Squidfire's Spring Art Mart

Find us on the park side of the street!

Team Lemon will be sharing our tent with Shortees who makes some pretty awesome stuff out of recycled t-shirts. See the previous post for a preview of the newest Lemon Cadet loot.

More info on the Squidfire's site.

A sneak peak . tails

Somehow I managed to finish two (TWO!!!) new designs for the Squidfire's show this weekend (Yay, Baltimore! and more on you tomorrow).

I've been wanting to add some huge tails for a while now but I was having a hard time breaking away from the beans. The heart guy is wearing a suit from one of my favorite Alexander Henry prints and the yellow guy features one of Jackie Shapiro's cool animal prints. The tails are made from vintage-inspired dotted swiss. As always, I've hand-embroidered the faces and carefully stitched the edges with my fab Huskystar. I'll post more pics after the show.

Zadie's nursery on the Ikea Hacker blog

I submitted our changing table hack to the Ikea Hacker blog months and months ago. Since I never saw it posted, I just figured it was a bad idea or something.

Today, it magically appeared.

We are still loving this. It works great, we love all the storage in the bins, and when Little Beastie is out of diapers, we'll be able to take this apart and make further use of it.

If it's not on your Google Reader already, you should make a point to add this cool blog. It's crazy what people can do with the stuff in that AS IS room (our first stop on any Ikea trip).

Quilting Along . nicely

a blocks in a pile

I'm making great progress on the Quilt Along. For one thing, this is WAY easier than sewing a dress for a little girl. You get to cut with a rotary cutter and ruler and everything is straight. But at the same time, you have to be really precise or anything you do wrong will get magnified by the end -- this doesn't happen with clothing where one mistake is simply one mistake. (I'm in denial about the actual quilting part).

I got most of my pieces cut out and placed on the organizers. I didn't understand how directional prints would work in the quilt so I'm waiting to cut out the last two blocks until I'm a little less tired. I need to make a new cutting diagram because I'm not sure if more ladybug fabric is on the way. I'm also not sure If I will have enough of the apple print so I need to measure what I need and what I have a few more times before whacking into what's left.

Since I already bought a pattern from the Oh Fransson Etsy shop for Zadie's toddler bed quilt, I decided to make my organizers slightly more reusable. I used stickers for the numbers so that if I need to add more squares or use fewer, I can just switch out instead of getting confused (plus I hate my handwriting).

I love working on this. I think the fabrics have come together very nicely. But as you can see, I've already made some mistakes. I thought I was doing such a great job and I was all proud of myself. Then I ironed my seems open and realized that they didn't line up! Oh well.

Customer Appreciation Week . preempted

As you can probably tell, customer appreciation week was viciously interrupted by my obsession with the quilt along (and I'm already pretty far behind in that -- they are just speeding right past me).

Anyway, since I don't like leaving anybody hanging...

Here is one of the cutest kids I have ever seen and she is wearing a Lemon Cadet bun bun polo tee and carrying around her new bean. This is Shannon's daughter. In addition to heading up EtsyKids, she runs a delicious Etsy shop called The Clever Kitty. She bought the shirt a little big so there will be plenty of time to wear it! Check out her blog. It's very nice.

It absolutely kills me to see stuff this cute. Just when I feel like tossing my applique foot into the trash and giving up, someone sends me something like this.

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!