I Left With A Quilt, I Came Back With A Quilt (Or Four)

So ummm, last time I blogged, I was very pregnant and had just finished a quilt for SHB#2...two years later I have birthed the SHB#2, made a whole bunch of random things (plushies! a tiny hut on chicken legs! art! more than 250 nativity figurines!) and a few costumes. Due to said SHB#2, who is less inclined to play by herself than SHB#1, I've opted to do save my me-time for making things instead of blogging, relying on Instagram to quickly document most of my finished projects. I do miss the more detailed, longer form of blog entries though, and always meant to get back into it. Now that the new school year is starting and I have cosplays to finish before SVCC next weekend, this is the perfect time to procrastinate with a blog entry, y/y?

Since my sewing area is accessible to the kids, and I don't really need more clothes (more on that later), I haven't done much sewing until recently, when SHB#2 got old enough to (kind of) understand that she needs to leave Mommy's things alone. And even then, I was so brain-dead most of the time, I couldn't handle complicated things like fitting or figuring out new patterns, so I've defaulted to making quilts, which are not easy per se, but at least once I have the pieces laid out, it's more or less mindless sewing of straight(ish) lines.

I made this from florals that I inherited from the school drama teacher's mother-in-law's stash. All straight lines, and can you tell that I really didn't think too hard about the placement of my blocks?

I mean, look at how haphazard all the piecing on the backing is!

After the stashbusting quilt, I made a few quilts for important babies in my life:

Very simple, vaguely sportsball field-esque look. 

A dear friend's baby had a difficult start in life, spending time in the NICU and then working hard to recover for the first year of his life, but now he is a healthy, thriving boy who outweighs my own little girl, despite being almost a year younger! Maybe one day he will play sportsball for one of his parents' alma maters, you know, because the quilt I made him is so inspiring...j/k.

The back was fleece (no batting inside, since San Diego weather doesn't require a lot of warmth).
 I'm glad the school colors don't clash. 

Another dear friend had her third daughter, and I wanted that little girl to have something special of her own that wasn't a hand-me-down from her older sisters, so I made a Harry Potter and Star Wars mashup quilt so that she would have both of her parents' fandoms to wrap her in love. And then because those are also two of my big fandoms, I made an almost identical one for SHB#2. Like her big brother, Chewbacca is her first favorite SW character (SHB#1 has since moved on to Darth Vader, mostly because his lightsaber is red), so she enjoys pointing him out.

This was a challenge to design (even though it's all just rectangles) because so many SW fabrics are so dark, and HP fabrics are so bright, so to put them together in one quilt and have it look somewhat cohesive was tricky. I'm inordinately pleased with what I came up with!

This is the back of the one I kept. The one I gifted had a border of Hogwarts house crests instead of the spaceship blueprints shown here. All of these licensed character fabrics are from Joann's. 

And lastly, one of my college friends struggled with infertility for many, many years, so when she found out she was expecting, I knew I had to make something for her baby. She and her husband are huge LOTR nerds (they previously attended my LOTR birthday party and her husband won the trivia contest), so I wanted to incorporate that somehow into a quilt that also illustrated their story. While googling LOTR-themed quilts, I came across this amazing art quilt, but I knew I wouldn't be able to replicate something like that, nor would it really be baby-friendly. More googling of landscape quilts yielded this one, which seemed much more doable with its pieced strips (yay straight lines!). I decided to try to combine these two ideas to make my own take on an "Into the West" quilt; the more I thought about it the more I was set on it as the perfect representation of their journey. They had walked through the wasteland of Mordor in their quest for a biological child, and now after all that exhaustion, they were finally getting to sail into the west, into the rest and peace and hope of the Undying Lands. Not that having a newborn baby is at all as restful as I imagine Valinor to be, but you get the idea.

I had purchased a sizable lot of quilting cottons in various colors a year ago from somebody else's destash (some of the pieces were used to make up the rainbow blocks in the HP/SW quilts), and I tried to use those as much as possible in this quilt. I figure elves and hobbits would be all about being green and not purchasing new fabrics, right? The only new fabrics I had to buy were some browns for the cliffs and the backing fabric. Anyway, I started by laying out my fabrics in a semblance of the final image, then I got to all the tedious cutting and sewing of sky and water strips.

I initially wanted to have hobbit boles at the bottom, hence all the green bits. After doing some measuring, though, I realized it would end up being too long of a quilt for its width. 

Figuring out the cliffs and greenery was more fun and challenging. I wasn't sure how to attach them, so after more googling I treated them as appliques, folding the edges under and hand-stitching them down. The little boat was done the same way, but I interfaced the pieces since they were so tiny and fiddly to work with.

I chose a neutral gray, vine-y backing fabric; I wanted a fabric with some kind of busy pattern to disguise my inevitable quilting errors, and vines seemed appropriate for the elvish theme of the front. For the binding I went with a plain solid navy blue since I figured the edges would get dirty fastest and I didn't want to take away from the design. The quilting was all sort of haphazardly done; I didn't mark any of my lines beforehand and just sort of sewed with a vague plan in mind. I think it turned out pretty well, all things considered. One day I'll take a quilting class and figure out how to do things the real way instead of just winging everything...

This quilt took a month's worth of nighttimes and naptimes, but since AP exams were over it was mostly a relaxing way to wind down after a hard school year. We were even able to make it down to San Diego as an entire family to deliver it in person at their baby shower; it was gratifying getting to watch them unwrap it. This is why I'll probably only ever make quilts for people I love a lot -- I don't think most people would be willing to pay for the hours and hours it takes to make one, but this is the best way I know how to show how much I care. I may not be a baby person, but I'll be a sewing-for-your-baby person as long as it's my idea and not an outrageous request that belongs on @canyousewthisforme!

These last two pictures taken by the mom-to-be's sister. 

The Geekiest Baby: Underwater Themed Quilts

Each year that I've blogged, I've sewn a giant sea animal. No such adventures this year, but I have sewn a couple of nautical/sea animal quilts for SHB. It's my first foray into quilting, and I've gotta say, it's pretty addicting. I used to look at quilters' blogs and quilt shops and wonder why on earth anyone would be into cutting up perfectly cute fabric into lots of tiny pieces that had to be measured and sewn exactly right, and then deal with all the hassle of trying to shove yards of fabric under and around on a sewing machine...and now I can say I (kind of) get the appeal. It's kind of fun to be able to get so many different prints into one object, and you really can't argue with the functionality (and cuddliness) of a finished quilt. I'm still not convinced about the fun of the actual quilting process (my walking foot has been acting up, and I can't adjust the pressure of my presser foot on my cheap sewing machine), and I'm purposely choosing quilt designs that don't require a lot of meticulous attention to detail, but generally I like it! First up, a not-overtly-babyish nautical quilt:

Included in this quilt are fabrics from several of the garments I've made in the past few years (Victorian bathing dress, Alice in Wonderland, pencil skirt, Father's Day shirtdress, nautical shorts, lobster dress, Belle cosplay)  plus a couple of fabrics from the stash of a friend's late MIL, who was a seamstress. I really love all the history and meaning carried in this quilt. 

Since this was my first foray into quilting, I opted to omit the batting and go for a fleece backing. This gray and navy chevron from Joann's was perfect for the nautical theme. 

Of course, since this was my first quilt, my stitch lines pretty wavy and my squares don't match perfectly at the corners...

I actually made this first quilt for SHB with very little planning -- it was just a spur of the moment project because I was sorting my remnant stash, and I noticed how much blue fabric I had that would all coordinate nicely -- just some quick sketches on post-it notes, and I suddenly found myself cutting out several squares. That first quilt was so gratifying, I immediately went out and OD-ed on cute sea animal prints at the closest indie fabric store (absolutely amazing store, BTW...excellent curation of quilting cottons, Japanese fabrics, and apparel fabrics!).

There's so much cute in this, I might die. If I weren't so pregnant mature, I would make (and wear) dresses from all of these fabrics.

The whale fabric wasn't quite wide enough to span the whole quilt, but I think I did a pretty good job of piecing it semi-unobtrusively!

These sharks were my favorite. 

For this quilt, I used real batting in between two layers of quilting cotton, which was much harder to work with than the fleece backing/no batting option. I quilted this one with wavy lines because of the ocean. Actually, it's because I didn't trust myself to sew straight lines. 

Unfortunately, the wavy quilting lines accidentally made the backing (also from Joann's) pretty wavy too. But that's just part of the character of home-made quilts, right? Right? And in the spirit of honesty, that teal strip is there only because the polka dot fabric wasn't quite wide enough on its own. 

And then just as a bonus, because sports team fabrics were on sale at Joann's, I made a concession to Mr. Cation's love of a certain baseball team:

Wanna take a wild guess as to why there's a strip of orange fabric in the middle? If you said it's because I was stingy and didn't want to pay for more than a third of a yard of licensed fabric, you would be correct! Thankfully, I had a perfectly coordinating orange fleece remnant at home. 

Since the top was fleece, I left out the batting again and just used part of a thrifted sheet (from the same sheet as the Totoro bouncer cover!) for the backing. I went for a more abstract straight line design this time. 

I got really good at mitered corners by the third quilt. My favorite detail? The fact that I was able to use the same gray and white striped sheet to make the binding for all the quilts! It coordinated so well with each, and it's a nice detail that ties the three of them together. 

Just to prove how into quilting I got, these three quilts were all made in the span of oh, 2.5 weeks? I had to take a break after that quilting frenzy, though, and make some other stuff. I still am slowly collecting fabric for a geeky science quilt though, so that's coming up eventually...


Summary (boring stats, just for my own record-keeping)

Quilt #1:
Fabric: 100% cotton scraps, cut into squares, all prewashed, and a yard of 100% polyester anti-pill fleece for backing
Pattern: None
Hours: Twelve or so...I spent a lot of time playing around with square placement.
Total cost: $5 for the fleece, everything else was stash

Quilt #2:
Fabric: 1/4 yard each of the prints, 1.5 yards of the polka dot, and 2/3 yard of the teal, all un-pre-washed...we'll see how it looks after washing! I used a 50/50 bamboo rayon/cotton batting, too.
Pattern: Loosely based off of this easy baby quilt
Hours: Twenty? It was much larger and harder to manipulate, plus more print placement and trying to deal with grainlines on the teal borders
Total cost: About $45, all bought new specifically for this quilt (except for the border)

Quilt #3:
Fabric: 1/3 yard of SF Giants' fleece, a scrap of anti-pill orange fleece, 100% cotton sheet, thrifted, for backing
Pattern: None
Hours: Five
Total cost: $5, again, only the Giants' fleece was bought new, everything else was stash

Final thoughts on all three: Quilts are so satisfying to look at when they're done, and it's refreshing to make something that doesn't really require fitting. Even if I make a mistake in measuring or cutting, it doesn't really affect the final product other than to give it more um, quirky individuality. I don't think I'll ever get more complicated than these simple tops and straightforward quilting "designs" (if you can even call them designs!), but it's nice to make something cozy for SHB that has my love sewn into every stitch, or some such nonsense...