>Spill the Beans Sunday is BAAACK!!

>The topic for today’s Spill the Beans is… FINISHED PROJECTS! OR projects you hope to get fininshed really soon.OR whatever you are working on right now! (I like variety)

Here are a couple of quilts I finished THIS WEEK! Yippee, two in one week is pretty major for me. Plus, my next work in progress.

This is the second quilt I’m adding to the group to be donated to a local shelter for families this fall. My local Crafty Girls Workshop meetup group has been working on these month by month. It’s sort of my own design, although it’s super easy to do so anyone could figure it out. A new friend that I met through the SA Modern Quilt Guild has a longarm machine and she generously offered to quilt it for me, which helped me to get it done so quickly. She even added a custom butterfly in the quilting at my request.

 Then I found an absolutely awesome explanation for doing machine binding in the book called Dare to be Square Quilting. (Here is a great feature about the author, Boo Davis) So after hunting down a bias tape maker I whipped out binding for this quilt and the second quilt that I made to give to my surrogate niece, Lily, who just turned one year old this week! Her birthday party was yesterday. Here’s her quilt:

I quilted it using my stitch regulator and it went pretty quickly. I love to make the backs of quilts interesting too, so I used flannel and did an applique of her nick name which is Lily Bug.

Here is “Da Bug” with her quilt, doesn’t she look ecstatic to receive it? Her mom and dad loved it and everyone ooh’d and ahh’d over it so that was nice.

And just because she’s SOOO cute, here is one more awesome photo of yesterday’s party.

Really, I only took about 65 pictures and three or four video clips of the day. I just couldn’t put my camera down, I mean how could I with a face like that!?

Now, let me show you a little bit of my NEXT project. I had a honey bun, which is 1 1/2″ strips and some backing fabric from a line called Hello Betty. I’ve had this for quite awhile and finally decided I wanted to do something with it. The president of the SA Modern Quilt Guild had shown off a quilt she made with the same fabric using a grey for a contrasting solid color to help the patterned fabrics POP out. So I decided that since Crafty Girls Workshop HAS some Moda Bella Solid Grey, why not use some of it in a quilt? Well, then I had to find a pattern, and the Does Not Compute pattern was pretty close to what I wanted, but without the robot (Maybe another project someday) turns out I just wanted the pattern that is called Amish Brickwork, SO that’s how the idea for Amish Betty was born. Here are my supplies.

I’ve already made significant progress. The pattern is from Dare to Be Square also and the author gives a great explanation of using 18″ strips to do strips piecing to really speed up the brickwork background part. I spent my SA Mod Quilt Guild Sew In day yesterday from about 10 am to 2 pm sewing 50 patterned strips to 50 grey strips. My next step is to press them and cut them into the brick pieces, I can’t wait!!

OK, YOUR turn to SPILL THE BEANS! I want to know what you’re working on right now! Please share and feel free to add a link to your blog if you’ve posted pictures. I’m not doing a McLinky thing, but just put the link in your comments. Thanks!!

Happy Stitches,
Anna

I’m sharing this on Something I Whipped Up at The Girl Creative

>Too Many Tops

>I am SEW excited! I finished TWO quilt tops this morning, they really only needed borders but at least now they are DONE! Here they are:

Charming Love U Quilt with the new border!

I just LOVE the Love U Charm quilt! It’s my own design, what do you think? It went together SO fast and we have ALL the supplies you need to make this cute top in our shop. If you are interested in a kit of these supplies, please e-mail me and let me know. I’m happy to put one together for you with instructions too! This one is going to be quilted up and listed in our Etsy shop, eventually.

Rocketship Quilt (from a kit I bought locally)

I am totally in love with this geeky sort of rocketship fabric. The cutest thing is the grey rectangle fabric has cute geek-y words all about science and space! Can you see that? I think it’s adorable and educational at the same time! My hubby is a science teacher so if we ever had a baby boy I think this would be the perfect quilt for him. But for now, I’m going to quilt it up and list it in our Etsy shop for your baby boy!

I realized I’m really good at making tops, now I need to get better at quilting them!!

Of course, since today is Friday, I’m linking today’s post to all the FUN Friday linky parties, including: Follow Me Friday, New Friend Friday, Friday Follow, Feature Yourself, and, Look at Me I’m So Crafty

Happy Stitches for the weekend!

Anna

>Yes, she DOES sew

>

And yes, she IS obsessed with red and aqua! Look at these adorable pincushion cuffs I made today! I made one for myself and decided they were sew easy that I’d make another one for Regina at the same time! I used the Lil Plane Jane Aqua and Red and White Dot from Michael Miller. They were SUPER DUPER easy to make and so fun and fast! I dug around in some buttons I inherited from my grandmother and found a really cool white pearly one and one that had a little flower crocheted in the center. Can you see it in this picture?

The neatest trick I learned while making these was to add an old cut up credit card behind the pincushion part, on the wrist band to protect my arm from stray pins! Neat idea! Thanks KeykaLou Patterns for this great tutorial! It feels so good to have actually fininshed something from start to finish today. Yesterday I managed to get most of a quilt top finished too. I just need to grab some more fabric to finish the outside border, backing and binding, of course. I call it the Love U Charm Quilt because I used 1 Love U Charm pack and 1 yard of Bella Solid Mint for the sashing.

I think this will be a great blanket for a little boy (or girl), the fabrics are so fun and cute! I can’t wait to go to Regina’s tomorrow to get the rest of the fabric. That’s the update for now. We have some yardage of Martinique coming in soon and Make Life from Sweetwater, which is going to be super adorable for those of you who enjoy scrapbooking.

Happy Stitches to You!

Anna

I am SEW proud to be able to link this up to i made it! Blog party Thursday over at Everything Etsy!

Also linking to V.O.T.W.

And while I’m at it, a jump on next week:

Can you tell I just discovered the LINKY LOVE of link parties??