Teacher Gifts

Tonight I finished up our end of year teacher gifts. I really want to show them to you but one of the kids' teachers reads my blog on occasion so you only get a snippet until tomorrow!

It's always a dilemma for me when I make quilty things for other people as I get torn between making things in my style or theirs. I usually end up making them in their style with a twist of mine thrown in. I went quite traditional with these, (yes I do know how to piece and not just applique!) and the little bit of me would be the gold star points. Gotta have a little bling in there somewhere! I also went for a 4th of July theme since that's coming up soon. I don't normally make any kind of quilts for teacher gifts as they're so time consuming, but the Kindergarten teacher has now taught all 3 of our kids so she definitely deserves something more than the usual bag of fudge that I make!

I'll post them in their entirety tomorrow for Wordless Wednesday!

Squash done

Today I finished appliqueing the squash and pumpkin block.

I am really loving it (even if it does need a good iron!) except for that empty space there on the top right corner. I think I might need to unpick the pumpkin stem and slip another leaf under there to fill the space.

Edited to add: Thanks to a great suggestion by Deb of Cluttered Quilter, instead of another leaf, I'm going to embroider a tendril to fill up the space! Thanks for the fantastic idea Deb!

Seen-It Sunday

I just have one thing to show you tonight for Seen-It-Sunday. It is the cutest thing I saw all week. I immediately pinned it on my wall in Pinterest (If you don't know about Pinterest yet, GO! NOW! www.pinterest.com) and it was repined by a ton of people so I figure if they all liked it, so will you!

Check it out...

See? I told you it was cute! I have several pairs of my boys' jeans that have rips at the knees. This would be the perfect way to patch them!

You can go and see the steps at THIS blog. It's not in English, (I think it's Dutch?! Anyone?!!) but the pictures are pretty self explanatory. While there, have a look around her blog - she has some lovely things. Beautiful pictures are a universal language!

Organizing Scraps

My scrap bin has been overflowing and is a MESS! Something had to give - I either needed to sort my scraps out tonight or go insane!

I decided to sort them by color and use some containers that were already holding fabric.

These containers hold fabric that I hardly ever use - the fabric I bought before the whole modern quilt fabric movement came along. They're in another entire room in the basement if that tells you how often I use it! They are still great pieces but sadly they don't interest me as much as they once did. I emptied out some of them - my blues, greens, purples, yellows, black and whites, and batiks. Those are now sitting on a shelf and I suppose I'll have to sort through them and decide what I will still use.

I took the now empty containers and put them on my sewing desk...

...sat down with the big bucket of scraps and started sorting.

2 hours and 4 episodes of Parking Wars later, this is what I had...

I am so excited! It will be so much easier to find what I need now. They are sorted into reds, pinks, orange/yellows, grey/white/blacks, greens, blues, purples and browns.

Some people can't decide what should be a scrap and what should be folded up neatly. My rule of thumb is that anything I wouldn't cut with a rotary cutter and ruler is a scrap. Easy! Do any of you have a great system for your scraps?

Pumpkin and Squash

Today I had an itch to start a new block for my fruit and vege quilt. And what is on this block?! If you read the title of this post you already know! Yesiree, pumpkin and squash. Or to be more exact, butternut squash and a sugar pumpkin.

Sometimes it can take me forever to decide on fabrics. I immediately settled on the Heather Bailey yellow for the squash, but the pumpkin took longer. I absolutely love the new colorway of this Kaffe fabric...

...but I'm afraid it looks too much like a tomato! I might just have to do a block with tomatoes on a vine and use this fabric. It's not in the plan I've drawn up, but plans can always change. The fabric I'll most likely go with is another Kaffe...

I also plan on doing some embroidery on a lot of these blocks. Eg in this block I would embroider veins on the pumpkin leaf, and ribs on the pumpkin.

Want to know something funny about this block? Look at the background. I ran out of it, or rather, due to some over-zealous cutting, I didn't have a piece large enough for this block. I went to two different stores to find more to no avail. My only other option was to use what I had and piece it together. Luckily the butternut squash covers most of the join, but look under it.

I think I did a pretty good job joining it up, though I'm not sure I would have been so particular if I knew it would be almost completely covered up by the squash!

Purple and Yellow

I love the color combo of purple and yellow. An artist friend of mine in New Zealand has sent me two beautiful paintings she has done, so I wanted to thank her by making her some quilted goodies. I decided on the colors of purple and yellow (she is NOT afraid of color!) and asked her if that was OK. She said they are redoing her daughter's room and using those colors, so I thought how fortuitous is that?!

I have almost finished the projects for her, but I can only show you a snippet. I can't have her seeing the whole thing just yet, can I?!!

Wordless Wednesday