. After lots of searching on pinterest I finally landed on this post for a quilted pillow:

I made my first set of hexies and just finished quilting it today. I couldn't just send her an unfinished pillow, and adding a back and binding won't be much harder. We are supposed to do two blocks a month anyways because it is a 6 month bee. I will post a picture of the finished product whenever my bee member gets it :)

I also started cutting out my fabric for my single star block baby quilt. I found this adorable one that I posted about last week and I figured out how to make it from another tutorial here. I will probably still join the starburst quilt-along, but do a single baby girl quilt. It is much girlier and I can't think of any baby boy fabrics that would really work. I don't want to do a white background. I'm thinking pink with an all white star. Simple with solids would be beautiful...if I can get my piecing accurate. Here is a little mock up that I made on paint. Just put the simple shapes over a picture of the block so it is very rough:

Feel free to take it and add your own colors. I am all for helping other. I could never create anything without lots of guidance, inspiration, and patterns from other blogs and books that I have found.

I signed up for another bee: Get Your Hex On. It's all about EPP hexagons. I have only done a few but I'm excited to do more. I found this tutorial to make a hexagon holder and I have finished all the hexies to make the cover and now I am piecing them together, slowly but surely. Hopefully I can work out all my mistakes now so that when I go to make some for other people they look really good. 

Well, that is all I've been working on. I really need to set some of these aside for awhile and start working on my Lemon Square quilt so that I can link it to the Lovely Year of Finishes. Thanks again for stopping by!

New Year, New Projects

[On a side note, I had written this post the other day and when I went to add pictures from my phone I somehow deleted the whole post. Silly problems like these discourage me from blogging. I have enough troubles trying to write without having to rewrite it.]

Earlier this afternoon I started to worry about not being able to complete the quilt I had linked to A Lovely year of Finishes because I have been working furiously on two baby quilts. And then I realized "it's only the 7th!" Silly me. I feel like so much time has passed since getting back home from Christmas with my family. I started working on a new baby boy quilt. I got the idea from Camille from The Bonnie&Camille designers for Moda. She had done a single star block quilt with Michael Millers dumb dots and his bicycles as backing. So I searched for a free star block and I made my own star from Faith at Fresh Lemon Quilts. 


The first one I was pretty proud of but thought it was too small just to have one on the whole quilt front so I decided to make 3 more. I don't know where I went wrong, but I kept coming up short on the outside quarter inch. I eventually have up. Now I have a 15 inch star block and a yard of bicycles. I might just make it into a wall hanging for my boys room and make a minky blanket with the bicycles. Or I might start over with this new block I found. It is in three different sizes: 24, 32, or 40" block. You can find the tutorial here.


Once I got over being devastated from failing on my first try at paper piecing I got my Gypsy Girl charm pack in the mail. I had picked it up for $2.50 on Missouri Star Quilt Co. over the Christmas break on one of their daily deals. I really should have bought more. The moment I started looking through all the fabrics I fell in love. The flowers and birds and all the colors are so cute and girly.  I searched around for an easy charm pack pattern and found this one on Moda Bake Shop. I quickly put the pinwheels together, but as I was trimming them I realized that 5 of them were clockwise and the other 7 were counter clockwise. Another bump in the road! 


After fretting over if I should rip out the five and fix them, I finally decided to just rip apart one so I would have six of each. After arranging them this way and adding the sashing I am feeling better. Hopefully I can finish up this part tonight and start working on the borders and prairie points tomorrow.
     
     My to do list for the rest of the month:
1. Complete my crazy 9 patch square for the swap
2. Sandwich, quilt, and bind my Lemon Squares quilt for the Lovely Year of Finishes
3. 2 blocks for the bee host for We bee With It--whenever they send the information. 

Check back later to see how things are going :)

A Beginning

It's been awhile since I started this blog. I am usually a pretty quiet and reserved person, so blogging doesn't come naturally to me. But I am determined to start sharing my quilts and projects. I am constantly looking around the internet for new tutorials and whenever I find a cute new craft or quilt I want to know exactly how it was made and most of the time there is no guide or reference. So my goal for this blog is to share my projects and more specifically share how I made each quilt and craft.

So with that being said, let's start off with WIP (work in progress) Wednesdays. I have a horrible habit of starting something and not finishing it. And then finding a new project and forgetting about the first one. Maybe I'm subconsciously terrified of finishing something and finding out that I messed something up. But here are some things I am currently working on:

My favorite project right now is my Lemon Squares quilt from fresh lemons. I am in love with yellows and oranges and when I found this pattern on Faith's blog after I had picked up some beautiful Dear Stella Mimosa fabric it was fate.

I first cut out all the pieces and separated them into each block. I then chain pieced two sides, pressed the seams, chain pieced the other two sides until each block was done. I have 6 sets of 6 blocks total. I am now currently piecing together 6 blocks into a row. I hope to finish all the rows this weekend and start sewing them together. I'm super excited to see it all done.

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I am also slowly sewing on the binding to this beauty by hand. It's my first real quilt and I used a quilt as you go method. It's in rough shape, but it's just for my boys

My husband and I used fabric paint and put my oldest's handprints all over a piece of canvas. It will become a bag for my grandmother once I wash it.

And here is a zig-zag quilt I am working on for my sister's birthday/Christmas present. Her birthday is the 22nd, so I usually just get her something nicer instead of two smaller things. She helped pick out the fabrics and lay out. It came together pretty quickly by using 6 inch wide strips. 

I realize it is now Thursday. I had all of these pictures on my phone, but I never got around to uploading them. I really need to get a new camera. These pictures are pathetic. Look out tomorrow for my first completely finished quilt! I will share the whole process (and only a few photos). Thanks!