A couple things I've made lately.
Inspired by this on pinterest:
I made a quilt for our friend Fran who is expecting a little boy. I thought I was going to have to miss her shower, so I wanted to make her something really special. It turns out I get to go anyway. So bonus for Fran!
One nice thing was I had a lot of blue fabrics from another quilt project I did a couple years ago, so I didn't buy more than $16 of supplies.
I didn't have a pattern, I just kinda cut up triangles, sewed them together, then laid out my pattern so it wouldn't be too much of the same color in one spot, and kept sewing
Many hours later it was all sewn and ready for the edging
little mistakes like this always seem to happen :(, but a cute neutral gray soft backing.
all done!
Somehow I didn't notice until the end that her color gradating was from top to bottom and mine is from side to side. So I actually like hers better. And hers is a little bigger. But oh well, lesson learned, and just a cute little blanket to throw down and let baby play. August was proud of me.
One more thing I made was a
sweet little baby bonnet from a pattern I found online for our friends from our Apologetics class having their first baby.
Once again using mostly scrap fabric from old pillowcases I used back in massage school. I worked on it over a couple bedtimes so I don't know how long it took exactly, not too long. It was the 0-3 month size so August's head is way too big to test it out. Hopefully they will have a cat-sized headed baby girl :) September approved!
However, I was reminded that one is limited by the selection of their fabric store. Jo Ann Fabrics did not have a single thing that looked old and faded, and didn't have much by way of large floral prints either. But I did really like this pink and yellow floral pattern, and then picked some other fabrics in corresponding colors.
Step one, washing the fabrics and the dreaded ironing.
Then cutting the squares and sewing them together. This goes pretty quickly when just doing squares.
I don't know why I laid this out and thought it was ok. I ended up having to rip out a bunch of my seams so I could switch the order around to a pattern I liked better.
Sewed on the soft pink velvety fabric for the border.
I used an old soft creamy yellow sheet for my back fabric and sandwiched in the quilting material. Then held down the edges so I could pin and do my machine quilting to sew all 3 layers together. Professional quilters have this awesome table for this purpose, but people like me use the floor!
Trimmed.
Sewing all the lines.
The last step was folding over the velvet part over the back and hand sewing to avoid a visible stitch. This part was a pain and literally painful to the fingers to poke through all the layers. It took several episodes of watching something and stitching all 4 sides. I'm actually not super happy with how it ended up looking kind of pulled there on the sides, but I'm not sure how I could've done it any better.
Here it is all finished.
The back.
Part of me still likes the other girl's more, but I like that mine is handmade by me and I'm sure it will be fine. It is soft and pretty. I really do love that floral print so much I had my mom buy a yard and she is going to make me a new carseat cover out of the same material. So that's nice of her, she had made one for August and I didn't think she'd mind being asked to make a second. 4 more months!
