House quilt

I've wanted to make a house quilt for quite a while, but it kept getting pushed to the bottom of the list while I tried to catch up on UFOs. My small quilt group has been doing a bee, and each month someone brings some fabric and a pattern and we make two blocks and bring them back the next month. 

September was my turn and I decided to outsource my house quilt dreams. I went through my scraps and pulled together coordinating but mismatched fabrics in bright colors. I asked that the roofs be a black and white print and the doors be red. I gave my group free range other than that. I encouraged paper piecing, but it wasn't required. 

I tried paper piecing for the first time on this project and I love it! I even tried drafting a few patterns of my own, which didn't turn out exactly as planned, but still look pretty good. If you have never done paper piecing, I'd say go for it! It's not as scary as you think. Find a good tutorial video and make sure to set your stitch length pretty short. 

I'm working on scrappy flying geese for between two rows, and a scrappy postage stamp border. 

I made a few trees. I was thinking I'd put them all together to be a park, but I might just space them out between the blocks. 

I love the way these all turned out and can't wait to get it all finished. 

Project Life Update

Here are a few project life layouts I have done recently. My birthday was at the end of February and we celebrated with a roaring 20’s themed party. I love that so many folks came in costume, including our friend Jamie in an awesome purple suit!

We had tasty bites, including these and these. I made my dress from a modified Colette sorbetto and some cool trims I picked up at Mill End. (I'll try to do a full post about the dress at a later date.)

I made cupcakes and art-deco cupcake picks from gold glitter paper. (Inspired by this.) I used Project Life pages design A and F and paper left over from my cupcake picks for the filler cards.

This page is a bunch of my Instagram snaps from March. I really like the way this page turned out. I printed the pictures 4x6 at the grocery store and trimmed them down. Because I don't have any of the pocket pages that would have worked for this layout, I just used a regular 12x12 page protector and glued my pictures down. 

This is the backside of above, so I designed my page to fit on a 12x12 piece of scrapbook paper. Right side is Design C. I like using a mix of handwriting and typed up journaling.  

I have been making pages on a monthly or so basis this spring. That has just been the time that I have had, and the number of pictures I've been taking. Most of the pictures I take end up on Instagram, so it is fun to figure out how to make square pictures fit in rectangular pockets. 

Fist UFO finish of 2015 - The Beach House Quilt

In the summer of 2008 I started working on a quilt for my parents to commemorate their 25th wedding anniversary coming up in April of 2009. I thought 6 months was plenty of time to finish a quilt. I wanted to make an ocean waves block with green, purple and black and white prints and solid black center boxes. I did lots of math and made tons of triangle units.

My original sketches and math.

But then I got busy, or bored or who knows what, and their 25th wedding anniversary came and went without a quilt. And then several more anniversaries. Last fall when I joined the Portland Modern Quilt Guild I was looking through my stash for a project to work on for sew day and came across the paper bag with all the triangle units. I decided to abandon the ocean waves and figure out something new. I played around with many different layouts but ended up with this one that results in concentric squares formed out of triangles. I managed to put the whole quilt together, quilt and finish it in time for their 31st anniversary two weeks ago. I decided to call this design “Beach House” since I started on a path to ocean waves and I think it ended up looking a little log cabin like.

This quilt is not quite big enough to fit on the bed, but is a good size for a picnic (and has a nice dark back) or for snuggling up on the couch.

The blocks are all fabrics I bought or had in my collection in 2008. The sashing, border and binding are a combination of Kona and scraps. The back is a mystery fabric my friend Amy gave to me that was in her stash. I used some leftover HST to join the back pieces together.  

I quilted this on my home machine with my new walking foot and a crosshatch pattern following the diagonals of the blocks.

I was in a bit of hurry with the binding and was trying to use scraps and so I did not do mitered seams when I was sewing the strips together. I have always done mitered seams because “that’s what you do.” But I didn’t know why until I was trying to hand stitch the binding on. Turns out straight seams are kind of bulky! It worked out and I think it looks fine, but I have learned my lesson and will take the extra five seconds to do mitered seams for future quilts.

I really love how this turned out, and I’m so glad to have it off my UFO list. And my parents love it too

Pink Baby Quilt

I made a quilt for a friend who is due at the end of February. This is a quilt that I made years ago. The stars are from a block of the month class that I took and I really liked that block so I made a whole quilt of them.

I bought the backing fabric at Cool Cottons during their “we don’t want to count it for inventory sale”

Backing fabric is a Kaffe Fassett. Quilt label is hand lettered with sharpie.

I had the whole thing pieced and sandwiched, and then I couldn’t decide how I wanted to quilt it. I tried some hand quilting, but I couldn’t get my stitches even. So the whole thing sat in the WIP pile for years.

There are lobsters and octopi!

In October my friend announced that she was having a girl. Finally this quilt could have a recipient, instead of just “oh I liked the colors together.” I was inspired by a quilt Sam Hunter showed off at PMQG. It ended up being pretty easy to quilt, and I really like how it turned out.

I actually showed it to my friend at Thanksgiving, because I wanted to make sure she didn’t completely hate it. (People can have very strong feelings about pink.) The baby shower is next weekend (and I’m hosting!) so it will head off to it’s new home soon. I hope the baby likes it!

Project Life

I have been doing Project Life since October. Project Life is a system of scrapbooking that is supposed to be a little faster and easier than traditional scrapbooking. The page protectors have the layout already made and you just slip your pictures and the coordinating cards into the pockets. I got all my materials at Joann’s and Michaels with coupons. There are also lots of freebie cards online. I’ve found a bunch of cute ones through Pinterest.

In October when I started, I really wanted to make some layouts for the weddings we went to this year. That was my jumping off place, but then as I was going through my things I found a lot of old pictures that I had printed but never done anything with. So I ended up making a sort of “catch up” album that goes all the way back to 2006. I really like this system because it lest you add pages easily even if they are out of order.

Meredith and Jordan's wedding

Jess and Daniel's wedding celebration

I scrapped most of the fall and winter using project life as well. The original idea was to have one layout be one week. The design A pages have eight 4x6 spots, so you could have one title card and then 7 pictures, one for each day. I am not doing that, but I did scrap on a semi-weekly basis.

One of my favorite :catch up" layouts. For the summer of 2010.

For 2015 I’d like to try and continue scrapping weekly or monthly. I am going to let it be pretty organic. So far, I haven’t taken any photos, and we are three weeks in. (Probably mostly has to do with the camera on my phone being broken.) Here is my title page for 2015.

I am using the Jade edition cards as well as scrapbook paper that I had that I’ve cut down. I am using a variety pack of page protectors as well as some regular scrapbooking 12x12 page protectors and some office depot letter sized page protectors.  

Another thing that I am going to try and keep up on for 2015 is making a list of all the books I have finished.

How do you keep track of pictures and memories?

Quilt UFOs

Image via Sam Hunter

A UFO is an Unfinished Object. I recently joined the Portland Modern Quilt Guild and this year they are doing a UFO challenge. At the start of the year we have to commit to the UFOs we will finish this year, so here is my list before I turn it in on Thursday.

1. Bunting Quilt 
2. Green/Purple/Black Triangles
3. Vintage Dresden Plates
4. Green Map of the States
5. Rainbow Stars
6. Empress Tiles
7. Pink and Green Pinwheels

Several of these are tops that are finished and are just waiting for the right recipient, or enough money to buy the batting and backing. The rest are blocks or pieces that need a little more work to get to completion. 

Follow along as I try to complete all of these in the next 12 months. Can she do it?

I have nine of these blocks that need to be turned into a top. 

Holiday Round-Up

Well the holidays have been a whirlwind of family and food and friends. We hosted Thanksgiving for 15 people and I cooked the biggest turkey I have ever seen.

The Table Before

The Table After 

Christmas was much more low key. We spent Christmas Eve with my family and Christmas Day C’s family came up and we went out for yummy Chinese food at Zien Hong (new favorite Chinese restaurant). I did make a buche de noel which was really fun (and yummy).

Family Picture!

Buche de Noel!

We kept the decor pretty minimal this year, Left the twinkle lights up from thanksgiving and had a rosemary tree on the mantel. I only hung ornaments that I had been gifted this year, and of course we displayed all the lovely Christmas Cards we received.

New Years Eve was a progressive party of awesome friends. First we went to one friends house for dinner. Then to another friends house for a pre-NYE/birthday party, and then back to our house for the midnight countdown. So much fun!

Cheers!

Home made New Year's Banner

Now I am ready to take 2015 head on. I haven’t been doing a whole lot of sewing, and I've been so busy with other stuff that the sewing I have done hasn't been documented. I want to try and be better about that in 2015. I am going to set a goal for myself to post here twice a month.

What are your goals for 2015?