NYC "Love" Wedding Quilt

My friend Emily got married back in September, and I wanted to make her and her new husband a quilt.

My inspiration: the "Love" sculpture, by Robert Indiana.

I liked this quilt, but I wanted to go for something a bit bigger and a bit more graphic.

This was my initial layout design:

Emily is a librarian, so when I saw that Lucie Summers' "Summersville" fabric had a library in the city pattern, I knew that I had to make a feature of it in the quilt. My embroidery skills aren't going to win any awards, but I LOVE how it came out!

Then, I found the perfect backing fabric - "To Work" from the Commute collection by Jay Cyn Organics. Shut up, New York.

Here it is, all completed on the back.

Oh, ok, I'll show you the picture of the Library again. Surrounded by Big Apples, of course.

Here's the completed quilt top. I used the bicycle fabric that I bought because it reminded me of a dress Emily has, and I used some of the leftover red bicycles from Ed's Rangers Quilt for the bottom of the L.

One New York quilt, now with its happy new owners!

Quilt in action

That is one cute kid. :)

Grace's red quilt

I had most of the fabric for Grace's quilt back in July. Actually, the Tufted Tweets have been in my stash for a while (and were in this quilt from 2011). Oh, and the red was part of Gabi's Annie Dress. Newly purchased were the monaluna chairs (LOVE), the red stripes, and the birds for the back. 

Oh, and some of the polka dots from Gabi's quilt WAY back in 2009. Anyway, I didn't have a ton of any of the fabric, so I cut squares (5", I think), and then sashed them horizontally with grey. Not quite there.

I realised that I wanted to put AsYetUnnamedBaby's name on the quilt, so I added a white panel to the front, the same size as the pieced panels. (Thank you, Hubby, for the quilt feet.)

Then, I was at Quilter's Haven in Wickham Market over the summer to pick up some fabric for Emily's wedding quilt (not done yet...wedding was a month ago...), and spotted these birds. Birds on the front AND on the back? With red? Sweet!

I picked a font I liked, enlarged it to crazy proportions, then printed it out. I reversed the letters, traced them, cut out the fabric, then applique'd them on to the quilt front (the quilt was in suspended animation until she was born and had a name).

I used red thread to zig-zag around the letters, then finished my quilt sandwich and quilted with a meander, avoiding the letters to make them stand out a bit.

I LOVE how it turned out.

Almost as much as I love this selvedge:

All quilted and bound and ready to go. She was born two weeks before we left for New York so there wasn't a huge amount of time!

Ahem. These chaps thought the quilt was for them and were very disappointed to find out it was not.

Thanks to Evan for the quilt feet and the Brooklyn Bridge for the backdrop.

And here it is in its new home. Grace is exceedingly cute (but was a little sleepy at this point)!

Felt iPhone Cosy

The iPhone 5 is so new that there aren't many cases around for it yet. It lives in its own pocket in my bag, but I was a bit worried about it scratching. So, I made a thin felt sleeve for it, using Woolfilz felt (in light grey) from Purl Soho and some red pearl cotton. I measured the phone, added about 5mm all the way around, then sewed the two pieces together with a blanket stitch. Super easy and cute!

My plan for the afternoon was to quilt the rest of the baby quilt that's due next week (baby arrived on Tuesday and has a name, which is now on the quilt), but I ran out of thread five minutes after I started sewing. Oh, bother. I can run across the street to the department store tomorrow at lunchtime and get more...it's just that the plan was to do the quilting today.

I think the selvedge on A Walk In The Woods (which is the backing for this quilt) is absolutely adorable - don't you?

Full pictures (hopefully, including Baby!) to follow in the next few weeks.

Might have been fabric shopping

I went over to Quilter's Haven on Saturday after a full day of being the Official Photographer at EAST for the visiting Paralympic torch. They were having a sale (which turned out to be a very sorry collection of unloved fabric), but they also had quite a bit of Summersville and A Walk In The Woods.

I'm going to use the bird & mushroom print to back the chairs and birds baby quilt that I'm working on, to be finished as soon as the baby is born and named! Since I can't do the quilt sandwich until I've finished the applique, and I can't applique the name until the baby arrives. (I have been assured by the Mommy that the baby's name will NOT be Bartholomew or similar and that it WILL fit on the quilt!)

The rest of the fabric is for a quilt inspired by this one by QuiltyCat. It's a wedding quilt for a friend who lives in New York and is a librarian. So you can imagine how pleased I was when I noticed this in the Summersville (which I probably would have bought anyway). SHUT UP. I get to put a library on a quilt for a librarian!

Why I love making baby quilts

Here are the recipients of the last two baby quilts I made, snoozing (and presumably drooling) on their quilts. So adorable! I can't wait to see them in October when we're in NY...they'll be looking quite grown-up by that point, I think! (And yes, their Dad gave the ok to put them on the internets). Apparently the quilts are perfectly sized to fit in their pack-and-play. Since, you know, I planned that. By accident. Ahem.

In case you were worried that I would be lacking newborns to snuggle with, fear not. The future recipient of this future-quilt (her mom's favorite colour is red) will be very small and sleepy when we're there. The last of my Tufted Tweets, some monaluna organic midcentury chairs (also with birds!), and some more red and white stripes and solids. It's less blinding in real life, especially as I have interspersed the RED with lots of grey and white. The vibrating red stripe will be used as the binding. I'm aiming for zingy and cheerful rather than spectacularly overpowering!

The quilt top is actually finished but not yet photographed - I may need to check with future-mom to see if she wants to see the quilt in person first rather than on the blog.

New York Giants quilt: FINISHED!

Remember this quilt? You know, the New York Giants quilt for my uber-fan great aunt? Thought you did. Well it's all quilted, and has had its photo taken, and will be winging its way to New Jersey (via Boston, Rhode Island, and New York) with my mom when she goes home on Wednesday. 

Here it is, mid-quilting. The Giants fabric is from the wilds of the internets, the green is Kona Forest from Purl Soho, and the red, white and blue were from my stash. The red dots on the backing were from Ed's Rangers quilt, I think.

 Here is the back, taken at the British Larder, where we had an amazing lunch.

Here are a few outtakes from Snape Maltings (woo-wee, was it windy!)

Hold on to that quilt, Mom!

Ahh, perfection. Lovely quilt feet, too. I ended up straight-line quilting it (and not going over the NY with the quilting) in white on the yard lines and in between them, with my snazzy new walking foot. I took a little bit of artistic license with the number of yards - I think the field is only 75 yards long and rather skinny to actually play football on...

I hope she likes it (and that her Giants win the Super Bowl again in 2013)!

Giants quilt, in progress.

My great-aunt has just moved to an assisted-living facility. Her new digs are pretty snazzy, having seen them. She is a HUGE New York Giants fan, so I'm making her a quilt for "her" Giants as a housewarming present.

Here's the inspiration:

And the printed-out templates (reversed this time, even thought it didn't matter because it's a solid).

And the cut-out fabric:

And the fabric on the football-field front, with red zigzag. Now to quilt (straight white walking-foot lines like yard lines, methinks), bind (in red), and send!

Special thanks to the Husband for being the quilt feet.

Baby quilts and a recipe

One of my friends from college just became a dad on Friday. Twins, even! And what do twin babies need? Quilts!

I used some of the seemingly endless Moda Verna jelly roll that I bought a few years ago (and have used in a few other quilts), and made improvised stacked-coins quilts with the same fabric in both quilts. I used off-white cotton from Halfpenny Home for the sashing, and a brown print with blue circles for the binding. I used a little bit of one of the blue strips for the corner of binding on one of the quilts, so that they'd be easy to tell apart (and because I ran out of the brown)!

The backing, which you can't see in any of these pictures, is blue polka dot flannel. Soft and warm for February babies!

I finished these just before leaving for NY, so I got to wash them and dry them in New Rochelle (we don't have a dryer at home), and deliver them in person.

LOVE!

While I was there, the then-almost-parents made a wintry salad that was so delicious that I asked for the recipe.

Barlow Salad (adapted from Food & Wine Magazine, March 2012)

Salad:

1/2 head red cabbage, thinly sliced

1 large fennel bulb, thinly sliced

3 small oranges, peeled and sectioned

large handful cilantro leaves (that's coriander, for the Brits)

large handful tamari almonds, crushed [I'd never heard of these - apparently tamari is similar to soy sauce but stronger)

zest of 1 lime

zest of 2 lemons

Dressing:

juice of 1-2 limes

juice of 3-4 lemons

1/4 cup of good olive oil

salt & cracked pepper to taste

It was delicious, and wintry, and healthy. Make it!

Look what I made, 2011 edition

Various crafty peeps have been adding "what I made" roundups to their blogs. 

[Jumps onto bandwagon]

Ta da! Look what I made in 2011! In retrospect, Gabi was the recipient of the majority of my crafty efforts. Two and a half dresses, two sweaters, and a tote bag. I guess everyone needs a toddler to make things for! The only crafted items still in our house are the two cowls (a third, same as the one in the 2nd row on the right) has been gifted to a choir friend whose daughter has appropriated it as a baby-sling just like mommy's for her doll. Might give her the other one, two, so mommy can actually wear it as a cowl!

Any suggestions for a mosaic-creator would be appreciated - this was bodged into Pages, then exported as pdf, then screen-shot so I could upload the jpg to blogger. Workaround, much? Or, HEY blogger! Can we please upload pdfs to our blogs? Thanks!

Rangers Heritage Jersey Quilt: Finished!

You may remember that my brother asked for a quilt, several months ago. He asked for one inspired by the New York Rangers Heritage Jersey, so with some help from Google Image Search and my Leuchtturm dots notebook (thanks, Liz!) I created the design. 

The red fabric is from Spoonflower, the rest are Etsuko Furuya Echino and Kokka prints that I bought at the Purl Bee in an epic crafty afternoon back in September. It's a good thing that I don't live on the same continent as that store...I wouldn't have any money left to eat or pay the mortgage.

You had a quick update when I was working on the applique (which I really enjoyed, by the way), following the letter applique tutorials on Oh, Fransson! and using a New York Rangers font that I downloaded and printed out.

Here it is, before quilting and binding, with the picture of the inspiration on my iPad in the middle:

Yes, the selvedge is showing. I wanted to make it as wide as possible, but I also didn't want to lose any length. There were NO scraps left!

I quilted it with my usual meandering quilting, in dark blue on the blue stripes and in cream on the white and red stripes. The binding is a red polka dot. The bottom right hand corner has our initials embroidered, along with the year.

The back has more cars fabric, along with the meandering bicycles that I bought in Cambridge last winter.

I'd classify the size as a twin extra-extra-extra-long. But then again, the recipient is 6'4" and I want him to be able to curl up under it and take a nap (or watch the Rangers WIN) and not have his feet get cold.

I love you, Little Brother. Enjoy the quilt!

Works in progress

I'm midway through two projects. First is my new grey cowl, ravelled here. The pattern is quite straightforward and good for watching tv, except for when said tv gets suspenseful and you accidentally purl two in a row instead of purl - slip - purl and then you have to unpick two rows. Ahem.

I still love my interchangeable knit-pro needles, so if you're on the fence about buying a set (and are in danger of accumulating too many odd-sized circular needles, go for it.

I have also finished the front and back of Ed's Rangers quilt. I've fused the letters on, and just need to zig-zag around them, then sandwich, quilt and bind. I think I'm going to free-motion around the front but avoid the letters. I even found, downloaded, printed out, and traced a New York Rangers font.

*We interrupt this blog for a public service announcement*

When you are making interfacing templates to cut out letters to iron them onto the front of a quilt, you must reverse the letters. Especially the N. No amount of flipping or turning will help. You're welcome.


*Normal service resumes.*

So, yeah, it's going to be snazzy. It's extra-long twin sized, since my brother is extra-tall and I want to make sure that he can stretch out under it while watching the Rangers games.