Magazine Love...

Yay - mail I actually want to receive!  I was so excited to go to the mailbox today to see these waiting for me.  After our Asbury challenge, I started following Thomas Knauer's blog and saw that he had been featured on the cover of Generation Q magazine.  I had never heard of this magazine before (or seen it in any of my local stores) and customer reviews I read raved about it, so I ordered a couple of back issues. 

Full disclaimer...I haven't even read a single page completely through yet.  But I did a quick flip through and I'm already thinking that I'm going to love this magazine.  Any magazine - let alone a quilting magazine - that includes stuff like this is pretty great in my book:

Yum.  I can't wait to read through these pretties for real!

Introducing My Little Bookworms...

My second finish of 2013...yikes!  I've finished a quilt a month since December.  This is far and away the most productive that I've ever been (sewing-wise) and I'm a little afraid it means that I might go into sewing hibernation until I emerge for spring.  Hopefully not, but if so at least I went out with a bang.

I know that I've gone into exhaustive detail about each of these blocks and how I made them, so I won't bore you all by rehashing it, but here's the complete list just in case you don't recognize the characters:

Top row (left to right):  The Giving Tree by Shel Silverstein, Olivia by Ian Falconer, Llama Llama Red Pajama by Anna Dewdney, I Had a Favorite Dress by Boni Ashburn
2nd row: I Will Never Not Ever Eat a Tomato by Lauren Child, The Tale of Peter Rabbit by Beatrix Potter, Pinkalicious by Victoria & Elizabeth Kann, Winnie-the-Pooh by A.A. Milne
3rd row: Put Me In the Zoo by Robert Lopshire, Fancy Nancy by Jane O'Connor, If You Give a Mouse a Cookie by Laura Numeroff, Madeline by Ludwig Bemelmans
Bottom row:  Go Dog Go! by P.D. Eastman, The Cat in the Hat by Dr. Seuss, Little House in the Big Woods by Laura Ingalls Wilder, Maisy's Bedtime by Lucy Cousins

I wanted to take a different approach in quilting than I did with Elephant Parade and stick with simplicity.  All I did to quilt the Bookworms was to outline each character square once and then quilt the colored stars using Angela Walter's suggestions for irregular shapes - it's really hard to see in pictures (and even in person) because I matched the thread to the dominant color, but you can kind of see the arcing petals in these pictures:

The binding came out quite nice - the black and white french phrases are not really noticeable on the front of the quilt, but you definitely notice it on the back side.

I am so in love with this quilt for my girls and I'm so happy to report that the girls seem to love it just as much!  My littlest loves to sit and look at each block, pointing out her favorites.  They haven't quite noticed the detailed label on the back, but it still makes me melt a little bit.

I'm going to try to remember these warm and fuzzy feelings the next time the girls are really pushing my buttons....which will probably be in the next 30 minutes.  Happy crafting everyone!

Linking up:

Crazy Mom Quilts - Finish It Up Friday

The Last Trio of Bookworm Blocks...

 

I don't know what my problem is - probably my typical phase of getting stuck at the tail end of a project - but I had a really hard time getting these last three blocks finished.  Actually, I had a hard time getting any sewing done at all for about a week and a half while I battled a really bad cold that I caught from the girls.  All I wanted to do was curl up on the couch with some Downton Abbey - and I barely even touched my hexies!

But I managed to get my butt in gear as my wealth of scheduled blog posts dried up with nothing else to fill in the void and my self-imposed deadline of a February finish was looming.  Withouth further ado, the last three books in our favorites list include: Put Me In the Zoo by Robert Lopshire, The Cat in the Hat by Dr. Seuss, and The Giving Tree by Shel Silverstein. 

My favorite little detail from these three is a little pop of text in the Giving Tree block - family.  Gives me the warm and fuzzies just looking at it.

Yahoo!  The last three Bookworm blocks are completed and now it's off to quilt and bind this sucker!  I found a really cute text print a while back that is black and white (the perfect complement to a rainbow quilt, IMHO) french phrases with their english translations.  So perfect!

I can't wait to share the completed quilt with you all - stay tuned!

Linking up:

The Bookworms Are Backing It Up...

We had ourselves a monster snowstorm up here in New England a week ago and while literally snowed it (but still with power - yay!), I managed to piece the back of my Little Bookworms quilt and do some of the detail stitching on it.  When I was first putting all the ideas together for this quilt, I saw the cutest bookshelf fabric online and decided that it would make the most perfect backing for a quilt all about books...doesn't it fit to a tee?

But that alone wasn't quite enough...have you seen this amazing tutorial by Don't Call Me Betsy for a bookshelf mini quilt?  I loved it and wanted to incorporate that as well - plus it would be my first time working with selvedges.  I get the obsession now - it's fun!

 

 

So I laid out three shelves to divide the backing fabric.  The top two are pretty much straight from Elizabeth's tutorial and here are the results:

 



For the bottom shelf, I made a vertical stack of books with a little mascot on top:

And a special little label for the girls:

So here's the big picture all ready to go...now off to finish the last 3 blocks and complete the top!

 

Linking up:



 

A Bookworm Block and Book Review...

I mentioned last time that the next post about the Bookworm quilt would only have one block and a book review.  Usually I like to do groups of blocks, but this block covers a pretty recent book and it's a good one.

I Had a Favorite Dress by Boni Ashburn is an adorable story about a girl with a favorite dress that she wears every Tuesday, her favorite day of the week.  But she grows, as all kids do, and soon her favorite dress doesn't fit anymore. 

 

It's pretty fortunate that she has an awesomely crafty mom who teaches her not to make molehills out of mountains and can remake her dress into different things for her for the rest of the year with a simple snip, snip and sew, sew! 

The illustrations are by Julia Denos and they are gorgeous.  The watercolors mixed with some collage elements really make the story pop.

This book is a big, big favorite over here.  It teaches days of the week, calming down in the face of wardrobe catastrophe, sewing appreciation and showing some love for your hard-working, crafty mom.  Seriously, what mom doesn't like a book that makes her feel like a superhero for sewing?

 

So here is my Favorite Dress block, and of course it had to have a pink corner. 

I couldn't believe it when I held up some leftover Pearl Bracelet fabric from my paper pieced sewing machine and it was a perfect match to the illustration!

Only 3 left to go, and then I can move onto the back!  Or maybe I'll just skip to the back to shake things up a bit...

Linking up with:
  

Very, Very Late to the Party...

I did a little fun magazine and book shopping a few days ago - they're like candy for crafty adults but get set aside and ignored until the blissful two hours in the afternoon when both girls are napping.  If you haven't checked out Quilty magazine yet, its definitely worth a look!  As for my new book, Hexa Go-Go by Tacha Bruecher...well, I don't know if you've heard of this crazy trend sweeping the quilting world called "the hexie." Oh wait.  That's old news?  Like 2 years old?  Yeah, I'm pretty behind the times.  But I might actually be catching up.

Honestly, I've been reading about other people's hexagon quilts for a while now and loved seeing the final result, but they just seemed so labor intensive!  I've tried handsewing before and it's just not my thing.  That and I didn't really see any designs that I was crazy about.  But a few weeks ago, I saw a couple of bloggers doing hexies in a snowflake pattern and that peaked my interest!  I decided to do a little playing around with my fancy-schmancy quilting software (cough...I copied a jpeg into Paint and used the rinky-dink "fill" feature...cough) to do up a couple potential designs that I truly love. 

I honestly couldn't decide between a sunset color scheme with white outlines (just ignore the black hexies in the sketch and imagine white instead) or a green/blue/purple combo with black outlines that reminds me of stained glass.  So I went the truly overboard road and decided to do both.  I'll do a smaller hexie size for the sunset scheme and it will be like my practice run for the larger stained glass version.  And I'm going to TRY to relax and do it here and there whenever I can.   After all, you're supposed to take your time with hexies, right?

Oh yeah, there's one more thing that I'm really late to the party to discover...Downton Abbey.  I realize that it's been the toast of tv for a while now, but Season 1 has been sitting on my Netflix queue for ages and I decided that sitting down with some hexie fun might be a good way to check it out.  Several days worth of the girls' nap time later and almost into Season 2, I am hooked!  I'm rooting for Mr. Bates and Anna while whipstiching and booing the awful O'Brien and dastardly Thomas as I'm basting my fabric.  It's just so darn good...I know that I'm going to fly through all the episodes too quickly. 

Yep, I'm enjoying this project so far.  My only regret is that I was so late to begin with.

Linking up:

Inching Along With the Bookworms...

 

 Le sigh...don't you just love Madeline?  The perfect blue coats and yellow hats, that big old house covered in vines and twelve little girls in two straight lines?  But I'm getting ahead of myself.  Last time, I promised that there would be a famous french girl, gassed up canines and a brassy swine.  Kudos to Alice - nice guessing!  Here's a wider shot of the Madeline block:

 Next up was our gassed up canines from Go Dog Go! by P.D. Eastman (side note: it didn't make the character cut, but another one of our house's favorites is also a "Beginner" book by Marilyn Sadler about P.J. Funnybunny called "It's Not Easy Being a Bunny."  If you haven't heard of it, check it out!  Older sister loved to shout "Mooooonk!" when P.J. decides to run away and be a moose.  Trust me, it's funny.)

 

A peek of some Peeps, of course:



And that brassy swine?  It just has to be Olivia by Ian Falconer. 

Now, everyone knows that Olivia only likes to wear red, so I was a little disappointed when I just couldn't fit Olivia into a block with a red corner.  But I actually think that the orange and green worked better than I anticipated.  I hope she isn't too upset about it.

 

Only four more blocks to go!!  This is probably the last progress shot that I'll share until the entire top is finished, but it just makes me happy to see it all together. 

 

 

Next time with the Bookworms...a block and a book review!

Linking up: