3rd one done

 

In my previous post I explained about the need for 3 quilts for a friend who's family was burned out of their home last month.  Last week I got 2 tops done and sent to the quilter for her magic touch.  They are due back tomorrow for binding.   The 3rd quilt is a modified 1600 jelly roll quilt.  I used

 2 1/2 in red, green and yellow squares between each of the strips. I love how it turned out.  I did the quilting on this one myself. I do straight lines really well.

 

I even love the back.  I got the binding  done in one long sitting last night.  I'm seriously thinking of making this one (much larger) for me.  At this rate we should be able to deliver these early next week.

 

Another busy week

Where to begin….. I had great plans for myself for last weekend’s crafting.  I was going to put the binding on my king size swoon quilt and maybe do some blocks for the Dot Blog along.  Dinner conversation Friday evening put an end to that.  One of MJ’s coworkers and her family had been burned out of their home. Thankfully they are all OK. 

So what does any self respecting quilter do?  Why they commit to making 3 quilts for the kids in the family of course.  I only had one tiny problem and that was what to make.  Now I’m really good at baby quilts and my adult quilts aren’t bad but for tweens and teens, not really my thing.  There are none in my life at this point so I had to rough it.  The only info MJ had was that there were 2 girls and 1 boy in the tween to young teen age range.

I tackled the boy first and went to my old faithful stars.  I was surprised that I actually had enough dark blue fabrics without flowers and swirls to do the stars.

Then it was off to the girls.  One of my favorite quilts is this one I can’t remember what it’s name is but I have posted about it in the past with a link to the tutorial.  If you need it let me know and I’ll dig it out for you. 

Anyway, the center squares are lovely fine line flowers in several bold colors.  So I went with the bold colors for the outside of the blocks and ended up second guessing myself trying to figure out if it was too childish.  I have it on good authority from one of my coworkers with a tween that this was good and not childish and would be OK.

I put in most of Saturday and Sunday and after work on Monday on them.  Tuesday was a vacation day and I managed to get the backs done and got them into the mail to the quilter by noon.  

Got home from the post office and started this posting only to have Blogger not accept my pictures.  It didn’t matter what I did or what source I used I couldn’t upload a picture. Wasted a lot of time trying and decided to get to work on the third quilt.  I determined that a Jelly Roll 1600  quilt would be good and I could quilt that one myself in a reasonable amount of time.

Tried posting again last night and the same thing.  Bloggers ears should have been ringing.  MJ came out to see what my problem was and to show me just how much better on the computer he was and he gave it a try.  Well in the end it seems it isn’t blogger. MJ had no problem uploading pictures onto a posting from his laptop it just seems to be my laptop that is having issues.  I’m doing this posting from work on my lunch hour. He won’t let me touch his 2 week old lap top,  I don’t have a good track record with electronic equipment. 

I guess I'll just stick to quilting.

Busy Week

I’ve had a pretty productive sewing week.  1st up I have a friend in SC who had a heart valve replacement.  She’s a quilter and I didn’t think she needed a quilt but she did need something more than a get well card. I did want to send something quilty.  I decided a mug rug would be perfect.  My favorite part of Mug Rugs is that mine are from my head and heart not a pattern. 

 

I thought this conveyed my feelings exactly.


Next up was this toddler play blanket.  My friend J told me about this play blanket she saw earlier this summer.  It’s like a picnic blanket for a little one to play on. It has a draw string around it so you can pull the string and end up with a tote for the stuff the child was playing with.   The idea has been bubbling in the back of my head since mid July and this is my version based on her description. 

This is a pretty good size, it's on a king size bed for the picture.

I headed to JoAnns with the intent to buy home dec fabric with a coupon.  Home dec is pretty wide and I didn’t want to have a seam on the playing surface.  This being an experiment I also didn’t want to spend much money.  I don’t have any toddlers in my life and I had no real home intended for this when it was done.

What I found when I got to JoAnns was that they had the NO SEW fleece kits at 50% off , soft , large kid friendly and cheap.  What more could a gal ask for. 


Off to sew I go.  I don’t know what shape the original blanket was.  My guess is round because you pulled the string and it made a tote.  Well the fleece  I got was a rectangle so I trimmed  it to an oval.  I didn’t want to give up any play space by trimming to a circle. 

 The kit comes with 2 pieces of coordinating fleece.  Lots of fun kid stuff.  I picked puppies since I still didn’t know If this was going to a girl or a boy.   I measured the circumference of the oval and then I cut pieces from the coordinating fleece fabric for the draw string channel.  I cut the piece 6 ½ inches wide because that was how wide the ruler I was using was.  Very scientific.  

I attached it basically the same way you attach binding so that all the raw edges were covered, except at the opening. 

I then took the dog for a walk.

 Good thing.  While I was out with her and thinking through the next steps I realized I needed two opening for the draw string, one across from the other.   Back home and ripped some to make an additional opening in  the channel.   

The only thing I saw wrong with J’s description of the blanket was the draw string.  I really hate the idea of draw string and children.  My idea for a kind of work around was to make a very thick draw from fleece.  Again I used a 6 ½ inch wide piece of fleece, a couple of inches shorter than the circumference.  Folded it in 4 and stitched it.  It looked like a puffy strap.

This resulted in a rather fat draw “string”.  It also had the advantage of turning the channel into a slightly raised  rim which would in effect keep smaller pieces such as little cars and crayons from rolling out.  

                          This was a 3 hour project start to finish (including the dog’s walk). 

I don't have kids or grand kids so I am using Dog toys to illustrate.

Here it is full of dog toys hanginf from the door frame.

Brought it to work yesterday morning to show it off and immediately had a taker.  Also had a suggestion for an additional use, a gift wrap for baby shower presents. 

 If any of you run with this project I’d love to hear about it and the modifications you make along the way.  This was off the top of my head and really needs a  little tweaking before making another as a gift.  Good luck and have fun with it.

And the winners are:

Moewest @ Moe's Pastimes and Carla @ Dancing Moon.  I have sent emails to each of the winners and am just waiting for mailing addresses


 

Because I did a tutorial for the process of fabric embellished cards I ended up making many more cards than I entended to give in my giveaway.  Heaven forbid I should keep the extras, I probably wouldn't be able to find them in December anyway.  My solution ..... 2 winners.

Each winner will receive a fabric envelope containing 5 large cards w/ envelopes, 2 small cards w/ envelopes and 2 gift tags.




I have done a tutorial on the process, it was yesterday's post.  So if you are at all interested scroll on down.

My Congrats to both Moe and Carla.

Tutorial for Fabric Emellished Cards

Here is my best shot at a tutorial for using up fabric scraps for greeting cards.  Because I was Thinking Christmas I had lots of Christmas fabrics out and about but please keep an open mind. Scraps of anykind work. This is a link to my stop on the Ghastlies blog hop where    I show some cards, tags and bookmarks made with my Ghastlie scraps  http://selinaquilts.blogspot.com/2011/10/my-turn-on-ghastlie-blog-hop.html

I started this group with drawing a snowman, a tree and a stocking on some scrap paper.  I then photo copied them and made versions at various sizes.

I printed them out on card stock to make templates.

I ended up making cards in 2 sizes for this tutorial.  The larger cards are made using store purchased blank cards I found at a close out  in an art supply store. I know Michaels carries them.  The small cards are just made using 1/2 sheets of card stock.  The principles are the same.  The key is using a good fusible bond.  I use heavy duty Heat and Bond.   The draw back with using it is that you can't easily do hand stitching through it. The card leading this tutorial had the stitching done after all of the bond was adhered and my fingers are still unhappy with me 2 days later.

My measurement for the backing is to cut it a half inch smaller than the card face.  This gives it a nice clean 1/4 border of card stock.

I made some individual cards and some that were more of a mass produced nature.  Above is heat and bond on a single and below is heat and bond big enough for 3 blocks.

It does speed up the process considerably if you do the mass produce process.  You really only need to be creative once.  I made 8 different cards to start and they took about 15 minutes each to do.  I mass produced the next batch in under 10 minutes a piece.

Ok,  you have seen the templates they can be used on single pieces of fabric as in my snowmen

But you can make interesting fabric and get interesting outcomes

I thought that these scraps would make great trees.

Below are the finished trees from the scraps above.

You can also see an example of using one fabric and different size templates top right or just use a very cool scrap o fabric bottom right  and let it showcase itself.  The tree on the left is fused directly onto the card stock with no background as are the 3 trees top right.

 this is a really creative process way easier than quilting.  It's pretty much like applique without the neat stitches.

The stitching on the snowmen above are done with a pigma pen.  The small snowman is done using a small scrap of background.  There are no rules I am just sharing my visions .

Here is my mini mass production.  There are 3 stockings here on the heat and bond.  The background for the 3 are actually in a previous picture.

I made the cuff, heals and toes using fusible fleece just for fun.  I used a ball point pen.  I don't recomment that I just did it so you could see it in the picture, not. I have screwed up more things using a ball point but I never seem to learn that lesson.

So here are all the parts lined up for the iron

And the end result.  Really much quicker than being creative one at a time.

 

These are the smaller cards. Again mush easier to make several the same.  With the following exception

I was on such a roll I never noticed I had the card opening the wrong way.

Well I still had a few scraps left and a sheet of card stock so I set out to make some gift tags.

I just bonded the smallest tree to an edge and the straight part of the stocking  to an edge.  The stocking cuff, heal and toe are just the card stock.  I cut out those pieces before bonding

I'm hoping you can see that the tags open,  hard to photograph that concept.

So for my give away I planned on making 4 -5 cards for the winner.  Due to the tutorial I made a few more than that.  Maybe like 10 large cards and 4 small cards and 4 tags.  So I have made the executive decision to have 2 give aways.

I also made my favorite fabric envelope to hold all of the goodies.

So tomorrow evening I will have MJ pick 2 numbers and I will post the winners.

I hope this attempt at a tutuorial has helped spark some ideas with you for the use of some of your accumulated scraps.

Please go and have fun with it.

Think Christmas............easier said than done.  First I want to thank madam Samm and Lesley for all of the time and effort they are giving to us so that we can have such a great time.  Thanks also to all fo the other Hoppers, without you we wouldn't be.

Back to Think Christmas.  Way to many ideas.  Very hard to focus on any one type of project. I did get a little help from myself.  When I opened the boxes of Christmas fabric I found better than half of a Christmas sampler quilting begging to be finished. What more could I ask for, the blocks were 12 1/2 inches. I only needed 3 more to finish it up. This bear paw was the first block I attempted. I know many of you work days and quilt evenings. I do and I find there are things I should not attempt after a busy day.  One of those things is measurements off the top of my head.  This block was really simple 4 - 6 1/2 in paws = a 12 1/2 inch block, no.  Well it would if I hadn't forgotten the sashing part.

This poor guy is destine to be a Christmas Pillow.  You will not find a Bears paw in my quilt. I just didn't have what it took to make it over.

Next came my Christmas novelty print star.  This star is my go to block.  I can measure it and cut it in my sleep.

The little Scotty dog came from a block of the month at my local quild.  He was a very versitle pup depending on his coat and background.

This block was also part of a block of the month but I have no idea what it is called.  I just love the lines.

Put them all to gether with the 9 that were already done and woo hoo I have a finished top for a Christmas present for my sister. 

I don't have a lot of Christmas stuff out of the attic in july so I had to trot around my neighbor hood looking for pine trees for background shoots.  My neighbors think I'm nuts.

Next set of Christmas thoughts took me to this

I made a blue work quilt for a friend a couple of years back with these snowpeople and vowed that I would make one for me in Red work. I only managed to get 3 done for this event.

They make a nice table runner.  I'm not sure if I will end it here or put it in the Christmas box to take the place of the now finished quilt top.  Time will tell.

As a special thank you for stopping by and reading all the way to the end I am having a little giveaway.  I am making some fabric Christmas cards. I can't show them to you because they weren't done when I wrote this on Monday.  Trust me if they are not done yet they will be done by  the weekend for a drawing on the evening of August 6.

If you haven't stopped by to see the rest of the gals on todays schedule, please do.

August 2Grandmama's Stories
Sandra Kaye Designs
North Hills Quilter
Lv2sew
Quilty Doodads
Quilting in South Carolina
The Raspberry Rabbits
Charise Creates
Traveling Quilter
Nancy B at That Other Blog
Selina Quilts