giveaway day!

Winner, allow me to make you a pillow.


















Not *that* pillow, but your own, designed and made according to what you would love to have in your home.

That's the giveaway.  It stems from a few places--Elizabeth's giveaway from December was so cool...pillows are fun to make...it's hard for me to think of and execute something that someone might or might not want, but who doesn't want to be a part of Giveaway Day?...I might like to do custom work someday and this will be good practice...and mostly, I missed the signups over here.  I figure that I got a good chunk of my bento pillow (above) from Ashley, so this will be kind of like the other half of a swap, right?

If you're new here (or even if you're not), that last paragraph might seem a little busy and cryptic, and I apologize.  Moving on, here's the info that you're probably here for:

• If you win, I'll make you a quilted, bound, zipper-closured home dec pillow cover.  
• You and I will work together on fabrics, colors, size, etc.  I might ask you to make a flickr mosaic or browse over there (or here) so I can get an idea of what you might like.  I've got a couple of fabric stacks in mind that you might choose from (some Amy Butler, some Anna Maria Horner, some Sandi Henderson), but I've got a lot of random stash and scraps too.  And I'm always looking for an excuse to buy a little something!
• I'll include some of the scraps and a couple of other fun fabrics in case you want to make something that coordinates.
• I'll probably throw in a couple of magnets, too...And another (little) surprise.  The surprise from last time was my favorite part of the package!
• The deadline for mailing per the Giveaway Day guidelines is May 24, but since this prize is custom-made, I'll probably send it more like June 1.

To enter, just leave me a comment with a favorite fabric line, designer, color, whatever...just something that I can brainstorm about until we start emailing about the particulars.  Please make sure that you include your email address if you're a "no reply" commentor...you can't win if I can't get in touch with you!  I'll choose a winner using the RNG on Thursday night, May 20th.
Thanks for popping by!

Don't forget to check out all the other terrific giveaways over at Sew, Mama, Sew.  So much fun!

lake is the new charcoal

This is my block for my TBK quilt.  Inspirations here, here, and here; that last one is a block made by my friend Emily from CMQG, who sparked the idea that tied it all together.  Every print in my stash ended up in my packages, along with the lake blue Kona solid.  So much rethinking went into this design and I almost didn't go forward with it.  But I'm really, really glad I did.
















The wind and sun were not cooperating with our photo shoot, hence blowing, wrinkles, and shadows. 
















Luckily, Alex *was* cooperating...I'm just starting small and preparing him early for when he'll be made to hold up an entire quilt.

coming down the pipeline...

the sewing pipeline, that is, if there is such a thing.

My month for one of my bees.

Still need to make those spider webs...

A birthday gift.

A block for the next CMQG meeting.

Giveaway Day!

A block swap. 

My husband calls me overcommitted (in the nicest possible way) and maybe I am, but having sewing projects with deadlines fills some of the void that was created when I quit my job, but in a much more fun and less lucrative way.

Having nothing to do with sewing whatsoever, here's the guard dog at Cook Mansion.  Can I tell you how much I love living in a town that has a mansion with a guard dog statue?  A lot.

tea leaves

I know I keep talking about these famous sheets, but humor me one more time, if you would.

Margaret, from TBK, is a really accomplished quilter...an award winner...and she has her own longarm quilting buisness too.  It's only fitting that her blocks for the bee were the most challenging so far.  She gave us plenty of lead time (I think I had my fabrics at least a week before March began), and posted a thorough tutorial, but I was kinda busy in April.  They were the first thing I did after that craziness was over, because I hate to be late with bees & swaps (shhh!  I still have my Spider Bee blocks to do!--Tuesday at the latest, Tracy!), and I finally mailed them out midweek.
















Paper piecing is terrific, friends.  I had only tried spider web blocks before, but am now even more obsessed with seeking out other paper-pieced blocks.  I've been known to have issues with 1/4 inch seams, and for the most part, this process eliminates that stress.  Everything is so precise and tidy!  My only concern is the bulk when four or five pieces of fabric came together, but hopefully smooshing the life out of them with my iron and quilting will take care of that.















Aren't they cheery?

improvising, DS-style

My partner for the Urban Home Goods swap on flickr really made things easy on me.  She put "wall hanging" first on her list (with an exclamation point!) and loves Denyse Schmidt as well as charcoal, yellow, orange, and aqua together.  That combination really sort of spoke to me (and I already owned three of those colors...though who can resist a few extra Kona solids?), so I was off and sewing.


















I actually own Denyse Schmidt Quilts, and while I have long enjoyed browsing the photos, I realized I had never really looked at the patterns very carefully.  Talk about picky!  So many pattern pieces!  I was kind of looking forward to improvising, wonkiness, and etc., so I ended up going in a different direction.  The "pattern" I ended up using was inspired by the beautiful DS Run & Fall...the description talks about the complicated pattern and math that goes into achieving a random look, so I guess I was kind of wrong about the improvisation process.

I'm more of a rotary-cutter person, so I went that route, a la wonky log cabin/Gwen Marston slicing (even without a ruler sometimes!).  I think the idea comes across pretty well, though there is a certain something about the shapes of the pieces in the DS quilt that I'm missing, I think--maybe that's what the pattern pieces are for!  I wish, too, that the scale was a little different....I think narrower rows with two charcoal strips might have looked better. 

On the up side, she was certainly right about that color combo!  I had originally planned to use two different oranges, but in person, they were almost the same...so one orange it was--still, though, it's a good mix.  Can you spot that one yellow-and-white poka dot piece?  Using a little bit of print with mostly solids seemed kind of DSish, and it's also a nod (along with the bigger stripes of dots on the back)


















 to the dots my partner loves (sorry they're not red!).  The binding is charcoal (though it looks almost royal blue in the photo of the back...not sure what's going on there).
 
The quilting was fun.  I scoured flickr for inspiration, as most of DS's work seems to be hand quilted...something I'd like to try but wasn't ready to do for the first time on someone else's project.  This is kind of what I was after, though there's no part of me that's ready to quilt leaves!















My partner also mentioned magnets, and somehow I thought of this project...it was fun to look through my photos for favorite shots of fabric.
















All packed up with some Lemonheads (the factory is right next to my hometown, but these were made in Canada?) and off to New Jersey, an hour before the last FedEx pickup.  Whew! 

Next up, the sheets (for real this time!), then some shots of the beautiful things my partner made for me.

Happy weekend!

a diversion

Probably, it wasn't the best idea to make a quilt for the same event I was chairing, but it was actually kind of nice to have something I *had* to do that I also *wanted* to do. A break from talking to the printer and coordinating ticket sales and knocking on doors for donations.

The downside was that the photos were taken five minutes before I left to set up the raffle table, where it was bundled with tickets to an outdoor concert and gift certificates to wine and gourmet stores. An embarrassingly large number of my own raffle tickets went into that bag, and though I didn't win, at least I know the person who did...so maybe I can at least visit it once in a while.  Because it wouldn't be weird to visit a quilt!

The fabrics are all the pinkish/orangeish Kaffe Fassett prints I could choose in the (short) time a 3.5 year old is happy at the LQS, plus some Kona solids.

Hot pink quilting in a loop/pebble hybrid, made denser by the fact that it's harder to control your (faithful but not-meant-for-quilting old Singer) machine when you've attached an oatmeal lid to it with painters tape in order to cover the feed dogs...(such fun to have the new machine die mid-quilt!).  There are some puckers.

Machine-bound in the pink solid and a pink KF diagonal stripe.  First time with that, and likely my last.  Doesn't look as good as Rita's always do.  But it's a picnic quilt, not a bed quilt, so I'm mostly OK with that.

Tomorrow...my sheets are here!

back on the grid

and this is all that's left of The Fundraiser.

That and some money. More than a thousand, less than a million. But a good chunk of money for a worthy cause.

Now, sewing, sewing, sewing!