Ever since I got the sewing bug while I was pregnant with Brenna and in my last days of art school I’ve thought it would be fun to design fabric.  Then I became a quilter, discovered designers like Amy Butler and Anna Maria Horner (who also has 6 kids) and have thought over and over, “I could do that….. if I could just figure out how to do that.”

Well, I decided this is the year that I will learn to be a fabric designer.  I got myself some books

which have helped me immensely.  I learn by reading.  If I can read about how to do something in a book, then I can do it, but reading directions on the computer, experimenting by trial and error– they just don’t do it for me.  Kim Kight’s Field Guide to Fabric Design is fantastic.  All the tutorials for digital design are for Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator, but since those aren’t quite in the budget I’m having to translate things into GIMP and Inkscape, which are free.  I also got a vector drawing app for my iPad call iDraw and a stylus so I can draw right on my iPad.  It’s like a glorified sketchbook, though I have been using my real sketchbook a lot too.

And then there’s Spoonflower.  I’ve known about it since it first started in 2008 or 2009 and signed up as soon as it wasn’t just by invitation only, but have never figured out how to make designs until now.  And look!

My first test swatches came in the mail!!!  My designs are printed on real fabric!!!

Anyone remember the story I told about Ian coming downstairs one morning and telling me, “Mom, we’re going to get a girl baby and her name is going to be Eva and she is going to be zero and she will have a pink shirt that is a dress”?  Well, he further described that pink shirt that is a dress as having blue butterflies on it and a skirt that is blue with pink butterflies.  I’ve been on the look out for pink shirts with blue butterflies, pink fabric with blue butterflies, blue fabric with pink butterflies.  None.  I guess I’ll have to make some.

And I can!!  How fun is that?

Here’s Eva’s corner in my room– full of things that could each be a blog post in and of themselves.

There’s the new Moses basket I designed that will be my next baby gear sewing pattern (the SweetPod Sleep Spot maybe?), new handknit booties and hat for a fresh head and toes…

the newborn diapers all freshly washed and waiting…

a newly slip-covered rocking chair and a hexagon stripe quilt…

On Monday I had contractions every 10 minutes ALL DAY LONG– from about 7:30 in the morning until 9:30 or so at night.  While I could tell that it wasn’t quite the real thing yet I also felt like it could turn very real any second.  I was on a roller coaster of thought and emotion.  I wasn’t ready!  I need this one last week!  My shelves and refrigerator were empty– so a major grocery shopping trip was accomplished and eased some of the unready feelings.  We braved the new Ikea to buy that new dresser we really needed when the last baby was born so we could have a place to keep clothes and blankies.  I think my body was just trying to tell me to get with it, stop dilly-dallying.  There will be a baby coming next week, or the next.  My days with Hunter as the baby are numbered– as are my days of needing help rolling over in bed.

Last night, as the sky looked like this:

I relished in the wonderful day I had swimming with my kids and stocked my freezer with 3 pans of Chicken Enchiladas.  Today is Lasagna day.

And I’m feeling ready– with each day a little more.

Remember the quilt Brenna and I were working on?  It’s done!  Instead of basting and free motion quilting it myself I decided to go with plan B.  I sent the finished quilt top and back fabric to my mom who lives near the best quilt store I’ve ever been to.  She can rent time on their long arm quilting machines and the work she does is always amazing.  This one is no exception.  Brenna LOVES it!

My mom even bound it too.  It’s a truly 3 generation project, the 48 blocks pieced by Brenna, everything squared up and sewn together by me, and then finished to perfection by my mom.  What a treasure.

Here’s a shot of the back:

The girl room is coming together.  I think we can fit another one in there.  During Barry’s long June the loft bed got built.

We’re getting there.  About a month to go.  The hot days go by so slowly, but the weeks are whizzing by.

My good friend RaeLyn had her 5th baby last month.  I’m so hit or miss with baby gifts– sometimes not getting them done until the baby is 8 months old, or 1 year old, but this time I delivered the gift to a 3 week old baby!  Pretty good, huh?

I love the painterly style of Laura Gunn’s fabrics.  You can tell they’re made straight from her paintings with the texture of the paint and canvas right there on the fabric.  I’ve had a half yard of these two prints staring at me from a shelf for a LONG time and finally had the right idea coincide with the right time to make a quilt, so I cut into it.

I had a fun time with my design– making the border echo the shape of the blocks.  I quilted the middle part in swirls and then went around the outside a few times with straight lines.  I really like how it turned out.  It’s especially fun to sew for someone you know will appreciate the thought and time and be just as giddy about the pretty fabric as I am.

The back is another Laura Gunn print– lots of dots in the perfect colors.

Baby quilts are such a good size to play with and FINISH.  I need to find some fabric I love to make a few for this little girl kicking my ribs.

With the anticipation of our new little girl we’ve been scheming how we’re going to rearrange bedrooms, acquire the needed furniture and all that.  Once she’s 4 or 5 months old Eva will get to move in with Brenna.  Right now Brenna has a full size bed, a dresser, and a desk in her room with absolutely no room to add a crib,  and the crib is still being used by our climbing monkey of a two year old.  The solution I’ve dreamed up is that we’ll make a twin over full bunk bed for Hunter and Ian and a twin size loft bed for Brenna.  That way we won’t have to buy any new mattresses.

To get ready for a new bed we naturally decided that some quilt making was in order.  Brenna and I browsed simple quilt patterns and fabric together and I gave her full creative license.  The only stipulation I made was that whatever pattern she chose needed to be simple enough that she could sew the blocks with minimal help from me.  She chose the Juice Boxes pattern from Cluck Cluck Sew and a smattering of fabrics from Amy Butler’s Soul Blossoms collection.  I modified the pattern just a bit.   Since it was for 6 inch squares she would have needed to make 150 or so of them– so we enlarged it to 12 inch squares.  48 of those were much more doable.  I did the cutting, she did all the sewing of the blocks, I did most of the pressing, and then I trued them up.  It took a couple of months, but the blocks are done!

I’ve actually got the top all pieced together and the back made too.  I was hoping to have it done for her birthday on Monday (11 years!!), but I don’t think getting it basted and quilted by then is very realistic seeing that I do have to do school, clothe, and feed people.  We’ve got a good start, though!  And great memories of collaboration will be harbored in the finished product forever.

I’ve been having fun redecorating the family room walls, but I’m not quite ready to take pictures of it all and say I’m done.   I decided today that I need to do something different in my fireplace mantel/ cubby thing so I’ve been looking for inspiring mantel arrangements and dreaming up what I could do with what I already have instead of the family photos that have been there for a year and a half.  (And, to be honest taking photos of just one corner of the room is much easier because I can keep the baskets of unfolded laundry and explosion of k-nex behind me.)

What I can say is done is the sewing of these pillows and some quotes to hang on the wall.  I have a friend who had a pretty quote printed as a photo at Costco, framed it, and gave it to me for Christmas– and I thought it was genius!  So, I took some sayings I’ve wanted displayed in my house somehow, made them into big images using Inkscape (which is kind of like Adobe Illustrator, but free), printed them as photos at Costco, and framed them.  They’ve been done for a while.  I just decided they should go here.

The top one is from Doctrine and Covenants 29:34 where the Lord says “All things unto me are spiritual.”  It’s a good reminder when I’m cooking dinner, picking up toys, helping with math, ignoring laundry that even all the mundane things that need my attention have a purpose–  they’re spiritual.  The second is a quote from Charlotte Mason that says “Education is the atmosphere we breathe, the envelope of wonder that surrounds us, held by the gravity of our daily habits.”

The 2 colorful pillows were so fun for me to make.  They’re basically 4 little quilts, pieced and quilted and turned into pillows.  Here’s one side of the first one:

I used the Joel Dewberry Modern Meadow fat quarters I had been saving to make another quilt like this.  I never was really going to get around to making that quilt, and I decided this is a much better way to enjoy the fabric anyway.

This is the other side.

I got a little crazier with the second pillow.

This one is just quilted with straight lines.

I loved making these because I got to do everything involved in making a quilt, but on a much more immediate, instant gratification scale– and I can see and enjoy them every day.

I also used some home decorator weight fabric I had in my stash to add one plain pillow.  It took all of 20 minutes (invisible zipper and all).

Here’s all 3 again in a different corner:

Obviously these are usually on the floor being jumped on or laid on, but they looked pretty here for a little while.   I’m hoping at some point this year I can get a few Rollie Pollies made for jumping and rolling and reading.  We’ll see.  I probably really should be replenishing my supply of baby girl things– and will probably be more excited about doing that as the days go on.

So, anyone have some favorite mantel photos they want to send me links too?  Feel free to leave them in the comments!

This is the first project I started working on in my craft space here in Colorado 2 1/2 years ago.

It’s one of those projects that has been percolating in my mind for a very, very long time.  I fell in love with the plaid Moda silky fabric when I lived in Ohio and came home with several half yards of it.  It was neatly folded on a shelf so I could admire it and dream up just the thing to do with it.  I decided to add some plain natural linen to the stack, then some solid brown linen joined in.  Once we had moved here I had settled on this hexagon pattern made of triangles because the directional plaids and stripes would make it so fun.  As I pieced the long strips, cut them into triangles, and then into half hexagons I would run out of linen and run out to find another fabric to add.

The top has been finished for quite awhile– completed on one of my sewing dates with my good friend RaeLyn.  It’s just been folded up sitting under my drafting table waiting for me to get with it and find some fabric for the back.  Well, I did– and the perfect binding fabric too.  Ian helped me open safety pins as I basted the layers while Ellie guarded.

Now for the quilting.  I think it’ll take me a lot less time than piecing it did.

Walking foot, here I come!

I’ve had this quilt finished and rolled up under my drafting table all summer.  I have a friend at church whose oldest daughter just got MARRIED, and this daughter of hers is a photography major and likes artsy things, so I felt like I needed to make her something for a wedding gift rather than head to Target and buy something.  I ordered the fabric in time for the big day, got it all pieced too late, but in time for a visit this spring.  Unfortunately my free motion quilting wasn’t going quite as planned, so I missed that window to give it to her as well.  Finally this past weekend she was here again and I hurriedly unrolled it to take some photos before whisking it over to her.  Here it is, wrinkles and all.

I ordered a fat quarter pack of Joel Dewberry’s Modern Meadow line (not the colorway in the link, though).  I took 8 of the fat quarters and cut them into big 17 inch  squares and made 2 rows of big blocks in the center of the quilt.

Then I added big solid stripes of some Moda Bella Solid and Cross weave on the top and bottom and called it a quilt top.

For the back I took scraps of the fat quarters to make a narrow stripe and used some more Moda Crossweave, all the same color this time, to complete it.  I really like the simplicity of it because it shows off the loveliness of the fabric so well– and it was fairly instant gratification.  I added ties to one edge so that it can be rolled and tied and taken on picnics for years and years to come.

I quilted it in my signature swirls, but had a hard time getting my machine to cooperate this time around.  I was just using the foot my machine came with and my tension was crazy and my thread would break every time I changed directions.   It made me want to swear.  I didn’t swear, of course, but I really wanted to.  Then I tried RaeLyn’s spring loaded foot and was able to buzz through the whole thing in an afternoon at her house.  I spent about 4 hours on 12 inches of the quilt before our sewing date and then did the whole rest of it in an afternoon between the hours of 1 and 4– with lots of chatting and eating and kid chasing mixed in.  (RaeLyn– We really need to get together again.  Soon!)

So, anyway, here’s the quilt that’s been hiding all summer.  I have fat quarters cut to make another, just need to get some more solid fabrics to go with them.  And I think I’ll keep the next one.

My in-laws got me a stack of craft books for Christmas.  I’m going to show you one today.

Patchwork Style!  This book has been making the rounds in craft-blog-land for years as a Japanese craft book, but now it’s in English.  Japanese craft books do have super clear diagrams and beautiful photographs which make them easy enough to work from if you don’t mind using a little guess work– but being full of words with a recognizable alphabet in a language I can actually read makes this one much, much better.

I was intrigued by the way Suzuko Koseki says to piece log cabin blocks by basically foundation piecing onto your batting.  Simple, and you quilt as you go.  I tried it out with this simple project:

a patchwork pillow.  It’s a great way to use up treasured tiny scraps of favorite fabrics .

Since I only have one it keeps moving around from place to place.  If you can’t tell, I like it so much it even became my new header here.

It does need, at the very least, a partner.  My goal is to have that done in time to welcome our new couch into the house at the end of the month.  If only the IRS could be faster…

This summer when we went to visit my family I went through my usual crafty frenzy that I seem to have while I’m home with extra adults to police the masses.  I  made a trip to the best quilt store I’ve been to and came out with a stack of Kaffe Fasset shot cottons in close colors of green and fat quarters of prints by Heather Bailey and Amy Butler.  I pieced a bazillion half square triangles and put them up on my mom’s design wall.

And that’s as far as I got.

For Christmas my mom put it all together for me.  She squared up all those little tiny squares, sewed them together, quilted them in a super cool pinwheely pattern, bound it, and sent it to me for Christmas.

I love it.

Don’t you?

Thanks mom!