Finished!!!

I finished George's baby quilt! (wait, that's the baby, you wanted to see the quilt..)

Started May 2008, finished January 2009, thanks to the challenge. I used Ringle & Kerr's Plain Spoken pattern (with more than a few prints because I didn't have many solids) and hand quilted in pearl cotton #8. All the fabric came from my stash, woohoo!

I was worried about how it would come out when I threw it in the washer & dryer-- this is the first quilt done in pearl cotton that i've actually finished. thankfully it came out ok. I still need to re-measure it though and I might have to change the hooks on the wall if it shrank at all. It looked so good on the wall above George's crib, but now that it's actually done i just want to cuddle him with it and use it..
Maybe I'll just hang it up when company comes over...

making progress, stitch by stitch

Now that free time is so limited, I have truly come to understand (and appreciate) the busy crafter's phrase "one stitch at a time." Each time I've sat down to work on this quilt I've been able to get one, maybe two threads done (a thread being the length from my fingertips to my elbow, usually). Yesterday George slept for a long time in the sling, but after working on his quilt for a while I had to switch to piecing stars again because the next open space to be quilted will be done in circles, and hand quilting with a kid in your lap isn't really that easy. (I mean, small straight lines are ok, but turning the quilt to do circles.. haven't figured out how to do that with him yet..)

Aug 7th

more sewing today. the blocks are coming together nicely.

Here's a pic of the back side of Baby Quilt #1, quilting almost finished, binding half way on. I love how the Marimekko fabric looks with the pearl cotton stitches..

Baby quilts

I read a great post over at Meet Me At Mikes yesterday (by way of whip up) about starting a blog and what a blog should have.. it got me thinking. I’m not writing here much these days for a bunch of reasons, but the biggest excuse is poor internet connection. For a while I wasn’t feeling crafty or creative, and I wasn’t making anything, so I felt I didn’t have anything “good” to post about, but the Mikes post reminded me that it’s my blog, and my thoughts are important.
Makiba keeps telling me i should be writing pregnancy notes in a journal because I’ll want to remember all the little stuff later. I think about it, but writing there hasn’t happened yet either. Maybe after a semester writing papers and exams for grad school I feel all written out.
Doesn’t hurt to just jot down what’s been going on though.. During finals last month I chose, washed, cut & ironed fabric for the baby quilt. I decided to go with the pattern "Plain Spoken" from Ringle & Kerr’s Modern Quilt Workshop. My stash is totally lacking in solids though, so I just used all the neutral (gender neutral, I mean) fabrics I had set aside for the baby. I don’t know, somehow I just felt I should exclude all the floral prints.
Anyway, with sewing a few blocks/strips here and there, it went together in no time. At first I felt a little self-conscious because after reading the color choice notes for "Zipper", I realized I didn’t have enough medium tones in there. I just go straight from light to dark in a lot of places. My confidence was jarred again when Costas said he didn’t like it, that he was thinking of something more “babyish” with pastels and teddy bears (teddy bears?!?!?). So I went back to the drawing board (or, over to flickr to browse my favorites). These were some of the contenders.

But I finally settled on this one by Carolyn (fabric she sent me made it into the first quilt, btw. Thanks again Carolyn~). Simple, babyish, I headed out to Ann’s Fabric & Sewing Machine center in Canton that same day after work. It was a bit strange to walk into a quilt store with the intention of buying fabric after I have so diligently been using only stash since November (well, mostly). And not just “buying fabric” by rummaging through the scrap bin and picking through remnants like I usually do; I went in to buy yardage. I wandered around, pulled bolts off the shelves, stacked them up, took a few steps back, changed my mind, rearranged…The shop staff was very helpful, but I was looking for something specific that I couldn’t quite communicate to her. In the end I settled on 9 prints, mostly from Kumiko Sudo’s Shiki line for In the Beginning, and took a quarter yard each. I made it out of there for about $20.
It was so nice to have new fabric. Like, new as in spring colors with 2008 printed on the selvage. After it was washed and ironed, I just laid it out on the futon and looked at it for a few days.
I think it was this past weekend that I started cutting, and I pieced most of it this past Wednesday. It’s nice. Soft and sweet, totally looks like a baby. In between the ironing and cutting though, I went back and finished piecing & basting the first quilt, and once it was together and I started quilting, I liked it much more. So now I’m working on two baby quilts, for this kid who should make an appearance in 19 and a half weeks or so. I’m happy, and it gives me something to do when I wake up at 3 in the morning with pregnancy heartburn.
By the way, we found out Wednesday, it’s a boy.