Project: Hello Kitty (for you can guess who)

Penny has been *almost* begging me to make her a Hello Kitty quilt. I gave her some pretty cool options (I thought). Turns out, she does NOT like the pixelated look at all. So, she told me she like this one the best:

(You can check out my pinterest board as it gives specific dimensions and how many squares of each color you'll need). It's like they gave the pattern away.... Anyways, I decided that for the size we want (twin-ish) that I needed the squares to be 3" (that includes the seam allowance) of each color (you're looking at 750 blocks- I must love her). I had her help out in picking the colors (as we didn't use solids because that's not what she wanted and this is HER quilt of course). Here are her finished colors of choice:

She did choose the white and yellow to be solid but the purples will be the background. She LOVES these colors. I'm so grateful for this cool tool that I use the make the 3" strips from the fabric and then to make them the 3" squares that I need them to be:

I must really love her (or quilting/piecing...). 

Once I had all the squares cut out, I looked at the pattern as a grid and stacked the colors in order for each row. 

 And then came the chain piecing (which saves SO much thread *in my opinion*). I chain pieced them one row at a time. The real upside to this pattern is that most of the Hello Kitty design is symmetrical (except for her bow on the right side). I then pressed seams to one side and then the opposite way for the next row so that as I sew the rows together, the seams will match up better.

Then came the fun part- lining up all those squares.... (but the upside is that Hello Kitty was symmetrical except for her bow on the side).

This was one happy girl. Just after this shot, the power went out for 3 hours... That drove me NUTS. I was on such a good roll. Once the power was back on, I wanted to finish so badly that I made a mistake (pointed out by my husband and to show you that I am NOT a perfect quilter/piecer). He did say wouldn't I rather have him point it out now before I put the batting and backing on...

 

Can you see it? I about DIED when I finally saw it:

 

The black is supposed to be UNDER the bow. Thankfully, it was a quick (ish) fix of just taking out those two block (I took them out as a rectangle and just flipped them) and sewed them back into the quilt. Doesn't this look so much better?:

OCD averted (almost...)! Then I finished up the quilt top:

I found one more mistake.... You see the block that is the same by her ear and bow and then the light square at the bottom that I thought I needed to have there.... Switch!

Man, I almost missed that! 

All better!

Now that's all fixed, I decided that in the background color (the purple) that I would do a continuous butterfly stencil that Penny had picked out. My mom and I also picked a large clamshell stencil for the fur and a freehand flower to go on the jumper. Penny then picked out some greens as the binding.

Front view quilted.

Back view quilted.

The jumper.

The border.

The face.

Binded and washed.

Back view.

One Happy Girl!

This was a joy to work on with my mom. She's given me some great tips and tricks and a new quilting presser foot for Christmas. I know I will make good use of it.

Project: Baby Girl Quilt/Whale Quilt

I am so blessed to know some friends who are having babies. This is for a dear friend who, like me, has suffered from hyperemesis during this pregnancy. This is something that can be very rough from the beginning to the end of the pregnancy. She was expecting a little girl (as you can deduct from the title of this post) and she already has a little boy. She has told her little boy (almost 4) about how there is water around the baby and so now he has it in his head that there must be a whale with his sister somehow. We did some looking around on pinterest together and found this one that looks adorable:

As I read the description of this quilt, she mentions that she uses felt as the whale (which I assume she uses interfacing webbing to fuse it on). So then, I had to find a whale stencil (which is surprisingly simple on pinterest). I decided that I'd be using 6" finished blocks and 4 whales in the middle. My friend wanted pink, purple, grey, brown, and black (as well as the white with the whale in it) for color blocks. I found some beautiful rich colors that would go really well. Here is the final color pallet we came up with:

The backing is a whale flannel that I found (which I think is TOTALLY adorable). The colors are beautiful and rich. I was able to cut my 6.5" squares from each of the colors (I needed 10 from the plain white to have the whale). I got 6 from each fat quarter and then I used 10 from the gray and white wave fabric (I bought 1/2 a yard). Here are the colors all cut out:

Now, with the squares being cut to 6.5", that means finished they'll be 6" squares (with the quilt ending up around 36"x42" before the backing and such). Here's what my sad sketch looks like so you get an idea:

It's not a great sketch but what can you do? Now, after I got all the 6.5" squares cut, I decided to lay the blocks out to see where I should put the colors. Now, I can't take all the credit on this part. My lovely Penny helped me. Here's what we came up with:

 

(This is pre-whale application). I think we did a great job. My husband's comment was "that's small" and then I reminded him this was a BABY quilt (he's just used to seeing big quilts from me). So, then I  needed to get the felt whales on before piecing this quilt together. *A tip with felt from my mom: They now make felt out of recycled bottles SO when you're using fusible paper PUT A PIECE OF CLOTH IN BETWEEN the felt and the iron or it will MELT.* Thank goodness for moms, right? So, I had a 9"x 11" piece of gray felt that I ironed fusible paper to and then used my whale stencil (I printed out an image from the internet and sized it knowing my square would be a finished 6"). Here's how it looked:

I think they ended up pretty cool. I then eyeballed them onto the white squares (if you're more of a perfectionist than I am, use a ruler). I fused them onto the blocks and then started my chain piecing.  Then I ironed the seams from each row in one direction and then the next row the opposite direction so that when I sewed the rows together they would mesh nicely. Once the rows were all together, I ironed the final seams in the same direction. Here's how it looked:

I really like it! I then put the batting and backing stacked with the quilt top on top. 

 

The hardest part was deciding how to quilt this bad boy. I knew I wanted to hand stitch around the whales but I didn't know how to do the rest of the squares. After MUCH deliberation (and some time constraints), I (with the help of my mom and husband) went with sail boats around some of the edging.

They went pretty fast to sew. There are a total of 8 boats around the border. I didn't put boats on the brown paisley fabric. I used a light gray thread. After the boats were quilted, I hand quilted around the whales:

I chose this aqua thread that kind of looks like the blue whale on the back. Once the hand quilting was done, my AMAZING mother bound the quilt for me (as vacation with kids is a little harder to get things done like regular life). She did a stitch that looks like waves. It was pretty cool. So, here's what it looked like once it was all washed and ready to be given away:

(This is on my mom's quilting board on the wall- I want one!!)

And here's what her little girl looks like enjoying it:

This was a joy to work on. I know that my friend and her new baby girl love it.

Project: Queen Size Quilt

This was a hefty project, to say the least. It started out PERFECTLY (as I thought). We traveled to Ohio for a family visit of sorts. My SWEET, LOVING, WONDERFUL mother sent me home with 20+ pounds of fabric…. Can you imagine the wheels turning? I was truly amazing how much she let me take home. Here are some quick pics of her sewing room:

This is NOT including her fat quarters section or her drawers sorted by colors. Amazing, right? The bolts that are pulled out are colors I liked.

This was just the FIRST layer… Our little suitcase was FILLED of JUST fabric :) I have a pretty AWESOME mom huh?

Once I was home, I decided to start a notebook to keep my designs that I've done as well as being able to plot out designs that I like (and would like to do). I bought some graph paper and a little 1" binder.

(This is the little boy pinwheel quilt I made plotted out.)

I saw this design on Pinterest (of course) but a little different (and yes, I'm going to add an outer border but I haven't gotten that far yet).

Then I became torn between this design and this one:

I think I'm going to save this one for another time. I couldn't justify doing all those nine patches. Half seemed enough. 

Anyways, I digress. So I had this design and needed to pick colors. That became hard but I decided on the nine patches being cream/white with forest greens and navy blues.

I didn't end up using ALL these colors but this was my baseline of the direction I was going. I then cut the colors into 6" squares (after I've done all the sewing and cutting to make the disappearing nine patch, it ends up being ~16" square). 

This is how I laid out all the squares- into what would be the first part of the nine patch- and then I  started to do my chain piecing/sewing- first with what would make each row:

First, I chain pieced the first two blocks (of three) in the row and then went back and chain sewed the third block to complete each row. Then, I laid them out into the block again and took the first two rows and chain sewed them together *after pressing each row accordingly towards the dark* (Chain sewing is the BEST THING EVER!- I feel like it saves so much thread).

I then pressed each nine patch before the next round of cutting began. Note: at this point I hadn't picked the color(s) for the second block in this quilt. I decided that I wanted to see what the finished disappearing nine patch looked like before I picked colors so I could get a better idea.

You cut the block in half each way...

And then flip two of the sides to get the disappearing nine patch look that I was going for. You can also make the nine patch if you want to make a quilt with sashing and little squares in the corners if you don't feel like cutting all those little squares. 

Then I started sewing them together. I laid them all out on top of each other and then sewed so that I would do it the right way (I've messed up before when I was doing the pinwheel quilt so I learned something and applied it to this next quilt.)

TA-DA! The finished nine patch. I was also able to settle on 5 colors for the second square blocks. This made a 16" finished square (and I had 21 of them).

 

 Orange with a pokadot, a light blue with a floral design, a darker blue with dots, a brown with a leaf pattern, and a solid yellow. I cut these into 9.5" squares and sashing 4" that would end up 3.5" after seam allowance so it would end up a 16" square as well (to line up with the nine patch squares). One color would need an extra square since I needed 21 of them. I sewed the short ends on first and then the long ends.

 I made sure to press seams towards the dark before sewing on the other sides.

TA-DA (again)! 

Next, I needed to lay them all out to figure out which color should go where. Thankfully, the tiles on my floor are the 16" that the blocks were so it was easy to figure out how much space I needed to have cleared. Here was the first try at it:

 

So, I had to stand on the kitchen island to get this shot. The two dark blues and the two browns were BUGGING me (A LOT) so I had my engineer husband help me out. We finally got it.

 Perfect, right? . So, here it is when I finished sewing the blocks together and then the rows together (pressing seems the opposite way in each row so they would nub together).

It's GINORMOUS! It ends up being almost a calking sized quilt. I'll post pictures when I have the backing, binding, and quilting all done (but it's going to take a little while, with it being so large).

On to my next 3 quilts!