Thursday, April 24, 2014

Playing With Fabric

I cannot believe it has been 2 weeks since my last post. I have been extra tired as I approach the end of my pregnancy and have been focusing more on what I need to do to prep the house for baby's arrival. But I have been missing quilting. I still tried to quilt though. I continued to work out my love-hate relationship with the bluebird quilt. I got through piecing all 13 star blocks. 


Turns out I was really inaccurate at everything when I was first starting out. Love knowing that I am now more skilled and a lot more precise (I think after pulling this project out again, I may even consider myself more intermediate now)! But, after piecing these 13 blocks, I have also concluded that there is no love here. It is all hate. 


Don't get me wrong, love the stars, just hating the stress of dealing with such inaccurate pieces. So I think it will be time to take the fabric and try to turn into something else instead of the original quilt that I had planned on. Back to the drawing board, or rather my quilting sketch book. 


Oh my, this book is where I keep all my ideas and yet it is so uninspiring. And here is where I realized that my nesting is kicking in. Suddenly everything in the house is needing improving. Including my sketch book. So at 10 p.m. in the evening one night I pulled out some fabric and a glue gun and got to work. 


Much better, wouldn't you agree? Now it is something pretty to look at while designing pretty quilt ideas. I am still thinking that I might use some fabric paint to paint something pretty on the front but I am still debating. But I did keep playing with fabric because now that my quilt book looked so pretty I knew that my free motion quilting sketch book was looking really shabby in comparison. This time I pulled out some felt to play with and I must say, I am even happier with how the second sketch book turned out. 


I like the second one so much that I nearly went back and ripped off all the fabric off the first book so I could do it over with some fun embossed felt but then I told myself that would be a huge waste of fabric. So instead, I will just work on a third book this week for my embroidery sketches! And now I will be inspired to quickly fill up the quilt idea book so I can start a new sketch book once I am out of pages. 

The nesting stemmed into every area of my house. The biggest being the kids' room. After a 10 hour day of cleaning, laundry and re-organizing, I can finally say that their room is ready. Plus I finished the final decorative square for above the baby's crib. 


No, there is no random pink just slicing through the printed fabric. I have used photo editing to cover up the baby's name since it is still a surprise. But I did spend a lot of time hand embroidering the elephant and personalizing it with her name. 


I am really happy with how each section of the room turned out. I wanted the kids to feel like they had their own personal areas despite sharing a room and I think it worked out very nicely! Of course, upon finishing their room I realized I should probably start organizing what I want to pack for the hospital. Which led to picking the baby's coming home outfit which led to the realization that she needed something pretty to put on her head. So out came some ribbon to match her outfit and I got to sewing. 


There is velcro on the back of the flower so I can switch it from headbands to hats depending on weather and such. Of course, then I worried that the flower could possibly be too big . . . so I made a complimenting one a bit smaller just in case. 


I am loving these ribbon flowers! If I have enough energy this weekend I may have to go to the craft store to see if they have any other super cute ribbon to turn into flowers for her. Or for anything for that matter . . . they could be super cute on other fabric projects too! And because I like variety, I also took some time to make a smaller version of the dahlias that are above the crib for on a headband as well. 


I hope to squeeze in some actual quilting this weekend but I also have a big home decor project planned and I would love to make a few more flowers that can be switched out to match baby outfits! Boy do I hope the ultrasounds were accurate in predicting the gender!!! 

Until next time . . . happy quilting!   :)

1 comment:

  1. You might try 'framing' those blocks so that they all end up the same size, then it won't matter if they weren't pieced so well. Cute headbands.

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