Quilt Along . Inspiration

I'm a little surprised at how excited I am to do this quilt along (see previous posts) with Oh, Frannson. I decided to postpone Zadie's quilt for a while so that I can focus on this (and I'll get to that cute Spring jacket for her next).

This is my living room. I adore our red cast iron woodstove. It saves us loads of money on our gas bill in the winter and it's pretty cute. I also love this chair we got at the Salvation Army for $7 (or half that -- I think they were having a sale). I've been wanting a throw for my couch so this quilt project will be it.

I went through my meager stash and found this red print that is my favorite and decided to build from there. I'm going with aqua and teal to mix with the red. I will probably also stray a little bit from my plan to do all reproduction fabrics because there's so much out there (and not much at my local quilt shop at all).

So I'm off to a good start. More tomorrow.

Quilt along!

inspiring pin cushion from Oh, Frannson

I am so excited that Elizabeth of Oh, Fransson has decided to host a quilt along. I bought the pattern I plan to use for Zadie's quilt (see ocd post) from her Etsy shop primarily because I love her fabric choices and use of color.

But when I started the process of picking out my own fabrics, I just got overwhelmed. I'm almost there but I still need to buy a few prints before I can make the final decision.

Then I read that she was going to do this quilt along. Unlike other such projects where people just share images of their progress, Elizabeth is actually going to give us tutorials along the way so we can learn how she does it. Since my first quilt (the sock monkey one) was such a challenge, I've had a bit of fear in starting Zadie's new quilt. So this is just a perfect project for me.

I'm going to use all my favorite vintage-inspired and reproduction quilt fabrics (mostly made my Moda and RJR and Marcus). I'm hoping to take a trip to the local quilt shops this weekend to buy stuff in person (no more online for me unless I have to pick up a couple of coordinating prints -- the online buying has been the real issue in my fabric choosing for Zadie's quilt).

It's a sampler style quilt so I'll be able to learn quite a bit about piecing too. So far, I've only done the two types of blocks from the Amy Butler quilt.

I'll be posting my progress here. And wish me luck!

Customer Appreciation Week

I've recently gotten a couple of amazing emails with photos of people decked out in Lemon Cadet.

So each day this week (or something kinda like it), I'm going to post pics and stories. If you have any photos of yetis or beans or any of my other little guys (who I swear I will be making more of in my next collection), please send them to me so I can put them up.

This is my nephew Ashton in one of the now extinct yeti tees. What a cutie!

And we're out.

So the time has finally come. The yeti is extinct. He will be remembered fondly by his hand-stitched toothy grin, his pointy claws, and his silky pelt.

Oh yeti, you will be missed.

Pictured above is the last of the yetis. Ever. He flew via First Class Mail/Parcel Post to his new home with Jess T's dad. Another traveled far away and will be a baby shower gift so that's a secret. If you find some of this fur, let me know and we'll attempt a reincarnation.

I have already begun working on designs for a new elusive species. Look for them in late Spring/early Summer.

R.I.P. mysterious beast.

Amy Butler's Patchwork Crib / Playtime Quilt

I bought Little Stitches for Little Ones from Barnes and Noble a few weeks ago using a hoarded birthday gift card (my birthday is in October). It's an absolutely gorgeous book with amazing photos and lots of images of Amy Butler's fabric. The format of the book is nice because it has a sturdy hardcover with a spiral binding to lay flat. All the patterns are in a cute little pocket. Overall it's great for inspiration because it's just so beautiful. Because of that, I bought a previous book of hers called In Stitches.

I decided to start with the quilt project because we really needed something for Zadie to play on in our living room. This is a perfect size. I nabbed this photo during naptime.

The book is really lacking in diagrams (and often photos of the completed pieces -- if you're a visual person and not good at following written directions then this probably isn't the book for you).

So, as you can see, I made my own quilt map using photocopies of the 4 diagrams that were in the book. I then color-coded the blocks so I would have a better visual. I also made a little key of the fabrics so that I wouldn't make any mistakes when cutting or piecing.

The fabric is the Funky Monkey line by Erin Michaels for Moda. I bought it a couple of years ago. The pattern calls for 4 fabrics but since I had so many I decided to add two more. I wanted to use the green number print and the crowd print to add some more color. If I hadn't, this would have been too baby-ish with all the pink and aqua. The green gives it a nice punch. Since the pattern of the blocks repeats, it was easy to make the switch.

The back of the quilt is the fabric that has the monkeys in a crowd. Half is cream and half is red. I put all of the cream pieces facing up and all the red pieces facing down so there wouldn't be an orientation to the quilt. I also used regular quilt binding that you can buy from the store. I just didn't have time to do any more ironing and cutting.

I absolutely love this. It turned out really well and I'm sure we'll have it forever. The hardest part was the cutting and a technique for quilting called stitch-in-the-ditch. I hadn't done that before and found it kinda challenging. But now that the quilt is finished, you can't tell how bad of a job I did. I also used really thin quilt batting. It's good for a play quilt but for my next quilt (see this post), I'm going to get something thicker.

ocd, just a little

After seeing Heather Ross' gorgeous Mendocino fabric collection, I decided to make Zadie a quilt for when she moves into the toddler bed version of her crib.

I bought the Mixtape pattern from OhFrannson (who also has an amazing blog -- if you're into quilting, you should take a look).

And now I'm trying to choose fabrics. I'm going to use the Favorite Songs pattern because it will give me the largest blocks. Since I'm new to this, I think that's the best way to go (larger = fewer). The fabrics have some pretty big prints so the bigger the block, the more space they'll have.

Anyway, on the Freespirit site, they have swatches of 36 prints. When I was searching Etsy, I found a few more. Now I'm getting all ocd and feel like I need to see them all in one space before I'm able to make my decision. I wonder if someone can help me with this...

I often wish I lived in a city with a huge fabric store that would have everything. It is hard to buy fabric online.

Stripey and stuff

Look at this cool collage by Rebecca Kate on flickr. It's all stripes and legwarmers. Up there in the left corner is me and Anda and Sido and Zadie. We're all very stripey in the photo.

I took a screenshot of this.

I love it. I need to learn how to use flickrtoys.