Minky Baby Quilt

Hello,

Ok, so after a long, long silence I'm trying to resurrect my blog once again. I didn't give up on embroidery and sewing but I couldn't find the time to document it all and post on the blog. Let's hope this year I'll have more time on both.

In January we welcomed a new addition to our family and now I'm a proud mama of two boys :) (the older is 6 years old now). And I'd like to show you baby quilt I was working on when I was pregnant. I didn't manage to finish it before my son's arrival, but I just did it now, so it's only 1 month delay. Not so bad.

Some time ago I found a tutorial for making baby quilt and I loved the pattern, so it only waited on my list of things to be done till the chance comes up. And here it was. In case you're interested you can find the tutorial here. The tutorial is made to use Layer Cake squares, I didn't have those, so I just cut the pieces from fabrics in my stash.

I decided to use Minky as the back of the quilt. I was a bit worried how quilting of such fabric would look like and if it's not too hard for me. But fortunately, it turned out it's quite easy to work on and I'm really pleased with the results. Minky is very soft and warm and so nice to sneak under that I guess we'll be both sleeping under it :). Minky is quite expensive, at least here in Poland where I live, but in my opinion it's worth spending money on such a special occasion as new baby in the family. It's perfect for various baby items.

June FNSI results

I still don't have the Internet but it won't stop me to post the results here as I promised :). I decided to finish the work on the tablemat. I did all the layers some time ago and pinned them together but I couldn't move on with quilting them. The main point to make this tablemat was to exercise and try free motion quilting. I did some of that on other fabric pieces to get a feeling but still I was worried how it would come out. But, if you don't try you're not going to be better, so finally I started free motion quilting on the tablemat. Last Friday night I finished that all.

SewCalGal blog has the year long event called Free-Motion Quilt Challenge. Each month there a different expert showing how to learn and make various free-motion patterns. In January there was this leaf pattern shown and I thought it would be good to make on my piece:

Here's the centre square sewn together

and the whole tablemat:

Now, I need to make the binding and it will be ready.

November FNSI

I know that most of you are sewing things for Christmas gifts. Well, I haven't decied to give presents that I made during Christmas time yet. Instead, I keep moving forward with sewing my first quilt but if I finish it in time we'll have a nicely decorated room. So I might say it's a gift for my house ;).

Yesterday I managed to finish quilting. It was a tough thing for me. In fact it was the most difficult one in making the whole quilt. Now I need to do the binding but I hope I'll do it before the next FNSI, so I'll be able to start on something new for the next event.

I haven't decided yet, how the do the binding - in hand or using the machine. I did binding in hand for the tablemats and there is something nice in it. I cannot express what but it keeps me tempting :). So I might take the longer path.

And now I'm gonna to check out what others made during last night while tasting my delicious apple cake I just made.

All goes well till the thread runs out

Today was the perfect day for sewing. Almost. I had a day off from my work, my son was with his grandparents, husband went for mountain walking. There was just me and my sewing machine. All went well till I run out of the thread. Is there some Murphy's law like that? I bet there is. Anyway, today I felt much better when quilting. It wasn't such a chaos like I felt the first time. It is still very hard for me to finish a big quilt like this, but at least I wasn't thinking what the heck am I doing. :)

It's far from being perfect - I can see it's hard for me to push the fabric, so the machine could make even stitches. So, there are places where the stitches are long as should, but some where they are very short as the fabric didn't move properly. And I put the blame for that on me (not machine).

So, the quilt is stil in progress and now awaits for a new thread, but it doesn't mean I have nothing to do. I'm going to learn something new and here is the sampler piece I'm working on now to get the idea. When I do some practice on this I will move on to make the bigger piece. Do you know what I have in my mind? :)

{After FNSI}

Yesterday I did some progress on my first big quilt. The blocks were made during the Patchwork Squared Quilt Along. Some time ago I made the top then the back and I was left with putting this together.

Last weekend I basted the quilt and yesterday started the machine quilting. I didn't do much progress in this, well... it is tough job, especially for a beginner like me. But I learnt some things, as one says that you learn best on your own mistakes.

First of all, the quilt is BIG beast for me and at first I felt I couldn't tame it and begin sewing. But then after a couple of minutes I managed to organize it a bit.

Lesson no.1 - I should have muh more safety pins for basting than I have... I mean much more.

Lesson no. 2 - Using gloves when quilting on machine might be very useful. I didn't have them and now I can see that they may help a lot.

As I mentioned I didn't do much, so probably I will continue this one during the next Friday Night.

Celebrating Autumn

On the prevoius post I mentioned about Celebrate Color event that is going on for the next 3 months. I love such things, as they are great insiration to me and also quite good motivation to make something new. So, kudos to Rachel for organising this.

I was worried a bit that with lack of time I won't be able to join, but I decided to use some scraps to make an Autumn inspired pillow. Once I made such tablemats and I still had some fabrics left + nine patch squares ready for use. So I came up with such a simple pillow that is now proudly decorating my living room. For me personally brown is the first color I think of in terms of Autumn (though there are many more I'd put in this category as well).

Though the pillow is very simple, there were some "done for the first time" things for me.

Instead of envelope closure I added the zipper to it. I wouldn't do it if I didn't find a tutorial. I know there are many helpful tutorials on the Internet for this tricky stuff, but I used this one - thank you Katie :). Another first time thing is I tried to finish the quilt using in-the-ditch method, as I was just curious of how it would look like in the end. It looks nice, but I will wait some time till I try it again, at least when using my sewing machine. I sew on very slow motion, but still it was hard for me to keep exactly along the seam - more experience needed :). So, I'll do some more sewing and then maybe one day I'll try again.

Oh, and in case you wanted to know, the fabrics I used are from Moda Cherrish Nature collection. I also used one of these fabrics for the back of the pillow:

I have also one more pillow in my mind, this time with some hand stitching part. If time allows I'll try to make it for next month' Celebrate Color.

One update to this - as Wendy suggested me, I'm linking this post to her "Learn a New Technique" webside. By the way it's great idea to share our new endeavors in craft :).

FNSI - after party

This was the first time I took part in Friday Night Sew In but for sure not the last one. It's great opportunity to speed up with sewing. I have two things ongoing that need my sewing machine and I decided to do this:


It 's the last of 4 tablemats that I have to quilt. I didn't do all the quilting last night, but I finished 4 squares where during the week I couldn't do more than one square a day. So, hopefully I'll be able to finish it this week.











Another fun part of FNSI is that it's not over. Now, I'm going to check what other folks did. There were above 100 participants, so there's A LOT to see. Cheers :)!

Quilting around the house

There is not a lot going on with embroidery in my house recently, but there is quite a lot with my sewing machine. So I thought I'd share with you a couple of pictures of what I'm doing. Not sure if I mentioned here already but I fell in love with quilting and now I'm juggling bewteen this and embroidery whenever I have some spare time.

So, quilting - since some time I've been doing the tablemats. Two of them are finished, two of them in the progress. This is how it looks like when done. They are very very far away from perfection, but I'm pleased with them - after all I did them myself :). After joining the blocks I realized that adding the sashing would make them better, but I can live without it.

Second thing I'm doing at the same time is the P2 Quilt Along Project. I haven't heard much about Quilt Alongs and I must admit it's great thing for me. I don't know how it is for you, but it's hard for me to motivate myself and keep on doing things sometimes. So such events are just perfect for me, because they keep me going on without much break :). I was afraid if i could keep the pace and sew the blocks as they come out on the blog, but so far I'm following (heh, probably that's because they had some break now).


Here's the blog Patchwork_2 if you'd like to have a look at this. There's also Flickr page that you can view here . As I'm looking through various pages I can see there is a lot of such events happening and this is just awesome. I'm learning a lot now and just keep practicing, which is so important. I also found Stitch Along event in one of the blogs and probably I'll join this too. It's great to see how huge variety of stithes people can do from one pattern.