cat girl quilt and couched veggie tales quilt

I've been busy again sewing and quilting ( not house cleaning!)

This quilt is for someone special, can't tell who yet, if she reads this blog, oh well.

I bought this cat quilt pattern at the symposium this summer and made this into a girly quilt, I wanted it a little bigger than the pattern called for so I added more framing to each block etc.

so the first cat is looking straight ahead all calm!

I machine appliqued each block with a black and white variegated yli thread, it looked awesome!

Then just plain black and white around the eyes.

the 2nd cat ( or 2nd picture of the same cat?) looks a little more smug, something sneaky is going to happen

the 3rd cat has a bird in the corner and what's that hanging out of his mouth??

the birdies tail....oh oh

the 4th cat is winking and smiling, ha ha GOTCHA!

here you can see the tail sticking out.

Okay the next quilt!

one day on fabric.com these veggie tales fabrics were on sale, they are SO cute!

so I imported the fabrics into eq6 (now I have 7 and hear it's supposed to be so much easier- only just got it so haven't played much yet)

then I designed this star layout with the fabrics

I did a mitered border with this panel fabric and a scrappy binding from two fabrics.

when I sewed the top together, I had the idea that I wanted to try couching yarn onto this quilt, now long arming that is harder than on a domestic machine, but I manually did a wavy zig zag sort of line across the yarn.

I only couched the blocks on the outside of the layout, left the middle ones plain and quilted a curve from corner to corner on those

the backing has a label.

from a few left over fabrics I made these CUTE pot holders, I took the PANEL fabric and measured to see how big a square could be, then designed a log cabin around it in EQ to be max 8" I think.

I tried to sew just a 1/4" seam around thru all layers and turning it all inside out instead of sewing on a binding, it is THE way to go! then I turned it inside out, folded down the opening and stitched close to the edge all the way around, inside I just have one layer of insulbright and no other batting, maybe it's too thin? this was a good test.

Have you noticed what the veggie tales are doing?? CHORES? Bob the tomato is vacuuming on one, mopping on another, Larry has a plunger in one and a screw driver in the other.

the fabric with text reads BE A SUPER HELPER, ha! gotta teach the kids young!

productive day

This is the first day my kids are back in school and I didn't realize how productive I COULD be without them around.... though I do miss them a little bit.

here's a picture of them getting ready for school.

I also finished quilting the 2nd customer scrappy quilt!

this time the center fabric had fish and ocean stuff on it so on the border I quilted a VERY basic little fish and just meandering all the way around and then meandering on the blocks.

a little hard to tell right here

a little easier on the back

I also busted out my video camera and test -recorded some video of doing the fish and meandering, I did 3 different angles, we'll see if they turned out any good.

flags for PES

Last night was meet the teacher at my kids school, so finally I can let the secret out on a little project I had been working on....
48 FLAGS for each classroom for above the doors.

I "just" sewed the 48 flags and handed them over to the school, they stuck on the little pandas and teacher's names etc...

busy busy again

I have been busy busy again.

First I have two identical customer quilts like this "monster"

it's foundation pieced on muslin so it was quite hard to chug thru on the Voyager, but it turned out great I think.

the center of the block have this cool foresty dragonfly and bugs print, so on the large green border I quilted leaves, meandering, and the occasional dragonfly! just did the leaves and meandering on the blocks.

this is the backing, it was HUGE.

now a friend from church gave me this little quilt to quilt for her, I think it was 32" or so square...

I practiced more rulerwork, she had given me the book that the pattern was from to get inspired by, I followed some of the quilting in it, some I did not, hopefully she'll like it :-)

ruler work on the baskets, corner to corner curve on the triangles, then a flower feather coming out from the darker triangles.( hard to see)

more ruler work on the flowers

the border had feathers in blue going all the way around

to treat myself I got 3 KITS from connecting threads, they were on sale, so I got them for a great price! here they are all washed and ready to be ironed

this weekend is my son's birthday party, we're having a pool party, Bjorn wanted a pool cake, so I looked it up online and even made my own marshmallow fondant, hollowed out a round cake etc, covered it with the fondant.

grass for the bottom rectangle, then ready for the blue jello!

well... DISASTER, the first batch of jello made the fondant split and leak, so it leaked all over the place, I then made another batch and patched up the bottom with whatever left fondant I had in green yuck and tried again, well it leaked a tiny bit, but it's stiff now and my son loves it so that's all that matters.

final touches, gummy bears inside gummy lifesavers floating in the pool and candles on the cake.

of course I had to sew and quilt inbetween and couldn't wait to start this table runner kit.

hard to tell but I did very dense bubbles all over the white.

ruler work on the watermelons and the blue border, the red border I did a curve starting at the stripes and stopping at the next stripe

I made a scrappy backing for all leftovers, I probably only have a handful of tiny scraps leftover, now that's SAVING!

cool how the quilting looks from the back!

another project I wanted to try is couching! this is my first try at it.

I had designed this simple quilt with veggie tales fabrics from fabric.com and yarn from walmart...

I also wanted to share this link!

a friend from the hinterberg yahoo group- Vanessa who also has a blog here, made it on TV! she also won the next up youtube competition earlier this year, this girl is going places!!

I do want to do more youtube videos too with my quilting, what do you think? I actually got a mini tripod last night so I just need to practice and have fun, I do LOVE what I do...

check out the link

http://craftygemini.blogspot.com/2011/08/my-first-live-television-interview.html

pink quilt and patriotic quilt

I finally got around to finishing these two quilts, especially the red white and blue one, I had the top done for a while and the backing I made a scrappy one but didn't really like it, then I remembered I had lots of leftover fabrics and strips sewn together from making the top so I used every bit of it and made the backing plus another blue and white fabric.

so here's the pink baby kaleidoscope quilt done and bound.

still not telling who it's for.

I quilted some spiral meandering sort of

the backing fabric was so cool!

here's the red white and blue twist on bargello patriotic quilt done

look at the funky backing, that was kind of fun to make.

I'm starting to get a little backed up with customer quilts, my kids start school again in 10 days, but in 6 days is my son's birthday, so I'll be in birthday party planning mode.

not much time to quilt!? we'll see

different projects baby quilt, christmas table runner, pastel birdie quilt top, customer quilt

with my church doing VBS last week AND I had a big customer quilt on the frame to complete, I still managed to make some "stuff" since last time I posted.

here's pics of a customer's quilt I finished this thing was huge, well about a queen size, lots of custom dense feathers, I think it turned out great and she loved it too :-)

it worked out that there was uneven amounts of rows or spaces between the rows, so I alternated which way the feathers should go, at the ends I split the feather into two, at the beginning I did a little swirl to begin the spine for the feather

there was also feathers on the border which on the sides ran into the "brown/burgundy" background, at the top and bottom were these flying geese units where I quilted a curve from corner to corner

I also did a corner to coner curve on the uneven nine patches, doing it on large squares are actually hard, the line tend to get wonky sometimes, but these turned out fine I think.

a view from the back

this is a kaleidoscope baby girl quilt for a friend ( SHH! don't tell her)

I finished quilting it yesterday and will post pictures of that later.

another top I made from FQs I got from JoAnns a few weeks ago on sale.

this was a pattern from a book I think is called FAST and FUN quilts from fat quarters, you lay out FQs and cut them into lots of little pieces, but AGAIN in a book like this it then said that a FQ is 20 x 22" when is it ever that??? luckily this was a pattern that had plenty of leftovers- or so it said in the book, and by me changing a few things around I had very little left overs. I used kona white for the sashing.

the marblelized brown/tan came with the bundle of fabrics with these cute muted colors of fabrics showing bird houses and nests and birch trees, I think I got 2 packs of pre-bundles FQs each having 5 in it, I think I used 7 for the center of the quilt and the last 3 to cut up for the border.

okay maybe it was 4 for the border...

After the craft show a few weeks ago I went to a local quilt store- a new one in town in apex called whistle stop, they had a sale and I saw this cute christmas fabric that I figured I'd try to make into a one block wonder table runner, so this is the layout i came up with after i sewed most of the triangles together, i have the center of the top already made but I'm missing a green or red fabric for a skinny border and then I have more of the main fabric for an outer border.... we'll see, I have enough time :-) 4 months and 2 weeks until christmas?!