girl, interrupted

i've been a little too quilty in my blog posts of late, so to change things up a bit i thought i'd share with you a little something special.

look who Peanut got to meet the other day!

another favorite new friend...

it was my youngest daughter's very first trip to Disney and she had an absolute ball.  she loved every single minute of it, even those 60 or so minutes she was zonked out in her stroller, and i can't wait to take her back for more!  (so glad her daddy bought annual passes - one of the few perks of living in florida.)

it was extra nice to be able to go before the thanksgiving week crowds moved in.  the longest line we waited in all day was at the counter of the burger restaurant where we ate lunch.

next week we may try to check out Animal Kingdom since none of us has been there yet. 

p.s. did ya see the super cute mickey mouse pillowcase dress i made for Peanut?  love. it.

a finished quilt and new fabric

i finished my son's patchwork hand-tied quilt a while ago, i just never got around to taking photos of it and, since it was laying on the sofa this morning i thought, what better time than now?

kinda hard to see, i know - cell phone pics - but it's various shades of blue mixed with white squares (this was done in the same pattern as my daughter's quilt); the backing is and blue, white and dark green striped sheet and the binding is a dark green with lighter green flecks - it really brings out the bits of green in some of the squares on the front as well as the striping on the back.  this quilt is already getting used lots :)

these are three of the fabrics that i chose from the fat quarter shop to use as the backing for some holiday pillows for my family room...

and these are the three fabrics i chose for the fronts of the pillows...

and i chose these to cut up and send in for an I Spy swap over at the fabric stash club.



as soon as i get the pillows finished (i'm hoping to get started on them today, but i need to get some trims first), i'll post photos.

a pillow for my princess

 several months ago i made a couple of matching dog beds for my beagle and my bassett.  they're brown with flat, white piping and their names are appliqued on the front (though they rarely sleep in "their" bed) and they're kept in the dogs' room, which is attached to our laundry room. 

the dogs are quite happy with them.

so is my youngest daughter.  if i'm doing laundry, there's a 50/50 chance that she's laying on one of the dog beds, rolling around (laughing at me for freaking out) in all the dog hair, drool, blech...

so i needed to make her a giant pillow of her own to roll around (sans dog hair and drool).

yes, i made my toddler a dog bed.

she's pretty happy with it.

(i apologize for the poor quality of the photos; my camera's in the shop at the moment)

i used red & pink michael miller ta dot fabric and white piping i picked up at wal-mart and filled it with an entire 2 lb bag of polyfil. 

from a sewing perspective, it's not the most perfect thing i've ever made - i had a rough time getting the piping sewn in and it shows. 

does anyone have any tips on sewing with piping to make it easier?  i have a cat bed to make (not that the cat will ever use it) and i'd like to add some piping to that as well.

holy crap!

ok, so as you know, i entered my first quilt into the Blogger's Quilt Festival over at Amy's Creative Side. 

i got lots of great comments and found lots of great blogs i didn't know about - and that's all i was hoping for.

so imagine my surprise when i got an e-mail from Amy herownself telling me i'd won a $50 gift certificate to the Fat Quarter Shop!!!

seriously?!?!?  i never win anything! 

it didn't take me long to start filling up my shopping cart with christmasy fabrics to make pillows for my home - all from the Park Avenue and Wintergraphix III collections.

as soon as i get the pillows all sewn up, i'll take photos and post them for you to see.  (assuming, of course, that my camera is back from the shop by then - dreaded E18 error.)

i have a few other projects i've finished up recently that i can't wait to show you, too.

quilting in circles: BQF

i'm participating in my first Blogger's Quilt Festival over at Amy's Creative Side, and we are asked to post a new entry on our blog about a quilt and the story behind it - so i'm going to apologize to my regular readers about the redundancy because it wasn't that long ago that i posted about this very quilt...

i've only been quilting for about year and in that time, i have completed three quilts - one that's completely hand quilted and two that are hand tied.  i'm not big on machine quilting - i just personally prefer the process and the finished look of hand quilting.  it's a slow process, for sure, but totally worth it to me.

being the simple design that it is, and being a crib sized quilt, it only took me about an hour or two to piece the top of this quilt together.  the quilting, on the other hand, took me nearly 6 months to complete.  i spent anywhere from 1-3 hours per night, off and on, hand stitching.  i followed the circular pattern on my backing fabric for two reasons:  1) it was a built in pattern - no drawing or designing required; and 2) i thought the circles were a nice counterpart to the hard angles on the front of the quilt.

i chose to make this quilt in a rainbow palette because i'm hoping that my youngest daughter (the recipient of this quilt) will pass it down to her children - and i figured a rainbow palette is fairly gender neutral, at least for babies.



immediately after i finished this quilt i was relieved to finally be done with it....for about a week...then i started looking for another quilting project.

domestic diva that i am...

i've finished my first ever, have never done one of these before, holy crap i can't believe i finished it quilt.

for those of you into this sort of thing, i didn't use any particular pattern for the quilt top (though i did use oh fransson's paintbox quilt as inspiration for the design). all of the fabrics were scraps i had laying around, except for the back and the binding (and i have no idea who the fabrics were made by, sorry!).

i followed the circle patterns on the backing fabric as my quilt pattern (just made sense, ya know?) and since i was hand quilting the entire thing, it took freakin' forever. 

six months, give or take.

but totally worth it, don't ya think?

and i chose to use this rainbow palette because it's gender neutral (for babies, anyway) so that my daughter  can pass it down to her children someday.

close up of stitches

i just love it.  and truth be told, i'm so damn glad it's done.

next up?  i'm trying my hand at hand tying quilts.  i'm using my husband's grandmother(who passed away last september)'s old clothes and housecoats to make memory quilts for all of her great-grandchildren.