Macaroni Cornbread

Yes you read right, macaroni cornbread!  My brother-in-law and I decided to experiment in the kitchen a bit today.  The end product was eh, ok.  It needs a bit of tweaking before its amazing but it sure does have the potential!

I'm putting up pictures today of some plush toys I recently made for my son.  Both of these plush toys came from the book Wee Wonderfuls.  This first little guy is named Wes the Baby Giraffe.  When I first saw him in the book I thought "OMG soooo cuuuute! I totally have to make him!" I NEVER WANT TO MAKE HIM EVER AGAIN.  I don't know, maybe I'm lacking in skill but he was a pain in the behind to do.  I can't even say in the end it was worth it because I don't really like how he came out.  I pretty much stuck with the directions from the book but I used buttons for the eyes instead of felt and left off the nose.  One thing I do like about him is the fabric.  I picked out a print from Lizzy House's Castle Peeps from my local quilt shop called Quilting Adventures.

Koji on the other hand is a win all around!!

Koji is an all around win.  He's amazingly cute and he wasn't too difficult to make either.  Koji was made mostly by the book, they suggested felt for the eyes but I thought using buttons made him look a little less zombieish.  I really  like how he ended up.  Once again my favorite part of him is the fabrics!  I used a green plaid flannel for the body and a cute scrap of fabric I found in my sister-in-laws stash

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!