Quilts for twins! and for Dan's

I have been very busy lately! I finished these two baby quilts for friends of mine (Danielle and Dan) who are having twins, a boy and a girl sometime in December! It was quite a struggle to do the machine quilting. I hardly ever use a seam ripper except when I am machine quilting. First I didn't like the pattern, rip it out! then I didn't like the colour of thread, rip it out! then I had tension problems, eek rip it out!! but in the end it worked out, I am still learning and it's practice and practice and practice! It's a good thing babies do not have a critical eye when it comes to quilts!

How's about a nice Hawaiian Punch?
So now that I have that done, I have to work on my next big project.  A friend of mine, another Dan, asked me to make him a quilt made from some of his Hawaiian shirts. Oh that should be fun I said! King size, he said. eek King size? and most of the shirts are made of rayon! He has a huge collection of shirts! He brought me about 20 different shirts, I sorted them by colour and rejected the polyester ones, I figured I only want one kind of fabric to sew, and only one headache to deal with! and the headache is that it is slippery and wonky. Even after you cut the fabric it gets all distorted. I am continuously experimenting with spray-on starch. In the end I picked out 8 different shirts to use.

This also made it hard to figure out a design. I was going to use cotton fabric for sashing the blocks to stablize it. I found a pattern in my Sew to Swap book by Chrissie Grace, that I thought might work with so many busy fabrics, the only problem was that it was square and I had to make it bigger. I got out my graph paper and started drawing.  I also thought I would use white as my solid instead of brown.

My squares will be 2 inches instead of 1 inch and I added a flying geese border for the pillow rest and to make it rectangular instead of square.

Below are my 2 1/2 inch squares waiting to be chain pieced.  I needed to make 16x 16-patch blocks! I got those done at the BIQR.

Below is one completed block, I need 16 of these. I am currently chain-piecing the outer borders. 30x strips of 8 squares, and 30x strips of 6 squares. Chain piecing can be monotonous work at best, so I do a bunch as leaders and enders and in between projects. My goal is to get most of the top pieced by Christmas!

Waiting for Jean-Marie

My employee Tom is going to have his first baby...soon...in the next couple of days or week soon. He and his partner Sarah know it's going to be a girl and they are going to name her Jean-Marie. I finished this quilt for them and that is their cat Scamp waiting for Jean-Marie.

I hand pieced the scraps together over the last year or so. I needed a hand project to do in front of the TV....so I would hand sew my 5 inch scraps together in blocks of 5 or so and then I sewed them together in long strips. When Tom told me he was going to have a baby, I decided to use them for his baby's quilt. His favourite colour is purple, but I thought the orange was brighter and more cheerful, so I made the liberated stars in purple instead. I put the top together at the retreat and batted it up there,too. When I got home I machine quilted long horizontal wavy lines across the scraps and stippled the borders. It's got a nice thick flannel on the back for fuzzy warmth.

Baby quilt done!

I got my cousin's baby quilt done! My first time trying free motion machine quilting on something larger than a placemat!

I made a matching kitty:

I made 2 postcards for Mother's Day. I cut the birds out of a linen dish towel and machine appliqued and lightly thread painted them...