Easter Dress 2013

I finished up my daughter's Easter dress last night. Actually I didn't try out the buttons and it turns out I had to remove one and resew it because it wasn't placed quite right. So I finished it this morning.

This fabric is hard to photograph just right in my house; I'll try to get some outdoor pics when she's wearing the dress on Sunday.

I used the Oliver + S bubble dress pattern. It went together fairly easy, and I'm happy with how it turned out. I made the size 3 with the skirt the length of the 4, but it's still pretty short on my daughter. 

When I broke my finger last summer, making this dress for my girl was one of the things I daydreamed about at the very beginning. (I had to wait a week between the injury and the surgery so there was a lot of serious pain going on, and laying in my bed, and hardly any sewing for a few weeks.) I'm glad to have it done and will probably make another one. Maybe I'll try one without the side seam scallops next year.

Here's the back:

I have a little baggie in with my sewing notions and found the perfect buttons in there. I have no idea what they were originally bought for, but they match the flowers in this fabric just right.

 

P.S. I love automatic buttonholes. They are the only thing I unplug the foot control on my sewing machine for.

Craft Tree: Just for Kids

Last week I got my copy of the new booklet, "Just For Kids"--it's a compilation of 15 sewing projects for kids, published by Interweave.

My Stacked Coin Doll Quilt is the first project in the book. :) I love those puppet/washcloth mitts on the cover too.

I'm thinking about making a couple more of these small quilts for an ongoing charity project through my local quilt guild.

There are several other booklets in the Craft Tree series and I was told they will be available for purchase at big box craft/fabric stores...not sure if they're there yet though. For now you can buy them here.

What I'm Working On

I've been working on a few different things the last couple weeks:

L's Easter dress. I'm using the Bubble Dress pattern by Oliver and S. It looks cute so far (and no sleeves makes it a bit easier, too.) I'm excited to see how it looks with the skirt "bubbled".

My Alabama Stitch (affiliate link) skirt . I've wanted to make one of these for so long, and I'm glad I finally actually got started on it! I was hoping this would be ready for me to wear by Easter; it might not be. It's coming along, though.

 

And my granny square quilt back.

I ended up doing something totally different than I thought I would do. I started by making the orange/pink section. I wanted to use up the Amy Butler peacock feathers fabric (too multicolored!) and found some of my older orange and pinks to put with it and get them out of my stash. Then I made the green section, again using several older fabrics. Some of those are from my very first quilt shop fabric purchase back in 1997. Not so much a fan of the muted sage green these days. After I finished the green and orange sections I thought I was going to put a big (whole) piece of fabric in between them, but that didn't seem right so I made a pieced blue section too. And then separated the sections with pieced white/light strips.

I'm not too far out on finishing the Easter dress and I'm plugging away on my skirt. Hope to have a finish to share here soon!

Birdie Ruffle Crush Quilt

I have a new baby niece and I finished up her baby quilt a few weeks ago. I finally got it labeled and sent off to her, and now I can share it here.

 

I used my Ruffle Crush quilt pattern to make this quilt. My sister-in-law chose most of the fabrics--I pulled the small squares from my stash and from the leftovers from her other daughter's quilt. There's even a piece of the striped fabric from her son's quilt in this one, too. The binding is Kona pomegranate.

The back is just one fabric this time. 

 

I sewed the ruffles on this quilt with my ruffler foot and it was challenging to keep the non-ruffled segments of the quilt straight and square that way. It turned out ok, but I think when I make this quilt again I will do the gathers by hand, in order to have a quilt with all right angles.

I did echo quilting around the birds in this section.

And figure-8 loops in the pieced strips and swirls in the orange dots.

You can find the Ruffle Crush Quilt pattern in my Craftsy shop. If you make one, I'd love to see it.

Claiming

I still think the big G will reverse their position on reader... but I'm switching anyway. 
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I have a quilt back and front to show you, and tomorrow will be cutting out an Easter dress for L and a skirt for me. Hope you have a great weekend!

Finished Circle Quilt

Yesterday I finished up the binding on my circle quilt. I am trying to make a dent in my UFOs and am glad to have this one done.

(my helper's arms were not quite long enough to hold the quilt out straight; it's a big quilt)

The quilt is 60" x 80", and I quilted it in a spiral, mostly using my walking foot. I had some issues with the layers shifting, even with the walking foot and having the presser foot pressure loosened. Part way through, I undid the remaining basting pins, smoothed the layers out again, and rebasted it, with the pins closer together than the first time. Then I loosened my presser foot pressure a little bit more and started quilting again. It went better after those changes, but there was still a little bit of minor shifting.

The center of the quilted spiral was quilted last, with my free motion quilting foot. I was really nervous about how that would go, but I was able to quilt it more smoothly than I expected.

The back of the quilt is pretty simple with red and yellow fabrics I got from Connecting Threads, and blue kelp I got on sale a while back.

Most of the binding came from my binding scraps (I had a lot of brown) and I added some red, yellow, and blue fabrics. It was nice to have most of the strips cut and pressed already. 

This is my second circle quilt; my first one was a baby quilt made for my niece in 2010. When I made that quilt I wrote a couple of tutorial blog posts about designing your own circle quilt and drafting the patterns/templates for this block. Back then, I also promised a "how to figure yardage" post... and then I never wrote it. So I'm thinking I will go ahead and write that soon--let me know if you think it's something that would be helpful!