Drum roll please...

Finally!  Here are the pictures from the Summer Breeze quilt!  I'm quite happy with the way it came except for the boo boos here and there.  I also apologize for the low quality pictures.  This was the first sunny day in like 3 days.  It also happened to be the day I needed to send it out and because I have trudge to the laundry mat on foot I opted out of lugging my nice camera there.  Why not take it home and take pictures of it you ask?  Simple answer: our post office is literally right across the street from the laundry mat, so camera phone it is!

Front

Close up of quilting

Back

I've got a couple of projects lined up next, but I'm not sure what order I'm going to complete them.  I got one of the Moda Sudoku kits.  I've already completed the puzzle and I'm sorry to say it wildly unsatisfying.  I mean us quilters deal with these kinds of puzzles every time we try to figure a layout for the quilt.  There were at least 2 lines that were only missing 1 number.  This puzzle was way too easy, I spent maybe 2-2.5 minuets. It is nice that it does come with the pre-cuts though.  This might end up being my cats quilt she seems to like laying on them, or she just likes laying on whatever I'm doing.

These are a bunch of fabrics I got in a care package from my in-laws.  Specifically this is from my SIL stash that she had put in the craft room for anyone to use.  I'm delighted to say I'm going to use several of these fabrics!  The solid white is a nice flannel that I'm going to make receiving blankets that I'm going to trim in the green floral.  I'm also planning on using the Alexander Henry fabric along with a purple velvet in some turtle plushies.  The other fabrics will probably sit in my stash until I get a stroke of creativity.

AND THESE FABRICS..... I'm super excited about!  The prints are from the new Michael Miller collection Peacock Lane.  I paired them with coordinating solids from Kona Cotton and I plan on doing a gray fleece backing.  My plan for these is a hexagon quilt I'm not sure how large it's going to be but I will probably use 3 inch hexagons.  I'm pretty excited about this because hear hexi's are addictive!  Not to mention I'm super in love with these fabrics!

Almost there

I feel terrible for not keeping up with my blog, maybe if I had more followers I'd be more inclined to update *hint hint wink wink*  No but really, I do feel bad specially because I have been working on things.  I'm nearly done with the Summer Breeze quilt although I guess I should call it the modified Summer Breeze.  I changed the layout of it and I think this way complements the fabric designs better.  I'm much happier with it now.  For the back I decided to piece the remaining cut pieces to form a long strip and then I put it off center.  I'm really happy with how the back came out.  The actual quilting, I took the star-burst design my SIL did on munchkin's quilt, I'd have to say it looks good and was much more fun than stitch in the ditch.  Also, to add a bit of interest to it I used a hot pink thread on the top and then just plain white on the bottom.  I made bias tape out of a coordinating green print with the same motif as the pink and white print.  I used my SIL tutorial for making bias tape to refresh my memory.  I attached the binding this morning thinking I got off scott free from any major mishaps.  Boy was I wrong.  I ended up being about 18 inches short of bias tape!!!!  This is when having a quilt shop with a decent  fabric selection would have been helpful.  I can't take the time to order more fabric and I didn't have enough of 1 print to make enough, so I ended up making some quick bias tape out of the pink and white with the same motif.  I think it gives my quilt erm.... character.  Yeah!  That's it, CHARACTER!  Well at least it's all the same pattern!  So now all I have left is hand sewing the bias tape and burying threads, I'll probably give it another wash too to get rid of the lines I used for quilting.  Hopefully I'll get a post up with some finished pictures tomorrow!

Where has all the thread gone?

After all the washing, clipping, ironing, cutting, more ironing I go to start piecing and I can't find my thread!  It's missing in action.  Oh well, I guess I'll just have to go to the local craft store and get a new spool! :-)  But the good news is that I did all the washing clipping etc...  The one thing I hate about shopping online for fabrics is that you can't see in large scale with true colors what everything is going to look like all together.  I'm struggling with colors/prints working together in this quilt.  If I had gotten the chance to see everything all together I probably would have swapped around a few of the fabrics.  I'm at a place now where I am OK with them and the layout but by no means am I in love with this quilt.  I'd replace the fabrics I'm not happy with but I'm not trying to wait another 2 weeks for fabric for a quilt that technically needs to be done by the 10th.  Maybe this just is not a good quilt for this fabric.  Maybe it's just going to look terrible until it's done.  We'll just have to wait and see!

Sew Excited

I got my Wrenly fabric and the fabric for the Summer Breeze quilt in the mail today.  They are beautiful!  I ended up having to change one of the fabrics.  The floral print on the light blue background was supposed to be on a white background, but the store didn't have anymore of it.  I'm really not disappointed though it's still really pretty and works very well with the other prints.

Dream a Little Dream With Me for Summer Breeze Quilt

Valori Wells- Wrenly

I also placed some orders for some new things today!  I started with Amazon and got a couple new books including both of Aimee Ray's books Doodle Stitching and Doodle Stitching the Motif Collection.  I then went over to Pinkchalkfabrics.com (who is having a summer sale!) and picked up a couple patterns, some fabric, and a fabulous magazine I can't wait to get!  Any other books I should look into getting?

Inspiration

The munchkin and his Grand

So this past weekend I got to visit Venice again, only this time I did more looking with my eyes than my camera. The first time I went we walked around the city and along the water front and didn't really go inside anywhere, this time we went and visited the Doge's Palace and the Peggy Guggenheim Collection.  Walking through the Doge's Palace it's hard to believe that someone actually lived there and it functioned as a government center.  From floor to ceiling this place is filled with beautiful paintings of the Old World.  The armoury and the prisons were quite a site to see too!

View from the top floor of the Doge's Palace looking into the courtyard

View of Venice's outlying islands from the armoury at the Doge's Palace

Inside the courtyard at the Doge's Palace

Did I mention I got to go see the Guggenheim Collection??  It amazed me to see so many of the big names in art in one place.  I mean there was Salvador  Dalí, Pablo Picasso, Jackson Pollock, and so many more.  The inspiration that came pouring from these great works of art was immense!  I decided Theo van Doesburg would be my place to start.  His work Composition in Gray (Rag-time) translated really well into the quilting world.  This ended up being a very clean-lined, modern quilt and I cannot wait to make this.  This one is designed as a lap quilt, the center of it mimicking Doesburg's piece with a 3" black border all the way around to represent a frame.  I also think Robert Delaunay's Windows Open Simultaneously 1st Part, 3rd Motif would make a lovely pinwheel quilt.

What I would do for some anti-itch cream!

My knees are sooo incredibly itchy, just my knees though!



So after getting the Tinkerbell quilt done I decided to take a week and off and focus on the house.  Here is what I accomplished:

Cleaned and rearranged Munchkin's room
Cleaned and rearranged mine/TH room
Cleaned and rearranged "the room of despair" aka my craft room aka army gear storage room aka GUEST BEDROOM
Cleaned the living room and kitchen, both several times due to the Munchkin tornado

And that's about it.  It's a lot accomplished for me since I'm not really into this whole housewife thing yet.  It's a work in progress, I'll get there eventually.

So I just made my first online fabric purchase through FabricShack.com.  I like them well enough, their website is a bit awkward to manage at first but I found the best thing to do was let go of order and just browse till I find something I like.  And that's exactly what I did.  I found fabric for my next project, Summer Breeze from Last Minuet Patchwork and Quilted Gifts by Joelle Hoverson, and it's called Dream a Little Dream With Me by In The Beginning.

I also came by Valori Wells' new line Wrenly and OMG IM ABSOLUTELY IN LOVE!!  So I got a bit of Wren- Cobalt and Rosette- Citrus.  I can't wait to get them!  I'm so excited!  I plan on using them in a queen size bed quilt that I designed last night.  I have a feeling though that this is going to take me a while.  I do not plan on quilting this myself so if you know of any really good long arm quilters that are reasonable in price please send me their info so I can take a look at them!

There is no "I give up!" in "DONE"

So I finished the Tinkerbell quilt!  Yay!  I really like the end product and I hope the receiver of this quilt also enjoys it!  This is only my second quilt ever and compared to my first quilt this is a giant leap forward.  I completely couldn't have gotten this done if it weren't for my sister-in-law over at Make It Modern, she really has been an awesome resource throughout this.

Chain piecing the first white strip

 I really don't know right now how to put into words my experience with this quilt, it was more of feelings.  Sometimes I hated it and sometimes I loved it, but I was always very excited about it!  Putting it all together really wasn't as frustrating as I thought it was going be, most of my seams came out straight.  There were a couple that were just waaay too crooked for me to be happy with, but my seam ripper definantly did not get  as much love as it was expecting.  My biggest mistake was not enough fabric.  When I was first designing it I didn't have in mind the purple border.  Without the border, though, it would have just come out too small so I ended up having to get new fabric for the back.

Chain piecing the second purple strip

I was going back and forth trying to decided to do flannel or a lightweight cotton but flannel won out when I found the perfect shade of purple gingham.  I really like the contrast of the geometric on the back with all the prints on the front, I think it is exactly what this quilt was missing.  My dimensions were a perfect fit for this flannel so I thought I'd only need one cut of this fabric.  Oh how I was wrong.  I could have done with a few more inches width wise and I completely didn't take into consideration the selvage!  They were really sneaky with the selvage though, it wasn't a solid white at the bottom so I didn't notice it like I should have.  In the end I made it work.

The top all pieced together!

For the actual quilting I just did straight lines since my machine isn't quite big enough to do anything fancy, not to mention my lack of skill.  I did lines 1/4" from the seams going both horizontal and vertical so the pattern that emerged mimicked the gingham but more on a plaid scale, it is quite fitting (I REALLY LOVE IT).  OH! btw if you're ever lacking in quilt clips or find that you go through them like candy (breaking, loosing, etc.) try using plastic link toys.  I took a couple from son that had some nice teething/grippy stuff on them and they worked perfect for this size quilt.  These are also very convenient if you're a night quilter, it's too easy to dash out to your nearest 24 hour mega store and visit the baby section!

A lesson learned in bandages

So Monday when we had the CT scan it went well, for the most part.  We got there a little bit before we were told to be there (which was an hour before his appointment) and sat..... and sat..... AND SAT some more.  Apparently the people with an appointment before my son's got there late pushing us back, oh about an hour and half!  It was ridiculous!  I ended up sitting in that hospital for 5 hours.  They boy did good though and we should be talking to the doctor at the end of the month.  Needless to say I got nothing done that day

And I got nothing done the next day too.

Although the boy had a play date with his girlfriend.  We went to a baby gym, it was fun. (They had a blast!)

The quilt I'm making was inspired by this quilt by Alissa Carlton.  I didn't have a pattern or anything to go by so I used EQ 7 to help me plan out what I'm going to do.  I decided on a 4 inch square for my picture with 1 inch strips around it for the frame.  This results in a 6x6 inch square and I'm doing 6x8 squares for the quilt.  It should give me final dimensions of 36x48 inches.  I'm working off of this Tinkerbell print that I picked up from JoAnn Fabrics.


Here are the rest of the fabrics I'm using in this quilt.  My absolute favorite is the pink and purple floral on the white background, it is incredibly soft too!

Today I finally decided I needed to start knockin this cutting out.  So this morning I got all my 4 inch squares cut.  Then I figured out all the math for my strips so I could keep waste to a minimum.  I decided on cutting 12 1.5x44 inch strips and then chopping it down from there.  That then changed to 24 1.5x22 inch strips because it was more manageable on my rotary mat.  I got all my long strips cut from my white fabric and I'm now working on breaking that down to my workable pieces.  Here is a tip: keep your fingers OUT OF THE WAY of the rotary blade.  I'm working on my 3rd or 4th strip when OUCH! omgijustcutmyfingeroff.  Ok, ok, not THAT bad, but still pretty bad.  I had sliced a good portion of my thumbnail off which is now only hanging by a thin piece of skin.  It didn't bleed too much which was pretty nice and I was relieved to see I didn't get any blood on my white fabric!!  Here's another trip: make sure you put your band-aids on right the first time, it will always hurt more if you have to readjust them.

I really hope tomorrow isn't going to hurt as much today.