Blankie 911!

D came home last weekend and told me he needed a blanket for his nephew- for Thanksgiving- which was then just under a week and a half away. So, I had to come up with a pattern that was simple enough to get finished in a week. I remembered the design of these quilts we saw on the "loft" beds at a cabin we stayed at on vacation, which were pretty, but simply pieced, and I ran with that. Picked out fabric on Monday, started cutting in the next day or two, went out for D's birthday on Thursday, started catching a cold Friday, remembered at the LAST MINUTE I had a one-day workshop class at Lillstreet on Saturday, and still managed to have all the pieces cut out, pieced into squares (with a big X through all thicknesses) and put back together by 8pm on Sunday. I ran it through the washer and drier this evening, and it's all set to travel with us tomorrow. I don't *love* the rough and raw edges, and probably won't make a regular practice of it, but it was fun to break the rules and let them fray out in the open just once.

Purple Blankie

Purple hand-me-down yarn from my Mom, matched with a purple-teal-magenta variegated yarn that had caught my eye at JoAnn's a while ago. I tried to take a picture of the stitch pattern, but Kitty decided that was the perfect moment for a kneadability test.

Also my camera batteries decided to be dead when I grabbed my camera this morning- so cruddy phone photos it is.

Yellow Blankie

My mom stuck me with a big bag of canary yellow yarn, and this is what I did with it:

Blue and Yellow Nine-Patch (with Rick Rack!!)

Pink & Purple Chunky Afghan

Baby Quilt- February

Baby Quilt- Pink

I had a three-day weekend over Martin Luther King Day, and wanted to do something special! I haven't done a lot of sewing in the last couple years (at least, I feel like I could be doing more, based on the amount of fabric in my closet), so I decided to use up some of my stash and make a small crib sized quilt. It's a pretty simple design- I figured out the width of the blanket, and what widths of fabric strips could comprise the width of square. I then made several very long strips, which I sewed to each other to make one very long 18" wide rectangle, and cut it down at 18" intervals to make squares. I turned a couple squares, and voila! I used about half of twin-sized sheet to make the flat back, and stitched yarn ties in rows along the widest strips (which, yes, still need to be trimmed).

I took a quilting class last fall, where I had someone show me how to make a binding at home, and how to miter the corners on the binding-one of the more valuable things I learned in class, as reading about it in books was not working out for me! This was the first time after class I attempted my own binding, made from the same sheet as the back fabric, and mitered corners, as well as hand-stitching the binding on the backside (I really had no idea what I was doing with factory-made binding, and am inherently lazy- the easiest solution was to machine sew both the front, and then the back). I am so glad I learned that! The binding on this quilt turned out miles ahead of the binding on any other quilt project I've done before.