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Little Boy Blue
Here is the finished quilt for our friends’ little boy due any minute now. I love the way it turned out, so simple but really bright and colorful. This is such an easy quilt to make with stash fabric and really doesn’t take long at all. I kept the quilting simple with two parallel lines on either side of each horizontal seam. I also cheated by buying pre-made bias tape, which is similar to the pre-made quilt binding I have used before but the bias tape is more narrow. It looks fantastic and is so quick and easy, and for someone whose craft time is based solely around the nap time of a 6 week-old baby, a gal’s got to do what a gal’s got to do to...
Read MoreBack In The Saddle
I can’t believe that it has been almost two months since my last post, which means that it has been almost two months since my last sewing project. A lot has happened since, most importantly, the arrival of a very cute little baby girl on November 1. We have spent the past month getting to know each other and not getting a lot of sleep. The little lady is starting to take some nice daytime naps and I jumped on the chance to get back on my sewing machine. We have some wonderful friends in Amsterdam who are expecting a little baby boy any day now. I wanted to make the little guy something special and settled on a new variation of the last quilt I made. It is such an...
Read MoreLittle Dresses for Little Girls
It seems to be the year when all the babies being born in my life are little girls. And I have no problem with that, at all. Of course I would love any boy baby as well, but little girls are so much easier to make things for. I whipped a couple of dresses for our friends’ new daughter and for a friend expecting her first daughter in the Spring, just to get her excited. The pattern is Simplicity Newlook 6576. I love this pattern so much. It is super easy to make because there are only four pattern pieces to cut, maybe five, depending on how you want to finish the hem. I have tried a bunch of different patterns and have found that using a lining for the bust of the...
Read MoreWorking My Way Down The List
I actually have three running lists of things to do before having this baby. I could consolidate them but it makes me feel more sane if they are divided up by category, and naturally, one category is sewing projects. As I have lamented before, the early pregnancy and move really cramped my sewing style. Now that I am up and running, I only have a few more weeks to get caught up on my projects, including making some baby quilts for some newborn friends. This quilt was inspired by a post from Pink Chalk Studio of a picture of a quilt she saw at the Spring Quilt Market. The post and image were tagged immediately and squirreled away as inspiration. Since I don’t have a...
Read MoreFun With Furniture, Part 2
My in-laws are superstars. They have a great eye for furniture, great bargaining skills and love to share whatever they find with me! They picked up this chair for me recently and it just blew me away. It is such a cool piece and needed a little work, which is exactly the sort of thing I want to get my hands on. My father-in-law fixed the crack in the side so well you can’t even tell there was ever a problem but the upholstery needed to be redone. It was tired and the burlap texture was just too much for my cat to resist scratching. I have been reading upholstery books and watching online tutorials about how to do more advanced upholstery over the past couple of...
Read MoreFun With Furniture, Part 1
Redoing furniture has been an interest of mine for a long while. I was able to redo some chairs and a bench back in NYC, but that was about the extent of what I could in my tiny apartment. But now that I am out of the city, with access to all this great, really crazy inexpensive furniture that is just crying out to be redone and the space to finally work, I am finally getting to almost fully embrace my dream of redoing furniture to my heart’s content. (I say almost because I am almost 9 months pregnant so I am slightly hindered by a giant belly). Here is my first project – the bench. My in-laws picked this up at a garage sale and I quickly snatched it up...
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