As Promised

Here are the pics of Cori's Wrapped in Hope orange dancers quilt.  Still no real name for this.  Maybe it'll just be orange dancers.  How original. 

I gotta say, these pics were hard to get.  There's SO much orange here that it screws with the coloring of the whole rest of the shot.  I had to do a little post-production tweaking to get them anything close to the real look.

Doesn't that backing look like it was made to be part of this quilt??

Close up of some of the quilting.

"Love is louder"

And finally, the full frontal.  This will ship with the Superhero quilt in a week or so, in time for their respective birthdays in mid-March. 

And now, back to cleaning.  Yay.

Love is Louder

I'm not dead, I swear! Just trying to finish up this quilt before posting more pics of it. 

On Valentine's Day, a friend of mine introduced me to the Love is Louder movement on facebook, and I gotta say...I'm hooked!  It's hard to remember it some days, but love really is louder than anything negative the world can throw at us. 

To that end, I decided to incorporate the message in Cori's orange dancers quilt (which still doesn't have a good name yet) and quilted it (in my best handwriting!) in the bottom right corner.  It's subtle and you can barely read it, but if you look for it, it's there.  I could have done it brighter, bolder, louder, but I like that you have to really know to look for it to see it...it's like a secret message.  I did it using (what else) paper stencils.  I think I'm going to incorporate this on all my donation quilts.

Quick Pix

Just a few pix of the orange dancers quilt.  I found the backing on sale at Joann's this afternoon, and I have to say...I'm a little bit in love with it.  It's like it was designed to go with this top.  At the store, this old Irish lady commented on it and told me my top was wonderful...it meant the world.  :-)

Basted and bunched up.

Stencils.  Whirligigs are for the orange blocks.

Hearts are for the pink blocks.

Butterflies are for the dancers.

Dancing butterflies.

Hearts and butterflies.

Whirligigs.

Flipside.  See what I mean about the backing?  How gorgeous is this stuff??? And it's flannel to boot!

Now you can see where I got the butterflies idea from.

And last but not least, the hearts.  I'm doing the butterflies in white, hearts in pink (need more pink thread, argh), and whirligigs in orange.  I'm also stitching down the ditches, but I got impatient and wanted to try out these patterns. :-)  I had to use tweezers to get the paper off of some parts, but I'm not too worried about that...it'll be tedious, but a good "zone out in front of the TV" activity. 

Since I made Nick hold this up...

...I'll post this picture now.  Here's the full frontal of the Wrapped in Hope quilt. 

Kini is suspicious but I think she likes it.  You can tell how long it is by realizing MOTU is holding it above his (6ish foot tall) head.  I think I calculated it was about 70x76.  I haven't decided what to name it yet...any ideas?

Design Stuff Monday

Yesterday I did a bunch of shopping for MOTU, so to reward myself I went to Joann's and used up some coupons.  I got this nifty book which has literally opened up entire new worlds for me.  I never thought to quilt using paper stencils.  Duh.  I think I need to get myself some thinner paper, but for now just plain printer paper is working ok.

I played around with the new stencils, using some leftovers from the last round of QFKs. I made a couple of these and turned them into Valentine's gifts for some unsuspecting friends.  Muahaha.

The paper should be thinner...it's hard to get off as is.  If I wet it, it mostly works but some stuff still lingers.  If I don't, I'm afraid I'll rip the stitches.

I kind of like the slightly damp effect here.

I have (as usual) a couple projects going on right now.  In addition to the quilt for the neighbor, I signed up for one of the kids in the Wrapped in Hope program.  My girl likes dancing (but not ballet) and the color orange.  Her birthday is in March, so I need to get working on this.  I'm cheating and using a modified version of the QFK pattern for this.  I have a lot of the dark orange and a bit of the pink/orange hearts and the lighter orange.  So that pic up there is the basic pattern I'm using.  Grey is the focus print (dancers), and the rest of the colors are self-explanatory.

Blocks and strips cut.

Trying out the first few blocks.  I'm still mid-strip-sewing, but I wanted to see if this would even look ok.  I think it works.  I'm excited to try some of my new paper patterns to quilt on these!!

I also have the wedding quilt and the colonial quilt for our bed in progress as well...should really put some more time in on those.  They're just really big and slightly overwhelming right now.  But I'll get there.  Really.


UPDATE!!

I actually finished the entire top before going to bed last night.  I don't have a good picture of the whole thing, but here's a sneak peek anyway:

Happy Monday!!

Floral Beginnings

Thanks, everyone who left supportive comments yesterday.  I really appreciate it.  The more I put the binding on, the more I got to feel the weight of the quilt, the more it felt like a comfort blanket, the more I liked it.  I don't love it, but I feel like it might be acceptable to send to a 6 year old now.  I hope she likes it.  She requested princesses (I guess her dad writes her letters with stories about "Princess Emily" from prison so they can keep connected...how cute is that??) so she got princesses.  I even got some cheesy little tiaras for her and her mom. I hope they like them. 

Anyways. 

Moving on. 

Last night was way more productive than it had any right to be.  I mean, it was a Monday after all.  We went to talk to the priest about getting married, took the FOCCUS, and came out laughing.  We are SO ready for this.  Got home, neither of us was hungry so I just had a sandwich for dinner.  The Save the Dates came yesterday, so I started on addressing the envelopes...I got EVERY SINGLE ONE DONE!  Addressed, return addressed, stamped, and STD in the envelope.  Now I need to print out the "please book your room now" sheets, put those in, and ship them off.  Hopefully I can get those out the door tonight.

After that, I put the binding on Princess Emily's Epic Disaster and got about halfway through before calling it quits for the night.  I also took Kini on a good long walk. 

I didn't make any of this last night, I just finally remembered to snag a picture this morning:

 Here's a first glimpse of what could be a bouquet.  The one on the bottom is about the size of my hand, for reference.  That one might be a little big, I dunno.  I have a ton of ribbon and beads and such to add some extra oomph on these as well.

This!  I did this! By myself!  No tutorial!  I am quite proud of this one, actually.  It looks like a passable boutonniere, right? It needs some green on the bottom and some wire and green tape, but I think it looks pretty cute! 

Oh, and of course...

It turned out *ok*.  It's in the wash now, hopefully to be dried by tonight so I can put that in the mail with everything else.

Phew!

Can't wait to see what tonight will bring...

Design POS Monday

Dear Princess Emily of the Wrapped in Hope project (through Margaret's Hope Chest),

I sincerely apologize for the piece of crap quilt you are going to receive for your 6th birthday.  You deserve better.  Hopefully by the time I ship it tomorrow (pending successful binding completion tonight) I can remove a few of the curse words and violent screams that have thus far poisoned its existence in this world.  No 6 year old should be privy to that amount of swearing and screaming, especially from a stranger.

Signed,

Your quilt donor.

Remember this?

 It turned into this disaster:

 I swear, every possible thing that can go wrong with a quilt, did.  Nothing lined up right.  I sewed stupid stuff together. The back is horrific and puckered and..ARGH. 

 I kept screaming at the stupid thing all night.  MOTU kept laughing and telling me he was sure it was fine, but at the end of the night I just balled it up and threw it across the room. Stupid quilt.

 Here's what it looks like, more or less. I don't need to point out the awfulness of the center, or all the places that the corners don't even come close to each other...ARGH.

 But hey.  At the end of the day, there's still cuteness to be found:

That's right, Zucchini loves zucchini, especially when it's frozen.

Also on my design table are loads and loads of little squares waiting to be made into little flowers hopefully for my wedding. I made what has potential to be a corsage yesterday but forgot to take a picture this morning.  I'll post it later. 

Man that quilt pisses me off. For better design walls go here.

my own little sweatshop...

the current livingroom setup. wrapped in hope and wedding flowers, alternating based on who's asleep and who's not

The lighter fabrics right in front here are from the Wrapped in Hope quilt I'm making.  The graph paper was me trying to optimize the fabrics I have for that one.  The orange/yellow/red/green fabrics are for flowers for my wedding bouquets.  Hopefully I'll have a real bouquet to show off soonish.  

Infinite Awws

Get ready for some adorableness folks!  This post is just loaded with it!

 First up, Miss Shelby.  Yeah, she's the adorable destroyer of hard drives.  That computer no longer functions. Probably not related to her, but I can blame her anyways.

 It's a comfy quilt.

 The man of my dreams chillin' with his third ladylove.

 Asleepin'.

 Eater of hair.

 Nom nom nom.

 <3 Sun

 Purdy girl

 My design bulletin board.

 I have a few blocks for the princess quilt done.

Sort of playing with the idea of using these as flowers in my bridal bouquet...thoughts?