Just keep sewing!

Busy little dory fish over here today! With the Monkey in childcare and me on holidays I decided to take the opportunity to get some more done on her birthday quilt. I am very happy to say I actually got the twelve panel pieces done today - yay!

It went together relatively easy which was great, apart from a small alignment problem - oops! But will think on it and see what I can do the next time I work on it.

I am really glad the more I get into this quilt, the more i am happy with my colour choices. Even the HTC who wasn't sure about the light blue admitted he may have been less than right on that point :)

So next is trying to work out whether the applique panel I have in my head will work or not, I amreally hoping so but we will have to see.

Twelve panels done - hooray!

What are you doing Maisy?

Close up

A friend called Maisy

To say my little Monkey is obsessed with books would be an understatement. To say she is obsessed with Maisy books in particular would be the understatement of the century.

We actually didn't originally own any Maisy books - don't ask me how we managed that considering that the Monkey has so many books they barely fit in her room. But the fact was we didn't, and my first realisation of the girl's Maisy fascination came from picking her up from child care one day a while ago.

Monkey and friends were sitting on the floor reading a Maisy book with their carer, and she was hooked. She got so excited everytime the carer turned a page and she saw Maisy doing something different or a new character. And to top it all off she kept jumping on her knees and saying 'Maisy' over and over like it was her first Christmas. (Well maybe second Christmas, she was only four months old on for the first one and more interested in eating the paper than anything else. )

Needless to say, that weekend I bought the Monkey her very first Maisy book and she is in love with it as much as ever.

So, long story long, when I began sewing and started spending countless hours drooling over fabrics and came across a Maisy quilting panel I nearly died. I immediately knew I had to make a Maisy quilt for my little girl for her second birthday.

And hey, with her second birthday less than two months away *sniff* it was time to get started right?!

So I have been pondering on this for a while with the wonderful input of a gorgeous friend. normally I am not a bold colour girl, and really struggle with how to match such bright colours as there are in this:

The panel that started it all

There were a heap of other fabrics in the Maisy range but all were way too much for my liking so I headed off to the ever faithful Spotlight and grabbed these pieces of gorgeousness.

Ah polka dots ... how I love thee

And now came the hard part - working out what to do! I spent hours crawling around on the floor, putting each and every one of those panels on a million different backgrounds until I was finally happy.

In the end I decided to go with each panel having a wide red polka dot border, and then a smaller light blue dotted border. And today I got sewing the first row of panels and was very happy with the result (after once again working out that Maths wasn't my thing and cursing myself for going patternless yet again!)

Single panel - I am planning on twelve of these all up.

The row of three, which will end up being four rows in total.

After all the angst over colour choice I am really happy with it so far and can't wait to get some more time to get into it in a couple of days.

I do have other plans for a darker blue border around the whole thing and maybe an applique panel at the base but I am playing that one by ear at the moment.

I am so excited to be making the Monkey something I know she will treasure and truly love, there is something beautifully satisfying about that.

Tick, tick, tick!

No, that's actually not the sound of my biological clock ... at least I don't think so?

It's actually the sound of me ticking off three, yes three projects from my ever increasing to-do list. Yippee!

The one that took the most time was the quilt of course. I am still not entirely convinced quilting is for me, patience is not a virtue I am familiar with and I did start to take huge short cuts towards the end because I was getting sick of it and more importantly badly needed the end product to snuggle under on the couch as the weather took a dive toward icicle status.

But...generally I am pretty happy with it, not bad for a first effort I think! And next time I may take a slightly more sensible approach and work to a pattern or standard quilt size or something.

The finished product -
It ended up being about single quilt size and ultra snuggly mmmmm!

So with that big project out of the way, it was time to focus on a couple of kids/baby presents considering I have two friends who have popped in the last couple of weeks. My first project actually wasn't for the new bubba, but his older sister to go with the gorgeous stuff I bought for the new little man. It's a crayon roll, the pattern had a monkey applique on the front, but I decided to go with an applique of her initial instead.

Applique front with ribbon tie

Inside the roll

Close Up

I was quite happy with this in the end, was relatively easy and quite effective. So with number two ticked off, it was time for number three. One of the guys on the HTC's basketball team has just had a little girl and I wanted to have a go at appliqueing a onesie for her. The HTC plays in a team which has a pork related name (don't ask, trust me!) so he wanted a pig applique on it. I must take a photo of the one I completely stuffed up before this one too, not good at all! Bit anyway I did get there in the end and even tried to embroider the 'oink' on it as well. Not brilliant by any means but hey, I gave it a shot!

He does have an eye but it's hard to see on the background pattern unfortunately.

So that's what I have been up to! I actually have an order to work on now would you believe, someone wants a mini owl and duck so I am going to try to get those done this weekend. Kind of exciting really...my first paid job!

But once that is done I think I am going to hang up my sewing needle for a few weeks, we have had two sessions of our photography course so far and it is fantastic but suddenly there is a heap of homework to do for it, so I think I need to focus my time on that for the next few weeks to make sure I am getting the most out of the course.

Efforts on a Sunday

I have no pics sorry because I was too busy trying to get today's stuff done. No easy feat with a 20 month old hanging off one arm by the end of it.

But........today I actually got the whole front of my quilt done! I made sure I set myself up with cushions so my back wouldn't start complaining, and it took me over four hours but the 30 rows are done, all pieced together. Far from perfect but very satisfying I must say.

I also went to Spotlight and gathered all of the materials I think I will need to finish it - not a cheap trip!

But I am excited now I can start to see what the finished product will look like. So I am planning on maybe pressing and trimming the front in the next few days (remember the woeful calculations that lead to very uneven edges?) so once I hit my beautiful work free Thursday I can get started on the border and binding.

Wandering into Quiltland

These pics remind me in the worst way that I really need to get better at taking photos. The good news is that as of next week... I will be! But more on that later.

For the moment my time and focus has been taken up by this thing the locals call 'Quilting'. When I started on this sewing business it wasn't something that was even on my radar, I think I had seen too many horrid concoctions of terrible fabrics and horribly tacky designs. And read too much about measuring being the most important part. And considering that is the part of sewing I am least good at, it seemed a bit of a silly idea really.

But of course my blog roll kept luring me, showing me that just because it is a quilt, doesn't mean it has to look like it belongs at the foot of Great Aunt Ida's bed.

Initially I had decided on a baby quilt as my first project, but that was before I spotted the above jelly roll at Spotlight for 25% off! I am always a sucker for a bargain, even if the HTC does not subscribe to my theory that buying things on special is actually saving money. Hmmm.

So the question became what to do with the roll of lovely fabrics? I searched for a bit but to be honest it all seemed too hard for a starter project, so for some strange reason I decided going it alone would be easier. I wasn't drunk at the time, I promise.

So I decided on a simple step like pattern (I am sure there is a technical term for this but I don't know it), and spent a night cutting the jelly roll into strips for my project. I even did my first very formal looking 'pattern' on computer paper and with a red Sharpie. Impressive huh.

So after laying everything out it was on to sewing the strips together, which was surprisingly easy if not a little time consuming. I must admit, at this stage in my sewing experience, patience has not needed to be a huge factor, considering the things I have done so far have been relatively quick projects. I have learned that those proper quilting people must be very good at waiting in long queues at the bank.

So with strips sewn together it was onto joining up all those rows! 30 in total actually. Apart from because I made up my own 'pattern' and 'measurements', I ran into lots of 'trouble'. Mainly being the rows with half blocks ended up being shorter than the rows with full blocks. And three rows in I had somehow joined a strip that was an inch shorter than all the others. And not noticed it until two rows later.

But nevermind. Having already decided on the 'fly by the seat of your pants' theory for this project, I don't think the smaller block in the row is too noticable. And I plan on making good use of the rotary cutter once everything is sewn together to even the edges of each row up.

So far I have a third of the rows sewn together, I should have had more but am strugging a little with bending over to pin it all. Anyway I hope to get at least another 1o rows done tomorrow.

And the plan from there? I am thinking of maybe doing a border in the white and blue dot fabric from the jelly roll which I left out because it didn't really fit what I wanted. And then finding a backing and binding the thing of course. That will be all kinds of fun I am sure.

I am really hoping by the end of this project that I will have a nice warm quilt for the couch considering it has got very cold here very quickly. That's the plan anyway. Fingers crossed.