first quilt...and nephew!

I finished my first quilt ... finally, and just on time!

Henry was quite bored by the entire process:

Here's the final product, nearly a full square at 41"x42".  Bridget wanted to help show off.

Here are a few close-ups of the fabrics.   (I love them.  Can you tell?)

I definitely learned quite a bit throughout this process.  The binding was by far the worst part.  I've got a few ideas for the next quilt I'm going to make, but I may need to call on some experienced quilters to help me out.

But anyway, who cares about a quilt when there's a cute new baby in the family?

Welcome, Carson!  We're so excited you're here!

strip quilt: lesson learned

I learned an important lesson about sewing this week:  Fabric weights do matter.

I was moving along quite nicely with the quilt, ready to piece the entire top together.  I found some really soft blue fabric to put in between the patterned pieces.  What's not great about super soft fabric, especially for a baby quilt?

If you look past the crummy photo quality, you'll see that that blue strip in the middle has pulled at the seams.  I tried one more strip to see if it'd be any different and it wasn't.  Normally, I'd just keep sewing.  (Kind of reminds me of Dory in that fish movie -- what's it called? -- "Just keep sewing, just keep sewing!")  But, I do want to do this right and have a sneaky feeling that once I try to quilt it -- which I've never, ever tried to do before -- it's just going to look worse.

So I'll be spending some time ripping out these seams, but I suppose it'll save me time in the long haul.  Bummer.

Any other experienced sewers out there?  Any advice or helpful tips?

(Oh, and P.S. -- Inspiration for the quilt can be found here.)

strip quilt: day 2

For those of you playing along, I'm making this strip quilt for my (soon-to-be) nephew.  (If you want to peruse my fabric choices, you can read my first post.)  I've been working on this pretty slowly -- one, because I was kind of busy with school there for ever the past several weeks, and two, because I need blog fodder.

This one is pretty easy so far.  I just cut my strips and then started to sew.

So I was complaining about ironing earlier, thinking that that part was over.  Wrong!  Turns out you have to iron down seams too.

And here's one strip:

I'm sure I'm already boring people with the details, so I'll come back later when I've made more substantial process.  (I'm just hoping it looks right, all said and done.)

strip quilt: day 1

Remember my post a few weeks back, talking about how I was going a bit fabric crazy?

I've started to channel some of that energy and have started a strip quilt for my nephew.  He's due in October, so that should give me plenty of time to get my act together.

As a side benefit, walking everyone through my process step-by-step gives me that much-needed blog fodder.  And it allows me to show off the cool fabric I've purchased.  CJ doesn't seem to appreciate it at all, so I hope someone looks at some of this and thinks it's cute.

So...  Step #1:  Ironing.

I hate ironing.  I avoid it at all costs.  I don't have a full-size ironing board, because it's just a giant waste of space in this small house.  This is probably the thing I hate most about sewing.  But, side note, isn't that owl fabric super cute?

Unfortunately, I picked an awful lot of fabric for this quilt and it all had to be washed (which is also a giant hassle) and ironed.

The cats typically keep me company when I'm sewing:

And now I'm starting to sort out all that fabric.  I was clearly indecisive when choosing the fabric.  It's just all so cute!

Stay tuned for more in between now and October!