I first met her on a whim in Washington DC, when we were both in town for the Obama inauguration. (Her experience of the event was much smoother than my own, alas…) Last summer, she came to Boston with some other friends for a girls’ weekend, and was nice enough to take our family photos. And then, back in February, I got to spend a spectacular weekend at her house with six other amazing women. It was the most fun I’ve ever had doing almost nothing.

Anyways, after spending a few days at her (gorgeous) house, I knew I simply had to make her a quilt as a way to say thank you for being such a great host and friend. The colors were inspired by the gorgeous shades of blue she has in her house, with plenty of neutrals. It makes for a really calm, beautiful color palate. The blocks are simple enough, of course – a 4″ square with a 2″ border, making each block 8″. But hey, it doesn’t have to be a fancy, complicated quilt block to turn into a great quilt, right?  The quilt ended up measuring around 64 x 80″ – a nice, big lap quilt that might even work for her super-tall husband.

I’m so happy with the back. I had three neutral solids I wanted to use: Kona Stone, Medium Gray, and either Bone or Snow for the white (dang if I can remember). As always, I wanted to include some of the leftover prints from the front, and the rest just kind of came together as I expanded it to be big enough. I love the way it turned out, especially the big pieces of that sandy-colored Stone, and the strip of Amy Butler between the white and the gray.

It took me three tries to decide how to quilt it. My first attempt at free-motion just jammed up my machine (time for service, I suspect), so those stitches were ripped out. Following a suggestion for a big zig-zag seemed cool, but rapidly became clear that it would be way too much stopping and starting and cramming the quilt through my machine, so those were ripped out, too. Finally, I just started going diagonal through the blocks. And then, instead of going back for the other diagonal, I did vertical lines on either side of the seam between each block. The end result is pretty minimal quilting, and a subtle diamond-shaped effect on the back. Kinda cool, I thought.

I bound it in, what else, Full Moon dots from Amy Butler’s Lotus collection. Yes. I know. I have a problem. I LOVE these dots for bindings. I may have used them once or twice before. (Like here, and here, and here, and OH YEAH, here too.) But hey, this used up the last big piece in my stash! At least, in the slate/blue colorway… it’s possible there’s still a lot of pink and green in there. Whatever. Don’t hate.

Anyways. I named it Ocean View because I know Laura’s happy place is the beach, and these colors felt so calm and beach-y to me. I’m so excited that it has arrived and I don’t have to keep it a secret anymore, and that it has even been put to use on the first day at its new home.

P.S. Big thanks to our friend Maria for being my co-conspirator, so willing to text ideas back and forth as this surprise quilt came together.

D and A’s birthday was a few weeks ago, and I got it into my head that I wanted to make them pillows. Who knows why, but I latched onto the idea. And really, what five-year-old (or their mother) needs more plastic crap from Target in their house?

I picked up some 12×16″ pillow forms and decided to make some simple patchwork, but I included a little pocket on the front with their initial. I know my own kids love anything personalized, so that was a win. And I figured the pocket could make it a tooth fairy pillow if they want, or just a place to stow little treasures.

Of course, I managed to finish them with about 15 minutes to spare… Nothing like a birthday party deadline. That would be why they have the quicker envelope back instead of an attempt at an invisible zipper. Next time, maybe.

My last attempt at a nightgown for my daughter was… alright. It was kind of messy, and it has stretched out in a weird way, but it has held together and she’s been happy enough with it.

I don’t remember what sparked the idea, but I ended up finding this tutorial on Sparkle Power! for making girls’ nightgowns out of old (grown-up) t-shirts. I’ve had it bookmarked for weeks, and finally jumped on it this afternoon. Rebecca and I went through my drawers for a couple of shirts I was ready to part with. Mostly she wanted “colorful” ones. The white ones with funny (to me) sayings did not go over as well with the picky 4.5-year-old. Ah well.

I made three, late this afternoon. I’d say each one took maybe 10-15 minutes, and that’s only because I had several interruptions for snacks and other immediate concerns of preschoolers.

They’re the definition of quick & dirty, including the lame iPhone photos. I don’t have a serger, so the seams are just plain zig-zagged. Don’t look too closely at the sleeves for the puckering. And OK, so the v-neck from my XL t-shirt is borderline inappropriate on my little four-year-old.

But hey, not bad for some shirts that were going to end up in the giveaway pile, anyways.

The big blocks and bright colors in this quilt just make me want to run around outside on a summer day. Is that wrong?

Actually, this one was a strangely long time in progress. I was collecting fabric from Laurie Wisbrun’s Tufted Tweets, and decided I wanted to use them to make a “quick” quilt. I based it on Ashley’s Blocks and Stripes quilt tutorial, just making it bigger so that it’s a pretty generous size (about 60×70, I think?), and adding just a couple of extra prints from my stash. I had the top together relatively quickly, and then it just languished in an unfinished pile for months. It didn’t have a destination or a deadline, so it fell off my radar.

Finally, I decided to finish it up, and continued the big blocks and stripes motif on the back. I quilted it in straight horizontal lines – first going on either side of each horizontal seam, and then going back and filling it in with some double- and triple-lines.

I always love a good polka dot on a binding, and this bright aqua from Jennifer Paganelli seemed the perfect fit. And, as much as I have always enjoyed the quietly therapeutic hand-stitching of a binding, I think I am a machine-binding convert. Now that I’ve managed to do it so that it looks fairly neat and clean, the speed and strength just can’t be beat.

Best of all, as I was working on getting this quilt finished, I thought of the perfect home – with my friend Maria and her awesome family. So off it went to Maine as a surprise. I am thrilled to say that it was immediately welcomed into the family and put to good use on a freakishly gorgeous March day. I know some people make quilts as art, but I make them so that they get used and abused and generally well-loved. Sand, schmand. That’s what it’s all about.

The guidelines for this swap were to make one large item (mini quilt, bag, placemats, sewing machine cover, etc.), and also send a small item (handmade or not). Even better was the degree to which input was encouraged, even though partner assignments were secret. So it was a lot of fun responding to different discussion threads and looking for my partner’s responses to try and get a clear idea of what she wanted.

I settled on my design fairly quickly. My partner and I had both favorited/pinned this great yellow and gray transparency quilt. She also mentioned a love of pink and a preference for bright colors on a dark background, and listed the dimensions of her sewing machine, so this machine cover was born.

(Looking kind of lumpy because I had to stuff it with pillows to take a picture…)

They’re all Kona solids. The background is medium gray, and the pink squares are Bright Pink, Carnation, and Peony.  I quilted the whole thing in closely-spaced vertical lines in gray thread.

The lining is Kona Ash, with a little label sewn inside. I do love my pinking shears…

For my small item, I used an extra transparency block and made an oversized pincushion. It’s got batting on either side, quilted with variegated thread, and filled with crushed walnut shells. Nice and weighty.

I sent it all off, and I am thrilled to say that Eva Marie of Bijoux Baby Crafts was super happy with it, and it even fits her machine! Hooray!

Oh, and for me? Oh, was I a lucky one. I got this spectacular mini quilt, along with some awesome coasters (or, as she said, indoor frisbees for the kids) and pincushion from the delightful Linda at Surrounded by Scraps. Aren’t they awesome?

At any rate, I am actually quite excited about this new quilt. As I mentioned a month ago, it was a great intersection of inspirations, from Jeni’s Plus Quilt tutorial, to adorable fabric, to the excellent Tangerine Tango challenge.  Does this quilt exactly meet the judging criteria of the challenge? Probably not. But it was still a fun excuse to sew it up.

It’s not as though orange and purple is my go-to favorite color combination, but I love that it’s bold and saturated and a little unusual. My husband remarked that it seemed very Fall-like to him, which I can totally see.

The back is a great dark purple (Kona Berry), with one giant orange plus made from some leftover prints. Each square of the plus is 18″, so pretty darn large. As my husband said when I showed it to him, “subtle, honey. Very subtle.” Whatever, I’m not sure anything about this quilt is “subtle.”

I quilted in straight lines on either side of the seams in a bright orange (very Tangerine Tango) thread, and I love the way it shows up against the dark purple on the back.

The binding is scrappy, mostly using some leftover orange solids from the front (Kona Tangerine and Mango), with a couple pieces of orange prints. I machine-bound this one, and it turned out a bit neater than my first attempt on Triangle Madness. I think I may be a machine-binding convert. I have always loved sewing binding by hand, loved the finality and clean finish of the whole thing. But man, the speed and strength of machine binding is proving a huge draw.

The one bummer is that something appears to have bled in the wash, with this one nasty little mark on one of the lighter-orange pluses. This even with a color catcher! So frustrating.

Still, I’m really happy with this quilt. I highly recommend Jeni’s tutorial if you want a great-looking quilt, and a pretty generous one at that (~65×76), that works up nice and fast. I may very well do this one again.

Inspired by the Tangerine Tango challenge and some adorable bundles of Lizzy House’s newest line, Outfoxed, I decided to make an orange-and-plum quilt using Jeni’s Plus Quilt tutorial.  I cut the squares on Tuesday and the (not small!) quilt top was done by Sunday! Oh, man, that was super satisfying and fast! Now I just need to order a bit more fabric to make the back, and I may have another finished quilt on the books.

And speaking of fast finishes, last night I got it in my head that I needed a new little zippered pouch for my credit cards. A regular wallet just feels too bulky, I like to be able to throw something small in my jacket pocket when I’m dashing into Target  with three kids in tow.  A quick look at Cara’s tutorial, and about 10 minutes later I had this cute little gray and orange number.

It’s not perfect, but for a quick grab out of the stash and a few minutes at the sewing machine, it’s perfectly cute and functional. Win!

Any quick projects going on in your world, friends?

For those who might be newer to my little blog, this quilt started as something of an experiment way back in October of 2010. I went through my scrap bins one at a time, and cut one 5″ square from as many different fabrics as I could dig out. I had a goal of making 14 sets of half-square triangles each week, and would stop when I made it through the scrap bins.  Turns out, that netted me over 400 blocks from more than 200 fabrics. DANG.

And while there were a lot of starts and stops (and major life events) along the way, it is finally done.  I assembled the HSTs into 20 of these blocks, and then had enough left over that I added another ring around the entire quilt, just continuing the pattern. It ended up being approximately 72″ x 88″, or a pretty generous twin-sized quilt. If it’s not the largest I’ve ever made, then it’s close.

When assembling the blocks and, subsequently, the quilt top, I will tell you that I put as little thought into fabric placement as I could. I didn’t lay a single thing out ahead of time, I just grabbed the next HSTs out of the box and sewed them together. I only vetoed if the two fabrics were too similar to one another. That was it.

For the back, I had a handful of HSTs remaining, and damn if I wasn’t going to use all of them.  For the rest, I ended up pulling a rainbow of solids from my stash.  I meant it too look more “color wheel” than “pride flag,” but hey, it’s pretty whatever you want to call it.

The binding is solid medium gray. Given the complete randomness of the front, I could easily have used just about any fabric. But to narrow it down, I decided to go for something that would compliment the back, and the gray just kind of spoke to me.  In my haste to have this thing finally done, I decided to give machine binding a go. I am happy to say that it was pretty darn successful. I attached it to the back, first, and then sewed it down from the front.  The front, I think, looks really good. The back is a little iffy, but not terrible. Not too shabby for a first effort on a big quilt.

I am really, really happy with this quilt.  But while I’m perfectly pleased with the way it looks, I’m even more satisfied with it in the abstract. This was a departure for me – it was a process quilt. It was always about the process that got me to the end product, not the end product, itself.  I love that the whole thing is like my own personal I-Spy quilt, with bits and pieces from lots of old favorites. I love that the whole thing came from stash and scraps (aside from having to order more Kona Bone), and yet barely put a visible dent in either.

I would definitely like to do another process quilt. Something that pulls from scraps, something that is maybe a little daunting to think of in its entirety, but that I can do pieces here and there over time. String blocks, maybe? A warm-cool HST quilt? Log cabins or improv blocks? I don’t know. I’ve got other projects already started, so I’m going to turn this one over in my head for a while, but I do think I’ll do it again.

It’s frustrating in the sense that I feel like technical realities and limitations are getting in the way of what I would really like to do.  All I’m really doing is outlining the white parts, and all I really wanted to do was double- or triple-lines instead of single. Not a huge difference, I know. But it’s bumming me out that I simply don’t have the patience, strength, or endurance to quilt a little more densely.

The issue is that each traced diamond in the quilt is its own discrete shape. One does not flow into the next, nor does it move easily from one edge of the quilt to another. So I have to rotate the entire enormous thing through the I-thought-it-was-a-good-size-but-now-seems-laughably-small throat of my machine, for EVERY SINGLE ONE.

Truthfully, I seem to manage at most five or six blocks at a sitting, before I have to walk away and rest. I am man-handling this quilt so much, I made it a point to do some of the outer blocks earlier than I would normally do, just in case the spray adhesive gives out with all of this tugging and shoving.

It would have been exponentially faster to just do straight lines from edge to edge, or to free-motion quilt it. And yes, technically, I could have outlined those shapes using my free-motion foot instead of my walking foot, but I didn’t think I could get as clean a corner that way and I didn’t want it to look messy.

At any rate, I believe I’ve passed the halfway point, so hopefully I can buckle down and finish it (OMG, FINISH!) over the long weekend. I’m ready for this quilt to be done and to put it into use, and I’m itching to start a new project or two.

Fingers crossed that my next post will be about my first finish of the year… and that I don’t get completely paralyzed at the thought of choosing a binding fabric.

And, because it’s the first of the year and a good time for goals and lists, here are my my sewing goals for 2012. What are yours?

Finish Triangle Madness and Avian Therapy – These are two quilts that have been in progress for a while that just need to get DONE. Triangle Madness has, of course, been in progress for well over a year. I finished piecing the back today, and will hopefully find some floor space to baste it tomorrow. Then I just need to get over my fear of quilting it.

Avian Therapy has been in the works since the end of the summer, and was meant to be a very quick project. Unfortunately, it just kept getting forgotten. The top is done, I just need to come up with a back and finish it up.

Twin quilts for the twins – My big kids turn five this year, and I suspect will be making the move from toddler beds to twin-sized beds. New beds need new quilts!

Improv scrap quilts with the kids, if they’re interested – I am so inspired by the quilt Amanda Jean made with her daughter, I would love to try something similar with my kids. That is, if they want to.

Crib/toddler bed quilts to sell – OK, this one is a bit of a question mark.  But if my friends and relatives slow down on the baby-making front this year, I might have time to make some extra crib-sized quilts and would like to sell some. We’ll see.

Teacher gifts – My older kids will be in their third year of preschool/kindergarten next year, and will have been with the same teachers that whole time. I feel like a handmade gift is in order, but will I manage four quilts? (Two teachers in each of the two classrooms.) Time will tell. It might just be mug rugs.

Begin Project Forty – Two of my friends whose daughters have been recipients of baby quilts have made comments to the effect that they don’t ever want to give up their kids’ quilts. I think I may have said something about making quilts for them when they turned forty. Well, the first of my close friends hits the big 4-0 later this year… (thankfully, I’ve got a few years before a larger wave hits)

Get printed labels – I’ve been wanting to get some small, printed labels to use for some of my quilts and small projects, the ones that don’t necessarily want or need a full name and date on them.  Well, Amy’s post could not have been more timely, I think I’ll be placing an order soon!

Another scrap/process quilt, a la Triangle Madness – For as ridiculously long as Triangle Madness has been in progress, it has been a really good experience to make a process-oriented quilt.  So many of the ones I make have such a clear purpose and destination, it was a nice change of pace to have it be more about the act of choosing and working with the fabrics than about the finished item. (Though, I admit, I am psyched for the finished quilt, too.)  Plus, my scrap bins are getting awfully full, so it’s time to really raid them. Possibly a scrappy color-wheel plus quilt? We’ll see.

Go back to Sewing Summit! – Seriously, it was so much fun, I NEED to make it happen again. Fingers crossed.

Charity quilts – Project Linus and/or Quilts of Valor – I would like to make at least a couple of quilts to give to people who could use the comfort. Hoping I can do one or two Project Linus quilts, and maybe one for Quilts of Valor, too.