a purse

i made a diaper bag/purse for my sister who just had an adorable baby girl {mazie} at the end of august. this purse is bright and bold but i love it... hope you do too stacey!

 

finally

Some sewing is getting done around here. It took a backseat for a while with all the Jasper stuff going on.

Remember the gracie quilt. Yeah, I should've finished it like months ago. I didn't... but it's finished now. And it's amazing if I do say so myself. I switched out some of the fabrics from when I originally posted a pic of the quilt top. And I love how the back turned out. Making quilts is so wonderful, I find great joy in the process and end result.

Some other exciting news... we are going to Philadelphia the first week of August! We will get to meet little Gracie {who shares my birthday} for the first time and visit with the rest of her cute fam {who just moved to PA last week} and we'll also get to explore some of the East Coast {Philly, DC, NY, New Jersey}. I am SO excited because E and I haven't been back East {together} before. Yea for new places and new adventures. can.not.wait {5 weeks away}.

love this boy

reminiscing and a purse

when we lived in california, i became friends with a wonderful woman. we trained with each other and did this race and this race together. she got certified to be a doula while i lived there and we had the best conversations about birth and babies. she was a great comfort to me as we started on our infertility journey, mostly because she always listened to me ramble about our troubles. i always felt i could confide in her.

we also loved to sew and were able to get together a couple times to have sewing days. those were always fun days. another good memory i recall was when we'd carpool to relief society activities together. we'd decide beforehand to only stay an hour {you know how you can get caught up while visiting, plus families at home to get back to} and we'd always be eyeing each other when that hour rolled around. it was nice to have someone to do that with.

shortly after we moved to CA she had a little baby girl {now 2}. her second {a boy} is due in a month. i made this purse for her to hopefully serve as a diaper bag. but what's so great about this purse is it's easy conversion to purse after the need for a diaper bag ends.

you may remember that i made a purse from the same pattern for my sis in law at christmas. i love how that one turned out and i absolutely love how this one turned out too. and still my fav part about the purse are the 4 outer pockets. they are perfection.

the pattern is Anna Maria Horner - Multi-Tasker Tote. All fabric is from Anna Maria Horner also. The exterior and interior fabrics are from the Drawing Room home decor collection and the red pockets on the outside are from the Good Folks collection. Anna Maria Horner patterns and fabrics are amazing. they are so easy to understand and work with.

i mailed it today Jess. and you may find another surprise in there with it. hope you love it! here's to good memories and friendship.

um, i'm so in love with it... i couldn't pick one picture

words with pictures

I love this mini quilt and I love these colors together. I also like that's it's more of a neutral... not boy or girl. You can't see the quilting very well on either side. But it is quilted in lines. The red striped side is flannel and the brown dots side is quilting cotton with a solid mustard yellow binding. I'll be listing it in the shop today.

Another one of my receiving blankets. I love this deep teal flannel. The color was hard to capture on my camera. But it is a gorgeous deep teal. I'll also be listing this in the shop today.

I'm participating in a vintage sheet swap. I've been collecting these for a while, so it was hard to part with some. Here is my stack I sent off and hopefully I'll get an even better stack back in a couple weeks.

Here's that fabric I was talking about. It is a deep plum background with pomegranate triangles. I got 2 yards of it for 1.99. I am going to make a skirt out of it. I love the colors. The picture does not do it justice. 

Remember how I mentioned a couple weeks ago that we bought a tree. Here it is. Isn't it cute?

sew - 24 - train

here's my latest quilt up on the design wall. i'm really diggin' this one. inspiration from here. i still need to add the stripes in between the blocks.


but you see there is a problem with all this sewing i do. i forget to do other things {like fix E's pants that have been sitting around for several weeks}. this morning he wanted to wear them and i hadn't fixed them yet because i get so preoccupied with my projects. sewing pants just isn't as fun as my quilts & blankets.


i ordered the first season of 24. i hear we're in for some non stop watching. not like we have the time for it, but i'm sure it'll be fun. since we don't have cable we have to have something on hand to watch when we're feeling like it. opinions on 24? who's watched it, is it good and will we like it?

E trained me hard yesterday. a challenging hour of yoga and then a 3 mile run. after the yoga i complained about how i didn't want to run because i was tired from the yoga. then E threatened to stop coaching me if i complained about the workouts any more. and i can't risk losing E as my mentor/trainer/coach so i tried to stop complaining. then on the drive over to the run, E gave me the speech, "training is hard and that's what makes you better. it takes doing it even when it's hard". so i went on the run and i felt amazing. coach always knows best.

E just emailed me and swiming is on the schedule for today.

a basket full of blankets

I've been working on a million {or so it seems} receiving blankets. But so far have completed 13. Then I spent yesterday afternoon taking pictures of them. I am listing them in my etsy shop tonight {it takes forever to compress and load all the pictures}.

It was so gorgeous here in AZ yesterday. Extremely nice and enjoyable outside. I even got a little sun on my cheeks. And while I worked the camera, this is what E did.

And on Saturday I was successful in my search for more vintage sheets & pillowcases. Now I have enough to make the top of this Beach Blanket To Go from Handmade Home {checked it out from the library, it's awesome}. I still need to find another vintage sheet for the back, but that wont be too hard. The best thing about a sheet is its size; there is always enough fabric for several projects. I already made a skirt out of the light pink floral.

p.s. i only have to work 2 days this week. wahoo!

finish

remember this

i had to finish the edges to make it complete.

i finished it last night while watching several episodes of criminal minds.

now it's finished self is sitting on the couch begging me to wrap myself in it and play mario.

it always feels so good to finish a project. so good.

hoping to finish another project tonight.

i'm on a roll.

the weekend in projects

i had a busy weekend with my sewing machine.

first
i created a design wall on one of the walls in the sewing room. it's very simple. a large piece of cotton batting pinned/taped to the wall. you see, i was tired of arranging the blocks for my quilts on the floor. so instead i put some cotton batting (or flannel works too) on the wall and then arrange your blocks on it. they stick to the batting perfectly. it is so much better than arranging and then re-arranging everything (a million times to get the perfect look) on the floor. plus now my floor is clear and I don't have to beg eric to step over all the fabric everywhere. now it's on the wall.

second
i finished cutting and arranging all the fabrics for gracie's quilt. now i just need to sew it together. normally i wouldn't post a picture of a quilt in progress because i like the recipient to be surprised. but i couldn't resist because it looks so great up on the design wall. hope you like it jo! hopefully i'll have it to you in a couple of weeks.

third and fourth
i made 2 skirts and i am in love them. i bought the fabric and elastic at my favorite fabric warehouse and spent a total of 7 dollars on all supplies for both skirts. remember this tutorial. i used it and it was awesome {did i mention there are pockets in the skirt}. the first one took me a couple of hours. but the second one i finished in just under and hour. then i wore one to church on sunday and it was fantastic. there is something so great about wearing something you've made. i can't decide which one i like better. which one do you like better?

fifth

i finished all my 101 siggy blocks for the modern siggy swap i am participating in. i am so excited to get a bunch of different blocks back from all over the world. and then make a great quilt out of all of them.

oh and i hemmed some of eric's pants too. it's not very exciting. but i have gotten so much faster at it. i can do it in about 15 minutes now. where as when i first started hemming pants it took me a couple hours to finish them.

the beast

A couple months ago as I was driving around on a Saturday morning, I saw a sign for an estate sale. I found my way over to the house and took a look around, everything within sight was for sale. I spent a good while looking through all this woman's stuff and then I found it. A vintage quilt. It was quite large and just the quilt top, but I grabbed it. I found a second quilt inside the house that had all 3 layers pin basted together but needed to be finished and I grabbed that one too. I paid a total of 8 dollars for both quilts. Which I decided was awesome.

I just stashed them for a while trying to decide what to do with them. The one that is already put together with all it's layers I am going to machine quilt (haven't done it yet). But it was the quilt top that had me questioning what to do with it. It is 90x100 and I didn't want to quilt the beast. So I thought about cutting it up and re-purposing it. But I didn't really like the idea of cutting up all the hard work someone put into it (even though the quilt is pretty ugly). My sis had the great idea to make it into a beach/picnic blanket and instead of quilting it, tie it. I went to CA a couple weekends ago and brought the quilt with me. I enlisted my mom and sisters to help me tie the beast. I bought the backing fabric at Joanns and when we got home we measured it again and it was 4 inches too short (I calculated wrong). So instead of going back to Joanns to buy more fabric, my mom pulled out some vintage fabric from my great grandma's stash. We happened to find some fabric that went perfectly (the bird cages). We added the extra fabric to the backing fabric and tied the whole thing over the weekend and all that's left is for me to finish up the edges.

See I told you, it's ugly. But I love it.

The back is my favorite. I am so glad I was short fabric and was able to add some of my great grandmas fabric to the back. I am in love with it!