Busy little bee...

What have I been doing the past couple of days?  Not working on my quilt that's what!  I did however complete some uncompleted projects.

The first of which is a Hanging Toy Sack for my son.  These are all fabrics I used in his nursery bedding (which I will post pictures of when I get back home!).  This has been in the making since like November and I had gotten most of it done but it needed some hand sewing to finish.  Since starting this one I made another one for my nephew and that one got done MUCH quicker.  Since I couldn't find a tutorial on this I just kinda winged it and now I think I've got it down, so I will be creating a picture tutorial to go along with it.  But that's another one of those things that has to happen when I get home.

My second project I finished was Megan's Apron and Oven Mitt.  Both of these are completely functionless except for pretend for a smallish child.  I will be remaking these :D  I do like how they came out though and I'm super happy something needing hand stitching got finished in an almost reasonable amount of time.

Next is not something I needed to finished but just something I needed to do before we leave.  My SIL got the great idea to do stepping stones for Mother's Day for my MIL.  This was another one of those projects that was supposed to get done a while ago (like Dec/Jan).  I really like how his came out!  Now I just have to do mine!







And these are what I'm working on for the next couple of days.  My MIL asked me to liven up her director's chairs with a fresh coat of paint.  This is the perfect way to get new life out of your old patio chairs or to clean up some inexpensive chairs you've picked up from a yard sale!  I really like the brown she picked out and we have these beautiful rustic red panels to replace the old ones with.

Before

After

The seam ripper is my best friend

I ended up getting absolutely NOTHING done yesterday.  The boy was still not feeling well. :(  Buuuuut I got the color book done today! Yay!

So today was all about piecing the cover together and adding finishing touches.  This was more of pain than I expected it to be.  I need tips and tricks on how to cut and sew evenly.  The seam ripper was close by through out my sewing today.  I must have redone some of these at least a dozen times.  I guess I could have left them the way they were but then my cover would have come out all wonky.

On the front and the back I stitched in the ditch again and on the inside I tried out some free motion.  At first I wasn't really happy with how it turned out but it's growing on me.

Since everything came out so thick there was no way I was going to be able to sew it all together with the machine.  I used 6 stranded embroidery thread to help it stand up to the munchkin.  I really don't like how it ended up so there is a great possibility I'll be redoing this tomorrow!

Overall I really liked how it came out.  Yeah, it's not perfect but I don't think anything I make will ever be.  As long as I enjoyed the process then that is quite all right with me!  Let me know what you guys think!

More like Edward's Color Novel!

OH! also, what's the best way (in your opinion) to quilt a log cabin block?

I wish I could go back to sleep....

....but I can't.  As many of you with children know already, a feverish baby makes for an restless night.  My 10 month old son, who was battling a fever yesterday, decided he was going to wake up at 10:30 p.m. and stayed up till oooh about 1:15 IN THE MORNING.  He was back up around 8:30ish today :( I wish we could both go back to sleep, I know he needs it.  Now he's napping and I'm up for the day BAH!

ANYWAY.........

My strips for the cover and the inside of the cover

The current project I'm working on is from a lovely little magazine called 101 Patchwork Projects and Quilts.  If you haven't had the chance to flip through this you need to.  It has a lot of cute ideas that would be great for yourself or great as a gift!  Right now I'm putting together Baby's Favorite Color Book.

This project is great for clearing out your scrap stash.  My sister-in-law let me go through her scraps stash (since most of mine is not with me) to gather all my colors which was pretty fricken awesome cause I wanted 16 different patterns for each of the 8 pages.

The aqua (or light blue) page is my fav!

The directions call for 2 pieces of batting in each page, so I decided to quilt the pages.  I just simply stitched in the ditch because I knew it would be way too easy for my son to pull and fluff the batting when he plays with it.  However, when I turned it I felt like my pages came out REALLY thick (they must have used super thin batting).  So I suggest using just 1 layer in the pages and if you do want to quilt it I would do it by hand unless you're a pro at straight seems (which I am not).

I decided not to put the tabs on, mostly because I forgot about them until after everything was sewn and turned.  Now all I have left to do is piece the cover together and "bind" my book.  I had lots of extra strips left over from cutting the front so I'm going to repeat the log cabin design on the back.  I really can't wait to finish this and get some finished pics up here!