Swap Quilt-The Design

I signed up for Jenna's SewHappyGeek Tablerunner/Wall Hanging Swap and was so excited to make something cool for my partner.  It's actually my first swap ever.  Based on stalking my partner's Flickr profile and inspiration board, I decided to make a fall-foilage wall hanging in some calm, neutral colors.  Very strange for me, something not bright!  Here's the final wall-hanging in case you want to skip right to the meat!

The first thing I did was sketch my general design idea out in pencil on a regular sized piece of paper (in pic, bottom right) then trace it onto a transparency (top right).  I used my old-from-university-surplus overhead projector to enlarge and reverse it, and then traced the full sized pattern on freezer paper.

I decided to use the Caryl Fallert piecing method (described previously here and here), so the next step was to ink the pattern and put registration marks all over it so the whole thing could be reassembled.

Here are a couple of shots of my potential fabric palette;  I wound up going with the pale blue for the background and the bottom right green/brown print for the forest floor.

I decided the three biggest tree trunks should be pieced, the largest with geese and the smaller two just string pieced.  In all cases, I tried to keep the light-dark gradient consistent so that the whole quilt would look like it had a unified light source. I just used a mish-mash of light cream, medium brown, and dark brown scraps for the piecing.  For the skinnier, back tree trunks I used one of Caryl Fallert's gradient fabrics to maintain the same light-dark pattern even though the trunks weren't pieced (you can see them hanging off to the left in the bottom picture.

Up next, the leaves and the quilting!

Swap Quilt-The Pouch

I'm working on writing up a couple of posts about the swap quilt I made for Jenna's SewHappyGeek tablerunner/wallhanging swap, but in the meantime, I thought I'd show some pictures of the pouch I made to send to my partner as a little extra goodie.  I made it based on the same idea as my first pouch, except this time I actually got the measurements correct.  

I definitely want to give a shout out to Anna over at Noodlehead.  Her tutorial for assembling the pouch is pretty much what I've been doing, and similar to what you can find lots of places.  What makes her description way cool and special is that she totally explains how to get the zipper ends to actually work out properly!!  None of my previous ones ever looked quite right, but thanks to her explanation and diagram, they came out great on this one.  I had some problems with the purple quilting thread, it didn't run as smoothly as some of my other thread, but all in all I think the pouch turned out cute.  I hope my partner likes it!

Have you guys learned any tricks lately for stuff that's been throwing you off?  I love when someone finally explains something in such a way as to give me that "light bulb" moment.

Linking up over at

Halloween-The Recent Years

Happy Halloween everyone!

I've always been one of those make-your-own costume people, but in spite of how much I love sewing, I try to minimize costume sewing  (this in spite of the upcoming massive non-Halloween costume sewing I'm orchestrating for a church event, but that's another post).  It seems like I'd just rather make quilts!  So usually my costumes are compilations of things I've sewn and things I've crafted and things I've cobbled together from all over the place.  

In recent years, I've only dressed up if we've had a Halloween party or event to attend since we hardly ever have trick-or-treaters around.  I really do love thinking up fun costumes, and of course the internet is a great source of inspiration.   We're not dressing up this year, but here are some of the costumes I've made from the proverbial "yore".

2010.  I was a fruitfly- drosophila to be exact.  I had fun making it, especially the hat with the big red eyes, and the homemade fly wings but most people didn't get it.

2009.  This was one of my favorite costume years.  Also, since it was the first year Mike and I were together, I was actually able to get him to dress up.  We went as Peanut Butter and Jellyfish (I mean, who doesn't love a terrible pun).  I made his peanut butter shirt and hat, and my jellyfish outfit.  I failed to consider that maneuvering through a party with a large umbrella attached to my head would be difficult, but it was fun all the same.

2004.  Another one of my favorite costume years.  I went as the Madwoman of Chaillot, as portrayed by the incomparable Katharine Hepburn.  I was working at a theater back then and we were allowed to dress up for work on Halloween.  It was a complete blast.  I loved gathering up everything to make all the layers of this costume, especially the hat.

2001.  This year I just went in one of my old RenFaire type dresses.  The year was mostly notable because my then boyfriend had just come here from India and had never celebrated Halloween.  He wasn't too excited about costumes, so I convinced him to go as a Christmas tree; I just sewed a bunch of fake Christmas branches and ornaments onto an old green shirt and there he went.  Sadly, my friends and I tried to host a big party with all the members of our class (~40 people) but not one single person showed up!  The five of us had great fun though.

1997-1998.  These were college years, and while my friend Melinda always sewed fabulous intricate costumes for herself and her now-husband,  I usually just made something up.  On the left- I was some sort of Chemistry-witch-street-salesperson with chemistry supplies hanging inside my cape for any passers-by who happened to need a graduated cylinder.  On the right- I went as the queen of hearts, inspired by Alice in Wonderland.

Hope you guys have gotten a laugh out of some of my crazy costumes.  What are you dressing up as this year?

Bloggers Quilt Festival- Fall 2011 One Hen, Two Ducks

Hi Everybody and Welcome!

Thanks so much to Amy for hosting the Bloggers Quilt Festival,  what a fun way for us to share our stuff!

This quilt is called One Hen, Two Ducks.  Don't bother looking for the ducks, there aren't any!  Since it's sort of an "I Spy" quilt, filled with fun things to find and discover, I named it after an old "I Spy" style poem my sister and I learned long ago.

I started this quilt in a One Block Wonders class given by Maxine Rosenthal, and it's one of my favorites.  The bright color scheme and bright-on-black quilting are fairly common ways for me to work;  I recently made a neutral quilt for a swap and it was a (pleasant) shock to my system not to use crazy saturated colors all the time.

In this quilt, all the blocks were made from this fun Laurel Burch panel, and I left a large black section off to one side so I could include some blocks that didn't coordinate quite so well.

Here's a picture as I was assembling the blocks into rows, and some pictures of some of the regions up close.

My very favorite part of this quilt is actually the quilting.  It was the first really large quilt I'd ever made and definitely the first quilt in which I was brave enough to free motion quilt in bright contrasting colors!  I love these little half-leaf-half-centipedes that crawl all over the black background!

I hope you enjoy my quilt and all the others in the 2011 fall Bloggers Quilt Festival!

Halloween-The Mom Years

I was inspired by Kenda to pull out some old Halloween crafty costume pictures to share.  She has made the best dinosaur costume (I want the tail really bad) for her son and the most clever skeleton costumes for herself and her husband.  Seriously, you should go check them out straight away.

Anyway, my mom is the most crafty art sewing person I know and she always made awesome costumes when my sister and I were little.  I have a few pictures from back then I thought I'd share since I don't have any kids to make costumes for now.  Maybe next year I can dig up some of the others.  I'm not really sure about some of the years; it's awfully hard to judge ages with all the costum-ery on!

c. 1987

c. 1988  That's me during my shirley temple curly hair phase.  The Snow White costume my sister is wearing was the most intricate thing I think my mom ever made us.  It had a bunch of separate pieces (the cape, the collar, the dress- not too mention the rather wretched wig) and was an absolute favorite in the dress up bin until we outgrew it.  Somewhere I have to find some better pictures of it.

c.1989  You can see we definitely reused costumes. Hand-me-downs are the way to go.  Also, yes, I am wearing a pom-pom on my head.

c. 1990  Simple matching kitties that year!

What are your kids dressing up as this Halloween?

Christmas Crochet: The Beginning

I spent a lot of time this weekend working on my swap quilt and it is now almost finished (yay!).  In the evenings though I made a few small Christmas crochets.  I'm pretty picky about not getting out my Christmas decorations too early, but I'm all about doing Christmas crafting and Christmas shopping way ahead.

I borrowed this little leaflet from my mom's stash a couple years back, it was published in 1983 (when she presumably bought it) and although it is falling apart I still have all the pages. It has a bunch of  angel and snowflake crochet patterns which I really love;  I think they are cute and lacy but easy to crochet.  They're meant to be done with skinny white thread, and I've actually made several things out of this leaflet in past years, including the large angel tree topper using the skinny thread.  When I get out my Christmas decorations later in the year I'll show them here.

In the meantime though, what I had was washcloth yarn in some sort of Christmassy colors so I made the small angel ornament.  It obviously came out much bigger than if I'd used the smaller yarn (way too big for a tree ornament), but I think she's cute all the same.  I have her standing on a paper cone in the picture, but I'm not sure how I'll prop her up permanently.  In the leaflet, they suggest sugar starch but I'm not sure that will work on such a large heavyweight yarn.

Then I made "snowflake #3" out of the same yarn combo.  It was sort of balled up at the end, so I blocked it flat overnight.  It looks cute, but is also pretty big.  Sadly, I think it looks more like a trivet than a snowflake, so I think in future I'll stick to the skinny white yarn for the snowflake patterns.

How about you guys,  anyone start Christmas crafts yet?

Sneak Peak of Swap Quilt

I've been busy working away on my swap quilt for Jenna's Sew Happy Geek Tablerunner/Wall Hanging Swap and since it's a secret swap, detailed posts on it will have to wait a while.  So for today, just a quick sneak peak of that project.

And then some pictures of my four legged family members.  I mean, what better blog filler is there than puppies!

This is Bentley, the super lovable SUPER BOUNCY pit bull mix.

This is my sweet pea Bullett, also known as Bratwurst (for his fat sausage shape).  We have no idea what he is, but love him a bunch. Don't let his adorable face fool you,  he and Bentley get into all sorts of trouble together.

And this is Missy the tiny Shih Tzu.  Don't let her cute face fool you either-  she's the boss dog who rules the roost.

I hope everyone has a fabulous fall weekend!

Works in Progress: The quiet book

When my sister was visiting this past weekend, she and I started working on a quiet book for her baby.  I suppose it will be a while before it's old enough to do most of the activities, but at least the book will be ready for it!  She has a couple of great patterns she bought; I promise next time to get names for them and link them up, but I forgot!  I also borrowed a couple of ideas from the amazing Creating Sarah, specifically the maze and the dot-to-dot.  We each picked some pages to start with and got to it!  There will be many more to come as we progress, and she's thinking about holding them together on rings so we can swap out pages as the baby gets bigger.

Becky started off making the two counting pages.  Super important but so many little pieces to fuse and sew! The numbers are detachable (velcro) so you can match the numeral with the number of items.

I started with this "tie the shoe" page.  It will have an actual lace-up shoelace but it's not on there yet.  We got so lucky to find a piece of fun black real leather in my scrap bin; I'd almost thrown it out the other day.  It came off of the bottom of my chaps (which I cut off since they were too long) and the lady at the motorcycle gear place looked at me sort of funny when I asked to take the scrap home, but I'm so glad I did. It made the perfect realistic looking shoe!  It was also fun to get a chance to use my grommeter.

Next I made this little train with the cute fuzzy smoke.  The wheels are buttonable so you can take them on and off if you are old enough to understand buttons.  It was fun to use my buttonhole foot; since I hardly ever make clothes it had been a long time since the foot was used!

This is the maze page;  one of Sarah's super inspiring ideas.  There's a wooden bead sewn between the layers (you can sort of see the wrinkle in the fabric where it is on the bottom middle) and the idea is to move it through from the beginning to the end.

And finally, the not-quite-finished house dot-to-dot.  There are little super strong magnets sewn under the page and into the little felt pieces so you can undo the string and then connect the dots.  It'll eventually have numbers etc.

This was our first major foray into crafts for kids (since we were kids that is) and we had a blast together.  What kind of things are you guys working on for the kids in your life? 

The Rise of the Animal Cracker

My sister is having a baby in March.  It's been nick-named the animal cracker, and since it's the first of the next generation in our family, we're all super excited.  My mom is making a fancy Noah's Ark quilt for it, and I told my sister I'd make a more everyday-play-on-the-floor-spit-up-and-toss-in-the-washer type quilt.

I don't usually buy fabric panels because they don't fit too well with my piecing approach, but I saw this one a couple of years ago and couldn't resist.  It's been sitting in my stash for a while waiting for the perfect project.  I thought it would be lovely for the baby quilt, and decided to just frame it with some basic borders.  As you can see, even for baby quilts my preferred color palette is "bright."

For borders I used up some old strip sets leftover from another baby quilt (which I might show someday).  The sets had two strips of black and white mini-tumbling block print on the sides with a piece of rainbow in between.  The colors matched the panel perfectly, but I only had enough to go around two sides.  I decided that if I cut the strip set in half, I'd have a nice inner border of the rainbow fabric and outer border of the black and white fabric.  Here's the panel with the strip sets pinned up sort of haphazardly around it.

I love the bold graphic tree of life motif.  Even though it looks like mostly flowers and leaves, upon close inspection the tree is populated with a large variety of non-mammalian fauna as well.  I found birds, many bugs, butterflies, and horny toads.

Since my sister's not sure what the sex of the baby is, and since the front is a little on the pink side, I decided to use something clearly gender neutral for the back.  I fell in love with this planet/outer space print and thought it went very well both color-wise and conceptually with the tree on the front.  

I quilted it on my home machine even though it's larger than I prefer to do for home-machine quilting (45x55). I tried to do large open quilting motifs, but had a very very hard time being smooth (see horrible stitches below).  I seem to do better quilting tightly in small areas on the home machine, but that wasn't very practical for this project.  

For the binding I chose a bright turquoise frog print that I've had for ever.  It's actually an old curtain I made over ten years ago that hung in our dorm living room during our senior year of college (remember Quintard ladies?).  I took down the curtain after we graduated and it's been living in my fabric stash ever since then.  Kelly, Sylvester, and Ed were actually the focus of this picture (not the silly curtain).  They were all dressed up in tuxedos ready to crash a Christmas party, but I cropped them out in case they didn't want to be plastered all over my quilt blog.  If I recollect correctly, getting ready for that party was way more fun than the party itself.  Anyhow, I'm glad I finally used part of the curtain for something.  I've always loved that fabric, and I have great memories of that year.

Back on topic, here's the final quilt;  it's inscribed "For my dear Animal Cracker, with all my love: Auntie Shannon, 2011."  I can't wait for this baby to arrive!

Animal Cracker, 44 x 52 Shannon Conley 2011 

What about you guys?  Any fun stories that go with fabric in your stash?  Any imminently arriving babies or quilts?