New fabrics!

I bought new fabrics!  Well, actually, I bought some new fabrics, and my mom bought some new fabrics which I will be using to make an awesome quilt for her!  Here they are:

These ones are just so pretty - I don't actually know what I'm going to do with them yet!

These ones will shortly become coasters for my many mugs!

 

And these are the fabrics my mom picked out for her new quilt! She really likes batiks, which is nice, since I don't usually pick those for myself.  So I'll get to work with something different.

Aaaand I couldn't help myself, I got started on it already, even though I'm not done with my previous quilt yet!  I cut all my 5''x5'' squares, and turned one set of squares into triangles.

And then I started making chevrons!  Also my new rotary cutter is in this shot - I love it already; it has such a nice smooth cut :)

Teapot!

Over the summer, I took a ceramics class with my mom (yes, I'm aware that it's currently February and that summer was 8 months ago).  Well, my teapot was only just kiln-fired on the last day of class, so I had to go back after the class ended to glaze it and make it all pretty.  And pretty it is!  Check this out:

So gorgeous :) I can't wait to serve tea in it!

Colorbrick quilt top!

One of the blogs I like (Stiched In Color; quilt along here: http://www.stitchedincolor.com/p/colorbrick-beginners-quilt-along.html ) did a quilt along (almost 2 years ago, but no worries on my end), and although I clearly missed the chance to quilt along with the other internet quilters out there on this particular project, here is my completed quilt top!

It's massive (for me) - this picture is of it on my full size bed, and you can't even see the sides since they hang off the bed.  I tried a few different angles to see if I could get the whole quilt in:

This is a close up of the edge so you can see the frame I put on the bricks.  And the next picture is the quilt turned sideways on the bed to see the bricks and the frame:

Also I have to say I have fallen in love with chain-piecing! Although the quilt along said to cut all the short sashings between the bricks to size, I just left one long sashing and chain pieced the bricks to it, then cut it up, as pictured below:

And last but not least, a picture of my workspace (read: dining room table) in the middle of the process.  As you can see, my iPhone is prominently placed so that I can respond to text messages mid-sew (on one occasion I forgot to take my foot off the pedal while I went to read a text and had to rip a few mis-sewn seams).

Fabric Turtle!

My friend's birthday was on Monday, so as a gift, I made her a birthday turtle!  It was so easy and came out so cute:

Just four pieces of fabric cut into spherical triangles (sorry, math background coming through - I don't know what else to call them), a circle, and a few sets of fabric feet and head and tail.  Next time I make one I'll take pictures of the process!

241 Tote!

Pretty much everyone is making noodlehead's 241 tote - now including me!  Here is my take on the pattern:

 
So gorgeous!  I'm pretty proud of it.  It's a gift, though, so someone else is going to get to enjoy it as well.  And here are some action shots of me using fusible interfacing for the very first time!

The second one, you can't tell, but there's fabric under that towel.  And it is being fused like a pro.  In the first picture are the pieces after I interfaced them.  I had been putting it off for a few days, because I was nervous about using fusible interfacing, but it worked great!  Now I don't need to be scared anymore.

If you want to get the pattern, this is where I got it from:
http://www.noodle-head.com/2011/03/241-tote-pattern.html
It was a great pattern, really easy to follow.  And it came out so beautifully in only a few hours!  

Better photos!

I figured out where to take better photos:  my kitchen!  It's the only place in my apartment with adequate lighting.  So be prepared for me to update all my prior posts with new, better lit pictures!!

Crayon Art II

I made more crayon art!  It's so fast and easy :)  And I think this one's really pretty:

I really like how her skirt is blowing in the wind. I feel like it tells a story somehow :)

I want to make one in green/yellow and one in orange/red, since this one is in purple/blue.  I haven't quite figured out who I'm going to put in those two, though!

Drawstring bag!

As I was browsing the internet recently, I found a great tutorial for a drawstring bag that looked like I could do it in about 20 minutes or so.  So I just made it! And it looks spectacular - check it out:

Yeah that's the Grammy's in the background.  Adele just won something yay.  Back to the bag, though - I love these fabrics together.  I have yet to decide what I'll be doing with this cute little bag, but at least I know it'll look cute with whatever is inside it!

From this...

To this...

In only a few minutes!

If you want the tutorial, it's right here:  http://incolororder.blogspot.com/2011/10/lined-drawstring-bag-tutorial.html

Oven mitts!

One of the nice things about gifts is that I get to use fabrics that I wouldn't pick for myself.  Mostly primary colors - red and blue especially.  I just would rather use green, purple, or orange, or a different color that comes out of red or blue, like pink or teal.  But it seems slightly limiting to never use those colors.  Luckily, I have two gift giving occasions coming up!  I won't say who in case they find their way here before said occasion.  But they'll find out soon enough.  So here is my first gift, oven mitts:

I think they came out spectacularly!  Its a blue and red pattern on the outside, lined with red.  The shadows in the picture make it hard to tell, but the red on the inside perfectly matches the red circles on the outside.  That only took 2 hours at the fabric store (Fabric Place Basement in Natick, MA , for those who are wondering) to get right.  And I quilted the fabrics together with two layers of insul-bright batting on the inside, to protect from the heat!  

And here are some higher quality pictures!

This is them hanging on my kitchen wall, with my first potholder under them:

And this is them, all on their lonesome, chilling out on the wall:

I went SHOPPING!

Today, I did something exciting.  I went shopping!  Look at all the pretty fabrics I got:

Stay tuned to see what they all turn into!

Crayon Art!

As an introduction to this post, I have to mention that I'm obsessed with Pinterest.  Although honestly, at this point, who isn't?  But one of my favorite things that pops up all the time there is crayon art, where you use a hairdryer to melt crayons onto canvas.  So this weekend, a couple of my friends from work and I tried it!  Here's mine:

It just makes me so happy!  And it was so easy - I just hot glued crayons onto the canvas, and then blow dried it for a few minutes!  I think next I'm going to try one where I use only purple, blue, and grey, and put a silhouette of a person holding an umbrella at the bottom.  That shows up all the time on Pinterest and Etsy, and I think it's gorgeous.

Quilt complete!!

I did it!  I finished a quilt!  Yesterday it was still a work in progress...

And today it's complete!  I am just so proud of myself.  As I write this I'm patting myself on the back.  Except I can't, because my new quilt is between my back and my hand!  Here it is:

Close up shot!

The reverse side, simple but classy:

What a beautiful corner, if I do say so myself!  Note the very well made bias tape, which I was too lazy to cut on a bias.  So it's really just fabric ironed perfectly into the same shape as bias tape.  What a great investment that machine was.

First real quilt, complete.  Now on to the next project!

Work in progress, but almost there!

Today is a big day - it's quilt day!  I've been working on a quilt since November.  Its my first real quilt.  I made one in the past, but not with the whole process of measuring, cutting, piecing, and quilting.  This is what the old one looks like: (the purple behind it is my bedspread, so please ignore)

What it's made of is a whole bunch of cut up t-shirts.  I was on the swim team in high school, and we made t-shirts for almost every meet of the season, for all four of my seasons.  So when I graduated, I cut up all the shirts, and sewed together the parts with writing on them to make a big quilt.  Unfortunately, the bits with writing were not all the same size, so it took a really long time to get it all together, and there were gaps that had to be covered up later with smaller t-shirt bits.

But now, I'm at home with a sewing machine again, and I finally started my first real quilt!  In November, I bought all the fabrics (which I'm still only so-so on their matching-ness), and started cutting.  I made disappearing nine squares for each block, and at last I've gotten to the point where I can piece it together.  I think I'm about 1 work hour away from having a completed quilt top!  Then I'll need to buy some backing and batting, and hopefully I'll be done soon!!!  Here's where I'm at:

I can't decide if I like it better with or without flash.  My apartment really doesn't have that much natural light, so it's tough to take good pictures.  But there it is!  

My new bias tape machine!

I'm kind of an impulse buyer.  After my very first experience with bias tape that I bought at the store, I decided that it was made out of an awful material, that my sewing machine made awful noises as it sewed through the tape, and that I didn't really want to go through 8 machine needles every time I wanted to sew a 90 degree corner with bias tape.  So I bought this!!

A bias tape maker!  I am really pretty excited about this little guy.  It came in the mail yesterday, and although I have yet to use it for anything, I think it will be fun.