March 2008

Carrie and Karen came on over today for an Etsy get together and to learn how to make quilts.

Our project was a doll quilt inspired by the log cabin pattern.

First we piece…

And then we quilt…

I apparently forgot the binding pictures. Oops.

All done!

Carrie got to sew for the first time and Karen learned that there is fish in a bag fabric. She’s thrilled.

It was fun ladies!

Step 7. Trim the blocks to 12.5″ square.

Step 8. Start laying it all out. It’s like a really big puzzle.

Step 8.1. Take a picture of Maeve because she sees you taking pictures of other things and she wants in on it too.

Back to Step 8.

Step 9. Sew all those blocks together.

Step 10. Sew your backing fabric together.

Step 11. Back to the iron.

Step 12. Pinning! I pin baste my quilts. A bent safety pin goes in every 4″. That means there are over 500 pins in this quilt.

Step 13. Trim the excess backing and batting.

All done!

To be continued…

Step 5. Keep on sewing some more.

Step 6. Iron. Iron a lot. The pile isn’t so fluffy anymore.

To be continued…

(Sorry for such dark pictures. I do a large majority of my sewing in the evenings when, well, it’s dark.)

Dirt may not hurt but apparently grass does.

I’m working on a custom quilt that was requested through Etsy’s Alchemy. It’s a queen sized quilt with shams in Heather Bailey’s Freshcut line.

Step 1. Buy fabric. Buy a LOT of fabric.

Step 2. Cut the fabric up into a million little pieces. Ok, not a million, more like 540.

Step 3. Sew all the fabric that you just cut up back together.

Step 4. Keep on sewing.

To be continued…

I’m having writers block so here are a couple pictures from today.  I wanted to go through more but Windows isn’t cooperating (shocking I know).  I had wanted to get a nice picture of the kids together.  We all know how well that goes.

Zooming into Etsy …

Recall the wind in your hair, the tang of smoking rubber on asphalt, the heat of your exploding Formula-1 racer as you wipe out again, and agin, and again against a billboard or into another car in this classic and hair-pullingly difficult archetype of the modern racing genre, Atari’s Pole Position.

Up close one can see only an impressionistic blotches of random pixels, but as one steps back from this massive, four-person-wide quilt, the image of that immortal race car begins to make yet one more unending lap around the track.

Not intended for use while driving.

- Approximately 110 x 50 inches (279.5 x 127 cm).
- Grey backing and red binding.
- Made from 100% cotton fabric and batting.
- Machine wash cold, tumble dry low.
- Pieced and quilted by machine in smoke-free, pet-free, and geek-friendly home.

Want a video game quilt?

And Maeve wins!

First the wind blows one way …

And then the other …

Photographing a 110″ wide quilt is tough even with almost no breeze.

So what’s next in the videogame quilt world? I’m not sure. Pacman maybe. Or Duck Hunt. Or … Suggest something!

Etsy has finally allowed us to have apostrophes in our titles.  Amazing.  Lovely.  Now if they could just fix it so the top of my page doesn’t read “CarolinaPatchworks’s Shop Announcement”.

Courtesy of Miss Maeve.

“Mama!  Don’t vacuum up Liam!”

I’ve noticed that when I’m in the middle of piecing a huge quilt I tend to babble less here. The current quilt is 110″ x 50″. That’s pretty big. I should be able to finish the piecing on that this morning assuming Liam takes his morning nap.

And thanks to Etsy’s revived Alchemy feature I have two large custom quilts to make. Do you want a custom quilt? I can make you one too!

I’m on the front page again with the big silk quilt.

It’s getting so warm here. We should enjoy it before it decides to be 100 with a heat index of 110 (grumble, grumble).

Spring has sprung and I’m loving white quilts right now. So crisp and fresh and full of flowers. I finished these three small quilts last night. I’ll be posting them on Etsy over the next couple of days.

(Sorry for the less than perfect pic.)

First one to guess the right games gets… well, nothing!

Maeve is going to FLIP out when she sees these new fabrics from Moda.  I mean FLIP out.

Now to wait very impatiently until next month when the collection is released.

My silk quilt was featured on Peppermags blog today.

I wrote a while back about the problems I was having with my Rowenta and how I thought the self clean feature had  fixed it all.  And it did fix it.  And then it broke the next day.  So I’ve been ironing with no stem or spray for months now.  Not good for sewing quilts.

The husband picked up a new Shark this weekend at Costco.  So far the $30 Shark is outpreforming the $100 Rowenta by leaps and bounds.

Says the little boy wearing white pants.

Celebrate Spring!

Friends & Flowers

Blue & White

I hope to finish up these three this week and then start on a new video game quilt.

I never used to look at them until recently…

Piet Mondrian was my inspiration when designing this quilt. I think it came out well and it is now for sale on Etsy.

I promise I sew quilts and not just take screen shots of treasuries. I am working on quilting a silk quilt right now. It’s gorgey. I should have it finished up tonight and, if the weather cooperates for pictures, up on Etsy tomorrow night.

I’m on the front page of Etsy right now with this quilt!  (Yes, I had to copy the whole page and not just the top.)

My bag is featured in this beautiful treasury by SweetgumHandbags.

The project for the first part of the week is new silk curtains for the kitchen and family room. These have to be the most boring thing in the world to sew. I have 9 panels to sew. I have 2 done. Yawn.

Quilts are much more fun.

I listed a new quilt last night on Etsy. It’s a bit more modern than recent ones.

The two are inseparable.

And on a quilting note, I finished an Amy Butler Lotus quilt today.