Wednesday, July 26, 2017

Finished Quilt

The baby quilt is done!

Once I decided how I wanted it to look, it took far less time than I had expected.

It's a 9 block quilt, I'd call it "log cabin inspired" more than anything, since there's a central motif and the pieces around it are more or less mirroring the idea of a log cabin quilt.

But it's not exactly one, which is about what I'd expect from me.

Because not all the blocks were the same size, and because I wanted to use some of the other pieces of clothing that didn't make it into the blocks, I did strips in between each block and around the edges.  It used up a bit more fabric and added a few more prints to the mix.

I have to give props to a mom who dresses her child in such nicely coordinating colors.  There were literally only a few pieces I didn't use, and most of them would have still worked.

When I sent her a progress picture and told her I was going to back it in a neutral fabric I had on hand, she was fine with that.  We also decided on a light gray binding, which was from a gray t-shirt I had in my stash for that purpose.

All the years that I thought I didn't need a serger.  I could kick myself, except then I'd have to take my foot off the pedal of my serger.  Because every piece of fabric in this is a knit, this entire quilt was assembled with my serger.

I think my favorite bit is the central LOVE panel.  It was two sides of a jacket with a separating zipper.  I reinforced it before cutting, removed enough of the zipper top and bottom to be able to run it through the machine without hurting anything, and kept it as is.  I could have probably picked out the zipper and sewn the fabric together, but to me that would have changed the point of the piece -- it's meant to be Katy's outgrown baby clothes, and losing the zipper would, to me, lose some of that.


Tuesday, July 18, 2017

Chicken Update

A little chicken video to start your day.  The girls like blueberries, particularly Frankie, who quite literally swallows them whole.

She's is still somewhat broody, but I've been messing with her schedule lately, feeding them either early or late, and the inconvenience gets her up out of her corner and pacing.  I'm hoping that if she keeps getting up, she'll forget to go back down.

In other chicken weirdness, these two, unlike their predecessors, have decided to spend warm summer nights downstairs in the coop instead of sleeping up in the roost.  They already decided to go their own way and ignore the perch, but now they sleep in the straw near the exhaust fan.

It probably feels good, but the night that a raccoon decides to come calling, those birds are going to get the fright of their lives.


Monday, July 3, 2017

Baby Clothes Baby Quilt

Center squares - images from tiny shirts and jackets
Last month, I was contacted by a mom who had purchased one of my receiving blanket bears.  She and I had talked after the bear's arrival about doing something else, but the project never happened.

When she contacted me this time, she was ready.  She had been cleaning out her baby's clothes, she said, to give to a friend who was expecting, and there was a pile of stuff she just couldn't bear to give away.  Would I be able to make a quilt out of her little one's outgrown clothing?

But of course!

The clothes arrived last week, a whole copy paper box full, in bags labeled 1, 2 and 3 (order of importance for use).  I didn't cut up everything right away, because I'll either return or donate the unused pieces, but I ended up using all the pieces in bag 1, a good bit of bag 2, and some of bag 3, because I needed some solid colors to break up all the prints.

Katie trying to tell me to take a break.
Originally I had wanted to do something a little more free-form, like the baby clothes stockings I do, but then I saw that a lot of her pieces were infant-sized and I wasn't really going to be able to get a lot of pieces out of them.  So after I found 8 shirts with writing a central motif, I embroidered a 9th piece with the baby's name, and cut everything else into 2" wide strips.

It's sort of a bastardized log cabin, but not really.  Most of the central squares were 4", but a few of them were slightly off.  I put the largest in the center and worked outwards, inserting extra strips to make things line up.  The central "Love" square still has a zipper down the center (edges removed before serging and then anchored from behind so it doesn't unzip).

It's not quite done.  I gave it a good pressing after the last photo here, and now I'm looking around for backing fabric.  She didn't send anything large enough for that, so if she doesn't have any objection, I'm going to use a section of ivory sheet that I had on my shelf for this purpose.   Not sure yet if this quilt is going to get stitched or tied; it's small enough (32x32) that I could get it through the machine with minimal swearing.

Finished photos to come, hopefully by the end of the week.