Category Archives: Work in Progress

The commemorative 36 patch block:

Yesterday was my 36th birthday!

Last weekend, I promised Niels that I would make us a picnic quilt.  The beach blanket is great, but a quilt would be even better!  And all he’s gotten out of my newfound hobby is a Lakers pillow made with a remnant (8 months after buying said remnant) and hemming up of some oversized pillow cases, so its probably time that I made US something.

I was looking around online for inspiration for our picnic quilt, and I came upon Crazy Mom Quilts‘ 36-patch quilt along.  The whole 36 thing seemed like a bit of synergy.  And its colorful, can be done with my ever-growing stash, and I may even make it with 36 blocks, unless I think that it should be bigger!

Yesterday morning I was wide awake early.  I headed downstairs, opened the couple of packages I set aside in hopes that they actually contained birthday presents (they did!) and then decided to head to the sewing machine for a bit before I had to get to work.  I finished up one little project that I’ll blog about once I clean it up…  Then I decided to test out the 36-patch, just to see how it went.  I picked out a couple of fabrics, and after a bit of cutting, ironing, pinning and sewing, voila:

With a birthday hat, of course

I made another block this morning before heading out to my “get to know your sewing machine” class – a month after I bought my new sewing machine.  Today, I actually followed the cutting directions, which made the whole process a lot easier . . .

If you told me last year that I would consider sitting down for an hour at the sewing machine a perfect part of a relaxing birthday, I would have thought you were crazy.  But here I am, really enjoying the process of creating (what I think are) beautiful things and sharing them with friends and family. But indeed, the next project is for me, for my birthday.

It’s been a few crazy weeks here – tons of work and some travel, and not enough time for sewing. I had high hopes that I’d finish the pinwheel quilt for mom prior to going for a visit today… didn’t happen. So then I thought – mom has sewing machine! I’m 90% confident that my machine’s presser feet will fit on her machine, so I’m packing up the operation and moving it to Cleveland for the week! with two more hours finishing the quilting, I’ll move to binding, and I won’t even have to deal with shipping!

All packed!

It’s all packed to go. I really hope that I don’t have to carry it back! Next time you see it, it’ll look a bit more complete.  Oh, and I showed the Machingers package because they rock.  If you’re new to free motion quilting and you don’t have a pair, get some.

Back in November, I was visiting my mom.  I had pretty much completed my first quilt top, and I was trying to decide what the next project would be.  Looking at pictures, we were both struck by jewel tones paired with black, and came across a pindot pinwheel pattern that may work.  It was agreed – this would be a quilt for mom.

Mom's pinwheel top

Between the cutting (hours and hours of cutting) and piecing, I finally finished the quilt top a few months ago. It’s messy.  It doesn’t always match at the seams.  It was a stupid thing to try to tackle for a second attempt at a quilt top.  But it is what it is!  And this week, I will actually finish the quilt!  She’s been very patient….

After getting squirrel’s quilt sent off, I came up with an idea to solve a problem that kept me from finishing mom’s quilt – I didn’t have quite enough backing.  So I created a panel to finish the back and tie in the colors from the front.

The solution!

It’s too nice of a day around here to quilt this today, but it’ll happen this week.

This shouldn’t be that hard!  Instead of quilting, catching up on work, doing my taxes, or unpacking from last week’s trip, I just spent who knows how long trying to figure out how to make this page work the way I want it to . . . almost.  I guess it’s a work in progress, just like my quilting!

Speaking of works in progress, here’s my first quilt top.

First quilt top

I made this with those 10 yards for $20 find on the day I decided to start quilting.  It’s a pattern from great little book with great pics and a few beginner patterns, called Quilting Made Simple.  Of course, it’s the most intricate pattern in the book, but I didn’t let it stop me.  As I was piecing the top together, at every step I’d run into the next room and show Niels the strip or block or row I’d just completed …  Again, he’s patient with me!

This is also the quilt that I spent hours pulling stitches out of when I wound up gathering the back together in my first attempt at quilting with my walking foot. . .   Since then, I’ve been avoiding it. Ergh. But I think I’l be more willing to experiment with piecing together something interesting for the back when I return to this piece – some random offsets of black, red and white will really complement the front better than the flat yellow I picked out.