A New Friend for Halloween

I LOVE Halloween, and love decorating for it.  I saw a few tutorials for an awesome monster wreath and decided to give it a try!   This video uses less fabric and is definitely just for a wreath, but this tutorial could also make a cute throw pillow.  Here's my take:

We only put on two eyes because Allison thought more eyes would be "too scary for the little kids."  I didn't use any hot glue, just lots of pins!  Instead of ping pong balls I cut a styrofoam ball in half for the eyes and just pinned them to the styrofoam wreath form.  Then I stretched the eye slits around the balls and pinned those down.  I suppose if someone looked really closely they could see the pins, but I'm not sweating it.

I love him, and I think he needs a name.  He reminds me of these guys, who were always a favorite!

I won!!

What a great birthday surprise!!!  I just won two charm packs of City Weekend by Oliver + S.  I won them from the Talk About Fabric forum- You should check it out.  They compile all the fabric giveaways they find in the blogosphere and host giveaways of their own, too! This week's giveaway is for five fat quarters of Castle Peeps.

Image from http://www.oliverands.com/

How to Train Your Dragon

Looks like I'm going to be venturing into sewing with vinyl and spikes this Halloween!  Allison wants to be Astrid from How to Train Your Dragon.  I think this one will be fun!

And Lizzie?  She'll be the dragon, of course!

McCall's 2335

Forgotten Bags

Here's a bag I made for my mom last Christmas that I somehow never posted!  It's the Melly & Me Black Forest bag.

And here's one I made for my friend Carrie.  This one is the Phoebe bag, a free tutorial from ArtsyCraftyBabe.  I sized it up by a few inches all around and left off the closure tab.  I also made her daughter a matching Buttercup bag, but I didn't get a picture of that one.

Can you tell I love Denyse Schmidt's County Fair line?

Happy Birthday to ME!!!

My birthday is coming up soon, and I think my sewing habit has really made an impression on my husband's family!  My father in law and his wife got me a gift card to Joann, my mother in law is giving me money for fabric, and my husband's aunt got me... THESE!

The peeking girls weren't part of the gift.

The New Handmade  by Cassie Barden

City Quilts by Cherri House

Carefree Clothes for Girls by Junko Okawa

Fit for Real People by Pati Palmer   (Cannot BELIEVE it has taken me so long to add this to my library!)

Amy Butler's Style Stitches

AND the Oliver + S School Days Jacket pattern!!!

I can't wait to get started!!!

Mini Table Topper Quilt

I've spent the last few days working on my blocks for the Fat Quarterly Quilt Along.  It's coming along nicely, but boy is it repetitive!  So yesterday I decided to work on something different for a while.  I have a cheapo little lime green side table that has seen better days.  The top is chipped, and without something to break it up, the color is a little bit retina-searing.  So I decided to use a few pieces from my Park Slope charm pack and I threw this little topper together!  I got it cut, pieced, basted, quilted and bound in a total of maybe two hours, tops.  Lots of skill-practice and almost-instant gratification.  I can definitely see the appeal of mini quilts!

Butterick 5319- A dress for me!

I finished this dress a few months ago, and kept waiting for a chance to get decent pictures of it before I posted.  Well, that's just not going to happen!  And soon it will be WAY too cold here in Wisconsin to put this dress on, even for a moment for pictures.  So I'm just going to go with what I've got!

It's Butterick 5319 in a linen blend.  I wore it to my cousin's wedding and it was cool and comfy all night, even while chasing my wild girls all over the dance floor!

Here's most of the dress, you can see I added a band to the bottom to add some length.  I left off the pockets and I wish I'd bitten the bullet and made them work, it would have been handy to have a place for my camera.

If you want to see more, I've got a horribly lit, fingerprints on the lens thanks to my kids picture here. 

Speaking of my girls, I just cannot resist sharing these pictures.  I didn't make these dresses (I ran out of time after making my own dress!), and I didn't take these pictures (my cousin did, aren't they great??).

Nana's Quilt- Finished!

I ended up just doing straight line quilting.  I was just too scared to venture into quilting in and around the flags or anything too complicated.  This is my second finished quilt and I made my own binding this time- It was not as scary as I thought it would be, and I bound the whole thing while watching football this weekend! 

The back is green with large white polka dots.  You can see a bit of that here.



I'm going to mail it off today, only about a month after her 91st birthday!  Hope she likes it!

A Quilt for Nana

After finding out that my awesome Nana might be a little bit jealous of Pop Pop's Sweden quilt, I set to work making one celebrating her Irish and Italian heritage. Here's the front, the back will be green with large white polka dots. The layout was inspired by Amy's amazing Ireland quilt at Diary of a Quilter.

Now I need some help. This will only be the second quilt I've completed, and I'm stumped! I'm not sure how I should quilt this and what color thread I should quilt it with. On Pop Pop's I just did straight line quilting horizontally and vertically, but I don't think that will work here since the flags aren't in even rows/columns. Help! Please keep in mind I am VERY new at quilting and working with a temperamental machine, so fancy stuff like stippling or pebbles are probably beyond my skill set at this point!

Yes, I know the flags are upside down here! But if I rotate the picture the perspective is all screwy.

Here's a closer picture so you can see the fabrics better. The red, white, green and orange have white pin dots, and the beige is sort of a tiny cobblestone print.

A Quilt for Pop Pop

We're home! The trip went very well, we all had a blast, and I even managed to do a little sewing. I made a little skirt and appliqued shirt for my cousin's daughter's first birthday. I made it on my Mom's machine she uses for scrapbooking! It's a basic little Kenmore but I actually really liked it! If I ever have need for a small traveling machine, I'll be keeping it in mind.
The big project was that Sweden quilt I was making for my Pop Pop. I finished the binding and I am so glad I'm over that "first time" hurdle. It wasn't really as bad as I had built it up to be, and I finished it in a couple of nights. I think Pop Pop is really happy with it. I had it ready just in time for him to return from a visit to Sweden.

I didn't do a lot of quilting on it, and I like the look- If you click on the picture you can see where I quilted, they are basically straight lines horizontally and vertically just inside the yellow stripes and on the edges and middles of the white parts. It's all Kona cotton, and the back is a blue and yellow stripe.

In other news, I picked up (another) vintage sewing machine at a garage sale today! It's super cool, a Universal Zig Zag, and with a little sprucing up I think it will be a great machine. It came with a few extra feet, it's in a table, it has its original instruction manual as well as the cutest little hand drawn threading instructions. It needs a new belt for sure, and a good oiling and cleaning, but get this... It was FIVE DOLLARS! A bargain, I'd say! Once I get her cleaned up I'll post some pictures.

I came home with a to-sew list a mile long, so hopefully I'll have lots to share in the coming weeks. Hope you're having a lovely summer (or winter for my Southern Hemisphere friends!)