R2-K9 Star Wars Themed DIY Dog Bed

The Star Wars dog-parent in your life is definitely going to want one of these.  Although a dog bed like this can be made for any theme.  Thanks to Shannon Fabrics, Dritz, and Fairfield World for providing me with product for this dog bed and to Fairfield World for compensating me for this post.  All opinions, ideas, enthusiasm and complete geekiness is 100% my own. This post contains affiliate links.

R2-K9 get it?!?  Although K-9SO could make a great dog bed too.  A friend of mine recently became pet-parent to a rescue dog and he wanted a comfy place for his dog to sleep.  Since he is such a Star Wars fan, I thought a punny Star Wars dog joke was in order.  (Free Pattern for Star Wars Quilt-in-a-Day in photos can be found here.)

And because he wanted an extra cover for when the first was in the wash, I made a second with some
Luxe Cuddle® Weave in Silver Heather to match the dog's beautiful coat to minimize visible pet hair.

Materials to make your own:

The Carry-It-All Bag - DIY Reinforced Tote Bag Tutorial

This DIY Reinforced Tote Bag is perfect for all sorts of heavy lifting.  Quilted with Support foam inside the tote as well as inside the extra wide handles, this tote makes the perfect carry-all for everything from rocks to books and everything in between.  Many thanks to Fairfield World for supplying me with product and compensating me for this post all ideas, opinions, and enthusiasm are 100% my own.  This post contains affiliate links to support my blog.

Easy Half-Square Blocks Quilt - Easy Pre-Cut Cuddle Cake and Layer Cake Pattern

This easy Half-Square Blocks quilt is a great choice for beginners and is the perfect choice if you're working with 10-in precut fabric squares.  The look of the quilt will be completely different depending on the fabrics you choose.  We love how it looks with the Seeing Spots Cuddle Cakes fabric pack from Shannon Fabrics.  This post is part of a Fairfield Master Makers challenge and I was provided with the cuddle fabrics by Shannon Fabrics.  Fairfield World provided me with product and compensated me for this post.  This post also contains affiliate links.

Time:
Start to finish can be done in a day.

Skill Level:
Beginner

Materials:

• 1 Cuddle Cake from Shannon Fabrics.  I used Seeing Spots, but any of their Cuddle Cake packs would work great, or you can make from yardage.  If you're using yardage, you'd would need 4-10 10" cuts of cuddle fabric depending on how much variety you want.  You need 20 10-in squares total.
• 1 1/4 yards Cuddle 3 fabric in Kiwi for backing and applique
• 1/3 yard Cuddle 3 fabric in Midnight Blue for the binding
• Scraps of coordinating cuddle fabric for head, feet, and spots of turtle.  I used Cuddle 3 fabric in Olive.
• 1 package Nature-Fil™ Bamboo Blend Batting 36″ X 45″
• 1/2 Yard paper-backed fusible web
• Basting Spray (505 is my favorite brand, but other brands work too.)
• Coodinating Thread

Supplies:

• Sewing Machine
• Lots of Pins - My favorite are these Extra Long Pins from Dritz
• 12" Square Quilting ruler, cutting mat, and rotary cutter
• Walking Foot for your sewing machine (optional)

Instructions:

Lumos and Nox Quilt Pattern - Harry Potter Inspired Quilt

Ahhh...the wisdom of Dumbledore. "Happiness can be found even in the darkest of times, if one only remembers to turn on the light."

Any true Harry Potter fan will love this Lumos and Nox Quilt.  Since it's a whole cloth quilt, it's pretty simple to put together and a great way to practice your applique skills.  The hand embroidery for the Dumbledore quote did take a while, but you could simplify things by leaving that off and you would still have a striking quilt.  Thank you to Fairfield for their ongoing support of my creativity by supplying me with the batting for this project and compensating me for this post.  All ideas and opinions are 100% my own.

For an extra fun touch, the "white" fabrics are actually glow-in-the-dark using Michael Miller's Glow-in-the-Dark Fairy Frost fabric.

I recently started participating in some Instagram swaps.  (Be careful!  They're addicting!) This quilt was a gift for my swap partner in the #HogwartsSwap2015.  I make so many Hogwarts Crest Quilts for my Pieces by Polly Quilts Shop, that it was a fun excuse to branch out design a new quilt.

Here's what you'll need to make your own:

Giant Quilted Book Cushion Tutorial - Lesson 2 of 2

We made these awesome giant book cushions for the reading corner in our elementary school library.

A huge thank you to Fairfield for making these cushions possible.  They provided me with the foam and batting and compensated me for writing this post.  All opinions and ideas are my own.

The kids love them, and I hope they get the elementary kids excited about science and exploring more non-fiction books.

Conversation Heart Reading Pillow - Tutorial and Free Pattern - Valentine's Pillow

It's always a good day when I can combine two of my favorite things...reading and sewing.  This fun Conversation Heart Reading Pillow does just that.

One of my favorite things about working with Fairfield is that I've been able to supply my kids' elementary school with fun pillows and cushions to make their classes more comfortable.  (Note: Fairfield donated some of the supplies and compensated me for writing this post, but all ideas, opinions are my own.)

It's especially fun when we can combine comfortable with encouraging learning, which definitely describes this pillow which is now at home in her 4th grade teacher's reading corner.

I've got my oldest daughter well-trained...she keeps her ear out for hints about what her teachers might like for their classroom.  She told me a while ago that her reading and math teacher really loves the Peanuts, especially Snoopy.  Can you tell from the bulletin board?

So when I saw some Red Snoopy Fabric a while back, I knew we'd be able to think of something fun.

Then Katie came home and said her teacher wished she had more Valentine's decorations and I knew the Red Snoopy Fabric would be perfect for a Valentine's pillow.

 And the pillow was surprisingly easy to put together, so I thought I'd include a tutorial and pattern.

Skill Level: Late Beginner or Intermediate

Materials:

• 1 - Red Fat Quarter for the front (I used Kona Cotton)
• 1 - Matching Fat Quarter for the back (I used Red Snoopy and Woodstock from Quilting Treasures)
• 1/4 yard Red Fabric for the sides
• OR IF you want the whole pillow from the same fabric, you'll need 3/4 yard of fabric.
• 1/8 yard white fabric or white scraps  (I used scraps of Kona Cotton in White.)
• 1/4 yard paper backed fusible web
• Plenty of Poly-Fil Premium Stuffing Fiber
• 1/4 yard Stablize Interlining by Fairfield (not pictured.)
• Sewing machine, thread, scissors, pins, and other basic sewing supplies
• Heart Template Piece A
• Heart Template Piece B
• Heart Template Piece C.
• Letters Template

Instructions:

Paper Airplanes and Rockets Modern TrianglesQuilt - Using fabric from Children at Play by Sarah Jane Studios

I finished up this Children at Play Boy Quilt a couple months ago, but just haven't gotten a chance to blog about it until now.  This quilt is available for purchase in my Etsy shop here.

Children at Play by Sarah Jane Studios is one of my favorite fabric lines ever...especially the prints with boys doing brainy things like playing with rockets and paper airplanes.  Unfortunately, they're getting pretty hard to find.  So about a year and a half ago I tracked down as many of the boy prints as I could, and I started a twin sized Children at Play quilt for Anson.  That quilt is still not finished...but cutting it out gave me all these yummy left-over triangles.

I used some of the bolder colored "After School" triangles a while back to make this quilt with white triangles thrown in.  (See more details about Modern Rocket Launch Triangle Quilt in bold colors here.  This quilt available to purchase in my shop here.)

I love contrast, though, so I didn't want to use the white prints with white background triangles.  I saved all the white prints and less bold "Over the Fence" colored triangles to use in this quilt.  The solid triangles are Kona Cotton in Celery.

2 DIY Super Easy Dr. Seuss Themed Shirts - The Cat in the Hat and a Star-Bellied Sneech

***If you're looking for the Usborne Books Giveaway and Book Drive for Seattle Children's Hospital go here...***

The best inspiration always seems to strike at the last minute...and these shirts were last minute...and the kids LOVE them.

 If you need a fast and easy DIY Dr. Seuss shirt, you've come to the right place.

Back when I was mentally planning out the different projects and blog posts I wanted to do during For the LOVE of BOOKS, this wasn't something I had planned, but...

DIY Dragon Army Shirts - Ender's Game Shirts

Do you have any Ender's Game fans at your house?  I've loved Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card (affiliate link) for years.  It's definitely my favorite in the series, and the Shadow books are my favorite sequels (affiliate link) to Ender's Game.  So I was really excited for the movie to come out.  In fact, it's the first movie I'd seen in the theater in YEARS.  We just don't go see movies all that often.  The movie was good...but of course the book is better.  I have yet to see a movie version of a great book that was as good as the book.  But, I digress...

As much as I like Ender's Game, my brother is an even bigger fan.  So much so, that he named his son Ender...for reals.  I thought it would be fun to make my brother and nephew some Dragon Army shirts...

...and as long as I was making shirts for them, I went ahead and made some for my boys, plus an extra one for a bloggy friend who also loves Ender's Game.

Star and Nativity Appliques - Nativity in the Trees Quilt-Along - Lesson 6

Yeah!  We're almost done with our quilt tops.  Now we just need to add our Christmas Star an Nativity scene.

Uh...and can I just say...I feel really bad this didn't get posted earlier.  I had it all written up 2 weeks ago...like completely written.  It just needed the links to the templates which I totally forgot to do.  I'll admit that I bit off a bit more than I could chew heading up to Christmas, and I apologize that finishing up these instructions was one of the things I didn't get done.  I'll admit that I didn't even get my own quilt done.  It's just needed the binding added to it for about 2 months.  Anyway...on to the instructions...

If you need to review our previous lessons, you can find them here:

Lesson 1 - Fabric Selection	Lesson 2 - Sewing Your Greens	Lesson 3 - Cutting Your Triangles
Lesson 4 - Basic Applique	Lesson 5 - Sewing Your Triangles	Lesson 6 - Advanced Machine Applique

You'll need to print out the Stable and Nativity Template from here and the Star Template from here (or you can trace directly off your computer screen) and trace onto your Heat'n Bond Lite.  You can also download and resize these pictures if you want to be able to fiddle with the sizing.  If you want the sizing to be the same that I used, click on the PDF files above.

When you trace an image onto Heat'n Bond, it will end up being a mirror image when you put it on your quilt, so keep that in mind if you want Mary or Joseph on a particular side of the stable.  Here I'm tracing with Joseph on the left so in the finished quilt, he will be on the right.

Family Tree Anniverary Quilt

***If you're looking for The One Ring Giveaway courtesy of Boutique Academia, click here.

I thought I'd share my Family Tree Quilt with you today.  I've been trying to balance getting things ready for Halloween, scoring SATs, and getting stuff done around the house.  The getting stuff done around the house is the one that really seems to be losing out.  Anyway, that doesn't leave much time for blogging, so I thought I'd share a blast from the past.

Some of my most favorite quilts I made years ago before we had kids and I had more time to spend on more intricate quilts.  And since they were also made before I blogged, I haven't shared them.  I'm hoping to gradually work through sharing some of them, although many of them I no longer own.  Like this one...

I made this quilt in honor of my Nana and Granddad's 50th wedding anniversary.  Granddad passed away earlier this year, and Nana has gone to live with my parents.  During a visit a couple months ago, I asked her if I could photograph her quilt.

I'd been thinking of making a hand print quilt for a long time, and finally had a good excuse for it.  I contacted my cousins and siblings and had them send tracings of their hands.  This was before I'd discovered how easy zigzag/satin stitch applique is, so those hands were all appliqued on by hand.  It took forever.

Boy Reading Freezer Paper Stencil - Free Pattern

Some of you might have thought that all I do lately is quilts and Harry Potter themed stuff, but I've got something a little different for you today...

If you've been a blog reader for a long time (like several years), you may remember the Girl Reading freezer paper shirts I made for the girls a while back.  Those were inside a heart for Valentine's Day.

Several years later, here's a boy version...

We needed a baby gift.  One of my husband's high school students had a baby.  We don't usually give baby gifts to his students, but for reasons I won't go into, we felt like she should for this one.  The young mom loves to read, so we thought a reading themed gift would be perfect and practical.