Tuesday, February 24, 2009

The four hour bag


Aaron and I are heading down to Denver this evening to have dinner with his family and give his aunt her new quilt (shown in a previous post). At the last minute I decided that wrapping the quilt up in a used Amazon box didn't do it justice so I made up a quick bag to present the quilt in. 

The bag is made with extra quilt fabric. The solid blue is the same as the quilt's background, the honeycomb blue fabric is the quilt's backing, and the charcoal gray fabric is the same as the quilts connecting lines. The bag is fully lined and has an external pocket on each side. 

Aaron also put together a poster using the photos originally intended for the quilt. I put a snap on two scraps of fabric and wrapped that around the poster. 

Wednesday, February 18, 2009

Cutest wallet ever!

Or at least it's the cutest one that I own. And it holds valuable things like my popcorn frequent buyer card. The importance of this wallet cannot be stressed enough because I lost my previous popcorn card when I had one more stamp to go before getting a free popcorn. 


The pattern I made had whiskers that I forgot to stitch on before sewing on the pocket panel. Ah well, I guess my bunny shaves.


Thursday, February 12, 2009

Once upon a time: Finished!


It took me a while to remember to ask Aaron to help hold up the quilt for a photo session. Unfortunately, Aaron had some issues with holding up his arms for any period of time which resulted in a lot of giggles and quilt waggling. Many of the pictures were quite blurry due to Aaron jiggling the quilt and whimpering and/or me laughing at him.


I am always pleased with the transformation of quilt top to quilted top. The quilting lines give it such a nice texture. The puckering that resulted from the washing and drying helped mask some of the bunching that occurred while quilting. 

Sunday, February 8, 2009

Once upon a time...


This is a "Once Upon A Time" quilt from The Modern Quilt Workshop by Weeks Ringle and Bill Kerr and it is for Aaron's aunt. She's going to be spending some time in the hospital so this quilt is for her to take with her. Hopefully it will brighten the room and offer her some comfort while she is away from home. The original plan was to use family pictures. However, there were some problems with the iron-on transfer paper -- the photos didn't always transfer and the fumes made me sick. It was decided that it would be easier to use "fun" fabric instead of photos.


Here it is all ready to be basted. The first quilt I made I sewed into the carpet. It was pretty discouraging to have to cut it off the carpet and re-baste it... And this was at my old apartment where the carpet had a very short pile. Foreseeing that I was doomed to baste this quilt into the shag carpeting, I made a large cardboard "sheet" to put between the quilt and shag carpet. Worked like a charm!

I've finished the quilting and the binding so I'll post a finished picture in the next few days.