One of the Baby Quilts is Finished!

This baby quilt was finished up right before I left town to spend time at my oldest sons in Oregon. Though it wasn't gifted until I returned home, it felt really good to attach the label and check it off the list.

Baby quilt finished up!

It has a sort of busy, young vibe to it, so hopefully will grow well with baby. My baby quilts usually end up somewhere around 42-44 inches wide and 46 plus inches long. Plenty of quilt to be used in a toddler bed.

My little brother has gotten more baby quilts from me.....

The long sashing strips are machine stitched in-the-ditch on either side and also around the peachy horizontal strips. Everywhere else is hand quilted very simply with #8 or #12 perle cotton. It's getting so very, very difficult for me to not add hand quilting somewhere. It just feels wrong! So you know me. I don't even bother fighting it. What's another couple hours with the hoop? hehe

Loving the texture

I passed this quilt off on the Sunday after returning home and the smile I received in return was sweet and perfect. Baby #5 gets to have a little something handmade from her A. Audrey and I know that means something to my sister-in-law. It's never worthwhile when it starts feel expected and unappreciated, right?

Just had to add the lime green, couldn't resist

In a nod to the fact that it was supposed to be for 'baby', I went ahead and used an old retro looking kitty cat fabric for the binding. As I've mentioned before, conversation prints look cute and all, but they just don't feel easy to work with. Most of the time I leave them behind in the store and think wistfully about how much easier to must be if only I could wrap my mind around the concept! 

A little bit of whimsy

I ended up being gone eleven days I think, arriving at my sons house the day before their newest daughter was born! Between the other grandma {who came and went everyday}, we kept our kids and granddaughters well taken care of. Lest you think we pushed ourselves onto them, we didn't. I would never have stayed so long without a genuine invitation of 'help'!

My precious granddaughters!

Getting a kindergartener off to school and picked up from the bus stop everyday, keeping up with the housework, plus chasing around a very active two year old is a lot of work for the grandmas, much less a recovering mama! Dad just switched jobs a couple months ago, so didn't have much time available to take off.

Miss Eleanor Olivia {Ellie}

I would say it was a hardship, but in reality, it was lovely getting so much hands on time with all my granddaughters. I hate that we can't see them more often. What a joy to snuggle a brand new baby, see a little girl getting ready for soccer practice with her daddy, watch the 2 year old slowly figure out that this grandma is completely wrapped around her little finger! So hard to say no to those sweet little faces! Also, our youngest son moved down to the same area about a month ago, so it was great to check in with him and see that he's doing well too.*sigh  Why can't they be happy living in the back of beyond like us?  Oh well. That's the way we were too. Couldn't wait to move away to a more populated area when we were younger! Super nice to back home though, as nothing is ever quite as good as home sweet home...

All the applique finished up and the blocks squared up!

As you can imagine, there was very little time for quilting. Once in a great while I managed to stitch some of the brown curved strips onto Crazy Daisy. This part actually went very fast and though I mostly stitched in terrible lighting {dim lights while the adults were watching tv}, I don't think any of it is so terrible as to justify ripping out. After I got home and got caught up on the laundry, I finished all the rest in a hurry and stuck a few blocks up on the wall. I played with a couple potential setting triangle fabrics, but my heart wasn't in it. All that will have to wait until the sashing is settled.

Online shopping just doesn't seem to work
out for me...

If you look at the picture above, the fabric on the left is the fabric that I went ahead and ordered for the sashing. The colors seemed perfect to me, so why fiddle around? In what now seems super ironic, the fabric that I ordered came in a much different look than the original fabric, very muted in contrast. Both numbers on the fabric were identical so I figured it must be a batch {dye} discrepancy. So I ordered another yard of the same fabric from a totally different store. Uh huh. Same issue. Which is why I so rarely try to buy the 'perfect' fabric on line. This never works out well for me and so once again, I have retreated to make-do, make-it-work with what you have method. All the strips for the new sashing are now cut out and read to go, all from the stash, which is what I should have done originally!

The start of a new baby quilt

So glad I didn't get started on the baby quilt for my new granddaughter before I left! This quilt should be a lot easier to put together now that I have a better idea what the nursery theme will be. I've cut out parts for simple 'wrench' blocks with the darker greens as the background. Hopefully they will go quickly and then I can lighten the vibe as things progress toward a border. 

My quilting attention is unfortunately a bit spotty since I've been home. Doesn't take much to get out of the routine does it? I'm finally starting to do some hand quilting in the evenings and remind my fingers what a quilting callous is. Surprise! {not really}, after a short break I am enjoying the hoop even more than before. Nope. Not giving up the hand quilting anytime soon....

Thankfully, before I left town, all the mending was finished up in a flurry and now that's one thing out of the way and off the counters in the quilting room. Did you think I never had any? If you are short like I am, barely 5'2", and tired of stepping on your jean hems? This tutorial worked well. I mean, like, amazing well! Someone told me about this method of hemming years ago and honestly, I just didn't think it could possibly turn out very nice looking. So I nodded at all the right moments and then promptly ignored their advice. I have been putting off hemming several pairs of jeans and finally, had no choice but to hem something, destroy my hems, or buy new. Yeah, right.

My old method of cutting off the bottoms of the jeans and turning under a couple times worked to shorten the jeans, but never looked as sharp without the original distressing and commercial thread used. After this hemming session, I did go back and do the extra hand stitching {mentioned at the end of the video} on a couple pairs of jeans, just so the hem doesn't flip up during washing. On one darker pair of jeans, I added an {almost invisible} extra, stabilizing top stitch, which... yeah, I can already tell was probably needed. Okay, why am I so excited about this? I have five pair of jeans now that fall exactly where I want them to at the top of my shoes? I'm not stepping on them. And the hem doesn't look obviously 'hand mended'. Do you know how rare that is for us short people? So tempted to go back and hem a couple of my older jeans as well, but I probably won't. I'd much rather be quilting!

Making Time in the Week For the Post is Sometimes the Hardest Part

Well here it is, another go at a baby quilt. After the last disastrous effort, I focused more intensely on gathering a cohesive grouping of fabrics. Something happy and cozy looking and at least a little bit girlish. As the days went by, fabrics were pulled out and other, better fabrics included until the stack had the right vibe.

Blocks for the baby quilt

Since that's where things went wrong last time, I calculated this step to be the most helpful overall. You would think that I {of all people} would never take a good color palette for granted, but hey. We all have our moments! Eventually I reached a spot in my latest hand work frenzy where it became obvious that there needed to be some machine quilting time. For equilibrium. And mixing things up. Okay! Good time to get serious about moving on with the baby quilt! And yeah, it's the strangest thing, but somehow I had lost my confidence with making these quilts for the littles. Everything that I imagined and conjured up just seemed so overblown and complex for the ultimate purpose. 

Starting to consider the fabric in the setting

Finally I managed to get ahold of myself and made the decision to start with a very simple courthouse step {or brick?} block. Just keeping it very basic and see where it leads us. Everything was free cut even though I occasionally used a ruler to avoid the wavy 'hand cut' effect. As you can see I used groups of color for each segment of the blocks, rarely using a repeat. After all the blocks were completed, then I trimmed the width only to the exact same size. 

Making it all work

That gave me a starting place to determine what to do next. As I worked through a period of about three different sessions, I found that it was a simple matter to just 'go with the flow'. First I joined blocks into the longer rows. If I saw that the peachy pink fabrics looked fine in the adjoining areas, then I didn't even bother to try out another option. Decision made, cut the fabric and move along!

Trying to make sure the blocks aren't' an exact
line-up in placement horizontally

As I was working along on this baby quilt, there was also progress being made each evening with the hand quilting on the Patina quilt. The more that I looked at the backing fabric there, the more that I realized some of it needed to go directly into the baby quilt. The green flowers [especially} on the pink print just seemed so perfect for breathing room between the blocks! 

Patina with the binding sewn on by machine,
waiting patiently for the hand stitching time to finish up

Thankfully, I wasn't too far out on the stitching. The push to finish wasn't some herculean task, but just a dedicated effort to make the best use of regular handquilting time. Wallah! It was a finish! And then it was an easy matter to trim all the extras from the backing into long sashing pieces, sewing sections together wherever needed. Yes, some of the trimmings were cut on the horizontal view of the printed fabric and others on the vertical. Does it matter? Altogether, the print worked to pull the blocks into a soft, unified whole. See how it comes off as a great background, helping make those stronger-look blocks 'pop'? Mission accomplished.

Baby quilt top all sewn together, ready for sandwiching 

Even the lighter {fill-in} sections of the lighter peach fabric used at the top and bottom of the quilt were re-used from the backing trim-offs since I often use 2 or 3 fabrics to make up a back. How fun to use up the backing pieces so readily! Really makes my frugal, use-it-up quilter soul want to high five someone.*wink  The only thing that I'm not 100 percent satisfied with, is the very far left sashing strip--its just a little 'off print' and showing lots of solid pink. Overall though, I think this effort can be considered a success. And it restores just a tiny bit of my baby-quilt-making confidence! Will probably try to wait and do the quilting at the same time as the next one in line. It's already late. What difference does another couple weeks make?

Half the Crazy Daisy blocks ready for next phase
of hand stitching

The primary applique project worked on in the last week or so has been Crazy Daisy. It's not a show stopper and in fact, at this stage in the game, it still looks a little sad. I kinda knew that, but it wasn't until a friend stopped by the other day and asked me what I was working on that it really hit home. When I showed her one of the blocks, she had this look. You know the one. It was pretty evident she was trying to figure out how to say something positive and polite, but didn't quite know what to say.... Oh well. You and I both know my quilts are never finished until the binding is put on!

I kept avoiding these blocks until one evening it occurred to me that truly, what I was doing was sabotaging available hand work time. I would take the hand stitching bag into the living room and place it by the couch. Then, you know... I'd have to go check the laundry, pick up in the kitchen, go water the flower pots, etc. etc. until there might be 20-30 minutes left to actually DO something. 

Looking closer at the flower detail and
potential sashing fabric

When that realization finally broke through my consciousness, things got serious. I hate wasting time. My goal was 5 blocks a week and I was waaaay behind. So then I really put my head down until now there are 13 blocks out of 25 ready for the next phase. Whew! So exhausting. But now I can happily do some hand work on the Positive Thinking quilt without any guilt whatsoever. Until next week, which uh... starts tomorrow? Unless I count it as being 3 blocks ahead? Hmmm...

Whatever. There was serious progress made to the point where I could put enough blocks up on the wall to do a quick audition for the side-setting triangle fabric. {The way the flowers are being sewn onto the blcoks pretty much pre-determines the final layout.} Uh huh. This is where it occurred to me that this quilt wasn't going to be happy without sashing. The vague idea I had about just slapping these blocks together and getting a top done lickety-split pretty much crashed and burned. Why do some quilts have to be so demanding? The only fabric/color that made any sense at all is a Tula Pink stripe that was only lacking about 20" from being enough. Of course! You're all going to be shocked, but yes, I ultimately caved and just ordered it online from an Etsy shop. Enough waffling about. When you know, you know.

It turned out that I was also able to get an excellent feel for what needed to happen at the bottom of the flowers too. At least that part was straightforward and almost exactly as imagined! It will most definitely be more of those sharp citrussy greens with a narrow band of the brown/green to help emphasize that it's actually a 'flower'. Super happy about that as I've been wanting to use more of those lately. I'm going to use about 6 of the different greens from the stash, but only that single brown for the narrow arch. That particular print has a lovely, subtle green included which just makes my heart do a little pitter patter of happiness. Love how the quick free-cut arch is so imperfect looking and will probably use it exactly 'as-is' for the final plastic template.

Patchwork Garden ready for the hoop!

Next up for the quilt in the hoop is Patchwork Garden, top all finished up sometime in 2019. All summer long, I was looking forward to getting this one in the hoop and finally, here it is! I totally forgot about taking pictures while it was being sandwiched, so this is 'it', in all its rumpled glory, pinned and ready to go. Things are not always perfectly camera ready around here in case you hadn't already figured that out. I wonder why? 

Alas, the first night of stitching was just wrong. So wrong. I had to pull out all of the stitches and start completely over. The colors, the patterns. Meh! As of last night, I'm finally starting to find the proper groove and rhythm. Always so good to be falling into the sheer enjoyment of being able to sit and happily stitch! 

It's kind of an different color palette for me, not one I've played with much before. Still, I'm having a ball being reintroduced to some favorite fabrics and remembering the many decisions made while putting the top together. I think that's one of the best things about hand quilting, having plenty of time to enjoy the very last moments with a quilt. Unless it's an ugly or unsatisfactory make, then it gets pretty wearisome to have to keep coming back to the hoop!