"Nine by Nine" quilt finished!

A fanfare if you please......









Phew! The Boy has been waiting on this quilt for over a year now, he was very very happy to open up the blanket drawer last night and see it there waiting for him. I was very very glad to finally have it done lol! The main hold up this time was the backing fabric, he wanted red minkee. Nothing else would do, it had to be minkee and it had to be RED please. I finally found some at a decent price on Etsy, ordered it at the end of November and it arrived January 11th! Just a bit late for Christmas then. Never mind, it's done now and he's happy so I'm happy :)

I tried straight line quilting on this one, outlining the sashing and the centre blocks of each star. It turned out OK but I prefer stippling or meandering, my straight lines aren't really that straight.

Baby Rails and Bright Stripes

I finally got these finished about a week ago and hubby has given them to their new homes, they were very well received. Here is the Baby Rails pattern:



I quilted it with an all over stipple, took ages!! It's backed and bound with a Robert Kaufman cotton I've had in my stash for a very long time, a pretty lavender shaded check.



And here is a close up of my favourite of the fussy cut fairies I put at the corners.




The Bright Stripes quilt has been made entirely with leftovers from the Boy's quilt, I added a narrow border as the white was just too white on its own, it really needed something else to hold it in a bit. The backing is another Robert Kaufman cotton that has been languishing in my stash for a few years which happened to match the bright colours of the quilt very nicely. And there was one purple fat quarter left from the pack which was just enough to use as binding.



I tried a kind of loopy quilting on this one, I need to work on my technique a lot. Here's the back, I had one leftover square that I used as a label.

A little more quilting

Bit of a catch up post this one, sorry for all the pics! The Boy's quilt top is almost done, here are the last three blocks:







And here it is with the sashing and inner borders in place - it looks a bit bumpy here, I've since taken off and shortened two of the borders which has fixed it and left it laying much flatter.



I have four co-ordinating FQ's left which I'm going to put on as a piano key border, it is getting there!

There were quite a few scraps left over from this so I made a baby quilt which will be gifted to one of Hubby's work colleagues who has recently had a baby boy. It needs something else as a border, I haven't decided what. I didn't have a pattern for this one, I just pieced the leftovers together and made strips while trying to keep some degree of symmetry.



Another of Hubby's colleagues has had a baby girl in the last week (they're just popping them out over there lol!) so he asked me to make a quilt for her too. I have just the right thing to use, this FQ pack which I was given last Christmas.



All lovely soft, glittery pastel colours just perfect for a baby quilt. I felt like a break from triangles so chose a simpler pattern from another of my secret santa books, the centre panel is a simple rail fence:



Then it has a plain solid inner border and the rest of the rail fence blocks make up the outer border along with four fussy cut fairies for the outer corners.



I'm not sure what to use for the backing and binding, I'm sure something will show up though, it's not like I'm short of fabric in this place lol!

And just a final few pics to show you how tough on my sewing space piecing all these quilts have been!

Hard at work on my increasingly messy desk


Snip, snip, snip....I've been finding trimmed triangle points all over the house!


My ironing space, in front of the shoe cupboard which has been out of bounds for over a week.




Okay, that's it, all I've been up to for this time :)

A Christmas quilt

Last Christmas I made snuggle quilts for my middle girls and my son was a bit upset when he didn't get one too. My youngest two children are away visiting grandma which has given me plenty of time today to finally get started on his quilt which, fingers crossed, I will actually finish in time for Christmas!

I had trouble deciding on fabrics for this and eventually settled on a fat quarter pack I found on ebay, Moda's Dinosaur Uproar range. Here they are, all folded nicely.



Next I had to pick a pattern. My vast prior quilting experience (three doll quilts and my girl's lap quilts!) has been a case of winging it, I decided it was past time I actually opened one of the qulting books I got from my Secret Santa last year and lo and behold, there was the perfect pattern!



The book is Fast Quilts from Fat Quarters but I must say that, so far, it hasn't been particularly fast lol! The first step was to select ten of my delicious fabrics and cut them all up as per the book's cutting plan. I actually used the bottle of spray starch that I picked up about three years ago and apart from the funny smell I liked it, it made the fabrics a lot easier to handle. Here they are, all cut and stacked ready to piece into the blocks.



After working on and off for about five hours I've finished six of the nine blocks. I'd still be going now if I hadn't come across a slight hitch. The design uses more of triangle D than the plan lets you cut from 10 fat quarters, I'm going to have to either piece lots of little triangles into bigger ones or butcher my large squares. I vote for butchering!

Here are the six finished blocks, they're all slight variations on an Ohio Star block and will be 12" square when it's all finished.













What do you think? I'm pretty pleased with these so far, I've finally cracked the "scant quarter inch" idea and my seams are matching up much better as a result!