threads of my life woven together
I really should start this post in January and add to it as soon as I finish a project. As it is, I’m probably six months earlier than I usually am!
May Wonky Quilt Bee Blocks
Wonky Quilt Bee – Polroid Blocks
Wonky Quilt Bee – January – Star Blocks
Sew Modern Bee – April
I got the ingenious idea to rearrange the boys' room the other day. It's not that I needed something else to do, but rather their room needed more floor space. With a twin bed and a crib, there wasn't much room to move.
There is a baby gate on the door to keep Liam in his room when he's trying to go to sleep at nap and bed times. Prior to the rearrangement, the crib was next to the door and we would bungee the gate to the crib to keep it open. It wasn't the safest arrangement, but it worked. Now, the crib is on the other side of the room, so I need a new door stop to keep the gate open during non-nap-times.
The door stop is made using this tutorial from Oh, Fransson!. I remember seeing it ages ago and I finally had a reason to make it.
Overall, it's a good tutorial. I used an invisible zipper, only because it's what I had on hand. The tutorial has you cut into the corners before you sew them to make it square. I followed the tutorial, but in retrospect, I wouldn't have cut the corner until I'd sewing across it to square it. It would have help in not "accidentally" pulling off the zipper pull, which my kind husband spent 10 minutes putting back on because I was too frustrated to do it myself after a no-nap day!
Now, we can keep the baby gate open safely. However, the toddler still climbs all over every pieces of furniture in the room, including standing on top of a 5.5 foot dresser and removing the ABC cards that are ceiling height. Ugh!
Where do you purchase your basic sewing supplies?
I'm finding it more and more difficult to physically go to Joann's to get basic things, like rotary cutting blades. Yet, it's hard to beat their price! I just ordered some from Amazon, but couldn't find needles with the free shipping option.
Going shopping with two kids, one being a toddler who like to explore (and especially likes to pull beads off their strings) is hard. I'm finding it much easier to order things online, but I really need the cost to equal the convenience.
Oh, and I'm finally getting onto the Instagram bandwagon, so I'll probably be uploading more iPhone photos. Not the best quailty, but you can do cool things with them!
Does it ever take you five days to realize you didn't sew something right? Yeah. That's how long it took me to realize I'd reversed the direction of four of these blocks.
Luckily, this is just a test block and I realized it before I'd sewn together the entire quilt. I'm sure I would have noticed it eventually, as the quilt blocks aren't sewing together in the same way as this 20 x 20 sample block. But, still, you'd think I'd have noticed earlier!
I'm still working on the quilt. It's going a bit slower than I thought it would. I have the sewing for all the 4×4 blocks done and need to trim them up this weekend.
Sewing and blogging may slow down for the next few weeks. I went back to work yesterday and have a bunch of end-of-the-school-year things to do. I'm a bit stressed out by it, but trying to compartmentalize it as best I can.
I also found out yesterday, my first day back at work, that next year I'm teaching a 1/2 combo class. Ugh. I've taught kindergarten for the past three years and have become super comfortable with it. That has its pluses and minuses. I taught upper grades for 6 years, too. I'm worried about the 1/2 combo and was up until midnight last night thinking about it. As the time nears I'll figure it all out. I'm still processing it all though and my brain won't stop!
"There's an app for that," my husband and I joke all the time. And, most of time it's true or at least someone should invent an app for that.
Lynne over at Lily Quilts discovered an application, TouchDraw, which is a vector based drawing application. It works great for drawing quilt designs. She's done a couple tutorials on how to use the application specifically for designing quilt blocks and quilts.
I played around with it a bit and came up with a few designs.
The first is a Kaleidoscope block and quilt. Last year, I started working on a Kaleidoscope quilt. It's stll in process, but I was (with help from Lynne) able to design a block and quilt based on the colors I'm using in the quilt. It took quite a bit of trial and error to figure out how to create the triangles.
Then I started playing around with the application a bit more and designed this block:
Which in turn, led to this quilt:
Or with a little bit of playing around, this quilt:
As you can tell, I'm enjoying this app. It's pretty intuitive. As I learn different processes, I'm able to build on that knowledge and "figure out" how to do something else. The possibilities are endless.
How do you design blocks and quilts? What tools have you found useful? I'm always up for sharing knowledge and bouncing ideas of one another.
I managed to finish all of my bee blocks for May well before the end of the month. It helps when two boys nap at the same time!
The first set, for the Sew Modern Bee, I forgot to photograph. Although I’ve found time to sew and mail packages, I haven’t always remembered to take photos! Luckily, the queen been photographed them when she received the package. Rather than repost her photos, I’ll link you over to the flickr pages. Block 1 and block 2. The blocks are Garden Fence, from this tutorial. They were super easy to make, especially since all the fabric was already cut for us!
The second set of blocks were for the Wonky Quilt Bee. For this month, the queen bee asked for large bear paws.
The blocks were fun to make and again, super easy.
This is the last month for one bee and next month is the last for the other. We are continuing the Wonky Quilt Bee, but turning it into a Traveling Quilt Bee. I’m super excited to be working on the traveling quilts. I just need to start thinking about my own colors and ideas for my quilt!
I've neglected the blog for quite a while. Let's just say that when I do find a free moment here and there, blogging hasn't been a priority (read: dishes, laundry, sleep). I do have a few things to blog about, though.
The first is a gift for Oliver that I totally wasn't expecting. For the past year or so, I've been part of the Wonky Quilt Bee on Flickr. We're in our second round of wonkiness. The girls from the first round got together and made a quilt for Oliver.
I love the navy blue and green together and all the scrapy blocks add so much color. Of course, I only have a photo of this side with a sleeping baby. The other side has additional wonky blocks and more green than blue.
Thank you, girls, for your hard work on this quilt! It was a complete surprise receiving it in the mail. We love it! It's a great quilt to take along to allow the baby some time on the floor.