projects

I finished up some underwear for my boys the other day. I really like the football fabric, as underwear at least. The gray and olive fabrics are recycled t-shirts. I might make spring jammies for my younger son with the football fabric.



And, I started work on my watercolor quilt again. It's going pretty well! I'm not sure if I have enough of the medium-light fabrics to finish. I better figure that out so I can send out requests for fabric if I need to. I will be working on this more today.

linking love

I was so excited yesterday when I saw that the Annie Smith of the Quilting Stash podcast talked about my blog and linked it on her website! Thanks, Annie! She talked about my "Made in 2007" collage and I should have done this in the first place, but that post was inspired by Kristi at Lost and Found. I've been reading Kristi's blog for a while, and ought to get to know her better because I'm good friends (in the real life, down the street way) with her sister (who ought to get her own blog one of these days). Kristi has great vintage and thrifted finds and seems to be a very accomplished mom, always doing lots of great activities and projects with her kids.

Also I need to mention Jan here, the Creative Instigator. Jan is another real world person in my life; she works with my husband and I'm glad I've been able to get to know her. I love the creativity tips at Jan's blog. I love today's tip--when you want to apologize for something you've made, say "It's fairly new, but it smacks of genius." Can we come up with something like this for the housekeeping apology? I really want to stop apologizing for my house when my friends come over.

Fluffy, ruffly, outfit.

My niece just turned 6. I think she's going to like this. Just about a year after I made a similar outfit, I finally got hers finished. This is the Redondo skirt with flounces in between each panel, and the Hermosa shirt. Both patterns are by Studio Tantrum, which has cute and interesting and fluffy, ruffly, flouncy girl patterns. I get mine at Sewzanne's Fabrics.

J is requesting underwear. He is dragging around the fabric he wants it made from. I'm going to do that (have to trace a new pattern size) and then get out my infamous insane quilt project. I'm going to finish it this time, really.

Cuteness

I finished my small scrappy log cabin quilt. It is good to make one just for me, for fun, after making 4 complete quilts and working on at least 3 others last year, all for other people.



Not the best photo, I'm working on that.

I did not do a traditional binding because I wanted each side bound with a different fabric. I decided not to worry about the quilt police on this one.

I did small swirly quilting all over. It was fun and easy.


I pieced the back with some of the leftovers from my (small) 30's print stash.


I really like it.

Next up, I'm working on a flouncy outfit for my niece. More cuteness!

Made in 2007

So here's a collage I made... a sampling of things I made in 2007. I wonder what this year's will look like?

I have finished all 9 of my tiny scrappy log cabin blocks and will be putting them together soon. I thought my camera batteries were dead, but they're not, so here's a pic.



I'm probably going to use a layer of flannel instead of batting, and I don't know what the quilting will be like yet. I'm planning on putting plain white sashing between the blocks, and for binding... maybe a different color on each of the 4 sides. We'll see.

disappointing projects

I made a Japanese stab-stitch bound book today. I had such high hopes while I was working on it, and it ended up kind of a flop. I used the instructions in the current issue of Craft and in theory it worked out ok but there were a few minor issues that left it looking kind of... lame.

So I keep telling my perfectionist child that he isn't supposed to get things exactly right when he's a beginner, but I'm feeling that feeling right now, the frustration of things not working out how you'd hoped, when really, they should have. I really thought it was going to be so good, and it's weird, and some of the pages have 2 sets of holes punched, and the holes don't all line up as nicely as I'd hoped. Oh well.

I was really happy with how the paper cutting went; I put an old (not good for fabric anymore) blade in my rotary cutter and it worked wonderfully. So at least I'm not intimidated by cutting paper anymore.

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I wanted to say hi to the folks from Craftster.org; I was super excited to see that I had a bunch of visits from there yesterday. I've had a membership at that site for a long time but don't hang out there often. I should poke around there a bit and see what's going on.