FITF: Film in the Fridge | modern quilts, clothing, fabric, and photos

I finished my first quilt!

Posted on May 26, 2009

This is the very first quilt top I made, let’s see… about nine months ago. Since then, I guess I got busy with other (smaller!) quilts. Perhaps pulling it out and posting about it the other day got me motivated to finally finish it…

I finished it up last week, but then the weather wasn’t cooperating for photos… Saturday was nice and sunny though, and since my sister seems to think that you’re all tired of seeing photos in our backyard, I took Morgan, my sister and the quilt on a little outing… most of these photos are brought to you courtesy of some farmer’s cow field (thanks, random farmer!)

Only in Vermont you’d include cows in your quilt photos, right?!

Some of them seemed ok with being part of the photo shoot, but others looked less pleased…

Quilting it? Kind of a pain in the butt elbow, actually. But happily, aside from the pain it caused in my right arm, quilting it on my regular machine wasn’t as bad as I expected. (guess I shouldn’t have put it off for so long!)

This quilt is made from a lot of Amy Butler fabrics, with some Joel Dewberry and Jennifer Paganelli fabrics mixed in. These are truly the very first fabrics I purchased, way before I knew how obsessed I’d become. Each block is 8″ square, I believe, and each contains three different fabrics. Then all sashed in white. And it’s big! The photos above only show half of the quilt – below is a photo of the entire front.

I enjoy looking at this one because I very specifically recall cutting and sewing these blocks, and not really being very sure about my measuring and cutting skills. One block in particular I recall ended up almost an inch smaller, and at the time, I just decided it wouldn’t matter (ha!). Luckily, quilting glosses over many errors!

The back is predominantly white, with one offset strip of mini blocks

Anyway, it’s all washed and cozy, and now I just want to lay under it on the couch. As I said, it’s a big one – 72″ x 94″ . It covers our queen sized bed, but doesn’t hang over as much as I’d like. Apparently I wasn’t concerned back then about making sure it was a size that would actually fit the bed! Minor details…

Spring to finish for May = 1

far far away squared

Posted on May 22, 2009

hr-squared-quilt

I didn’t have enough willpower to resist ordering a fat quarter of each of the prints from Heather Ross’ Far Far Away line. They arrived the other day and they looked so great all together that I decided to make one of my favorite simple charm square quilts. Sometimes I just can’t resist a quilt made up of squares of all the fabric from one line (like here, with the Katie Jump Rope prints, or here with the MoMo Wonderland prints).

Boy was it hard to cut into these though! I looked at them for a long time, touched and rearranged them for a while and then took the plunge… I opted for 6″ squares, and I think I ended up doing 6 of each print to make the quilt large enough (it has to be large enough to cover me, as I’m definitely not giving this one up!)

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I considered adding a solid border to make it a bit bigger, but I think I’m going to just leave it as it is. It will probably get a solid color for the backing – I’m leaning towards a corresponding purple, but I’ll have to wait for my order from Pink Chalk Fabrics to arrive to see what matches best (free shipping on orders over $50 this weekend – yay! …you know me and a deal!)

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I think I’m really going to love it!Â (ok, I already do!)

Posted in Household Sewing - bags, napkins, pillows, Posts about Quilts | Tagged charm squares, Far Far Away, handmade, Heather Ross, princess and the pea, quilt, quilting | 38 Comments

I heart my new Socialite dress!

Posted on May 21, 2009

It’s no secret that I’m not a fan of patterns, so you may wonder why I actually purchased this pattern (Anna Maria Horner’s Socialite dress)…(the main reason: it was on sale, and I’m a sucker for a sale!)

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This particular dress was made as a test to see the sizing, so I made it out of this chocolate brown solid. I didn’t want to waste good fabric, but I did want to like it well enough to be able to wear it if it did end up fitting correctly! To jazz it up a bit, I found a fat quarter of one of Anna Maria Horner’s Good Folks fabrics which went nicely with the brown.

(If you’re wondering, I was able to cut out three of the four front and back yoke pieces from the fat quarter of printed fabric (I used the solid brown for the interior back neck section – no one will see it!))

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What I loved about this pattern was that I cut out my size, sewed it all up, and when I tried it on when it was all complete, I found that it fit almost perfectly. This is a change for me — since many of my recent dresses have been made up or made from modified versions of other patterns I end up having to try them on many, many time while sewing. It was really nice not to get undressed so many times! Perhaps I lucked out, or maybe this pattern really does run true to size.

In any case, I love it! And even though I didn’t take any time selecting fabric, I really like the solid with the contrasting neckline. I think this will be a favorite this summer!

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