Dolls for My Daughter

I made my sweet daughter a doll from a www.bitofwhimsydolls.com "Wittle Whimsy" pattern when she was very little.  How she loved her blue-haired doll!  It was the perfect size for her little hands!

But this little doll needed a big sister...

For her first birthday, I made my daughter a new blue-haired dolly from the www.bitofwhimsydolls.com "Jean" pattern.  

Now we have a new favorite doll in our household!

A custom-designed quilt for a special little girl

For my daughter's nursery, I used the Penelope pattern from Pottery Barn. I fell in love with the adorable little birds on the crib sheets. Eventually these sheets inspired my sweet girl's whole room. What would we do when our baby grew up and needed a big girl bed with big girl sheets and quilt?

Around that time, www.spoonflower.com held a contest to design a "cheater quilt". (A "cheater quilt" is fabric which appears to have been quilted together, but it is actually a patchwork design printed onto a single piece of fabric.) I decided to collage different elements from my little girl's nursery into a patchwork design. The result: 2 yards of quilting weight fabric formed the center panel on a twin size quilt!

I picked up an adorable pink floral fabric to surround my custom-designed fabric on all four sides. The back is a single piece of bright pink fabric. I used 3/4" quilt binding and a zig-zag stitch to bind the edges, and the edges of all center squares are "quilted". In other words, the squares are not pieced together, but I sewed on all of the lines.

My design incorporated sections of the green rug in her room, a collage I had made for her wall with birds made of scrap-booking paper, a polka-dot design from flower pots I painted for her room,...

...photos of an origami mobile my husband and I made for her room, a stylized photo of wavy lines I painted on a dresser drawer pull, and a photo of her minky fabric changing table.

Perfect!!! Now my baby can grow up in style and still enjoy her little birdies!

If you are interested my fabric is available for purchase here.

I am also hoping to use the crib sheets someday to make her twin-bed-sized pillowcases, using a pillowcase tutorial from www.dana-made-it.com, available here.

Peaceable Kingdom Quilt

So, I had never "quilted" before last fall... I can still say, I've never quilted"correctly".. As with all creative endeavors, I jumped in feet first, figuring it out as I went along.

I wanted to be a part of an art exhibit in Anderson, SC that took its inspiration from the Peaceable Kingdom in theBook of Isiaah:

⁶ The wolf shall live with the lamb,

the leopard shall lie down with the kid,
the calf and the lion and the fatling together,
and a little child shall lead them.
⁷ The cow and the bear shall graze, their young shall lie down together;

and the lion shall eat straw like the ox.

⁸ The nursing child shall play over the hole of the asp,

and the weaned child shall put its hand on the adder’s den.
⁹ They will not hurt or destroy
on all my holy mountain;
for the earth will be full of the knowledge of the Lord
as the waters cover the sea.

After designing my work on the computer, I had my design commercially printed onto quilting weight fabric, using www.spoonflower.com, a company in North Carolina. I wanted to machine quilt the design. In retrospect, I realize a different sewing machine presser foot would be helpful in this endeavor. :) Next time... However, I completed the project without breaking a needle!

The design depicts animals peacefully surrounding the Earth. There is subtle variation within all of the colors, as there is in batik fabrics. The quilt was machine-quilted on the edge of the world, as well as in a design surrounding the animals. The edges are finished with blanket stitching, using embroidery thread that matches the colors of that portion of the quilt.

As a former Montessori Primary teacher and current stay-at-home mother, I designed it with a classroom or nursery in mind!!

Coveting coasters no more

I coveted the handmade fabric coasters I saw on Etsy. My husband's pet peeve is a non-absorbent coaster that is not functional. Our stone coasters are ideal, but pricey. And so, I tackled another project. I have had this beautiful fabric for years, intending to recover chairs with it, but I had enough that I could spare a few coasters... First I cut squares from the fabric with my rotary cutter and straight edge/ruler.

I sewed along three sides (wrong side facing out), essentially making a pocket, turned it inside out, placed a thin layer of quilting batting inside, and topstiched around all four edges (thereby securing the fourth side).

They seemed a little "poofy", so I decided to "quilt" them. I followed one curve of the pattern on one side and one curve of the pattern on the other side. I also used both sides of the fabric, the "right" side and the "wrong" side, so that there would be subtle variations in color.
Sooner than I realized I had a set of eight fabric coasters (four in each color variation), absorbent and functional! And, in a fabric I loved! It was quick and easy without a pattern!

Dinosaur Love

In my quest tolearn to sew, I've been tackling progressively more challenging projects over the past two weeks (with baby steps). A year ago, I could only list a "straight stitch" on my sewing resume confidently. Still scared of store-bought patterns, I bought a few small, "beginner" pdf patterns from online artisans. One such artisan's website is:

http://www.bitofwhimsydolls.com/

And so I was eager to take the next sewing step by creating bitofwhimsydolls dinosaur pattern. Less than 24 hours later, my dino was finished, and my son named it "Stinger".

Welcome to our family, Stinger. May you be a guardian dinosaur over my projects to come...