Her First Quilt

The quilting bug has caught hold of my seven year old daughter and she is working on her very first doll blanket :)

I am totally thrilled! She has been watching my mom and I craft since she was a baby and I can tell that she will soon be a full time member of our sewing circle *grin*. She's hand sewing all of the pieces together and is amazingly quick now that she has mastered how to tie her own knots and is no longer stabbing her fingers constantly :)

Thankfully for now my scrap bag will satisfy her every need for fabrics but I know there will be the day that she will want to shop just like her mama at the fabric store. All I can say is poor hubby's pocketbook! LOL.

Hugs,
Rosina

Hexagons on the Hoop

Thought that I would share how I'm doing with my little hexagon quilt :)
I had originally intended to give it to my daughter for Easter but with all of the bunny goodness that I ended up making for her I thought that I would hang on to the quilt and give it at a later date so that her brothers didn't think she was getting spoiled *wink*.

I found the most vivid fuschia colored linen to finish it with. I just LOVE the color and I'm absolutely smitten with linen right now so I just had to buy it *grin*.

I pinned the hexagons to the linen with some quilting safety pins I had to keep it as smooth as possible so that it wouldn't bunch underneath as I shift the larger piece of linen around and now I've got it on my hoop so that I can start to quilt inside the hexagons :) I've decided that I'm going to do a little bit of free hand embroidery inside the green linen hexagons and put 'love mama' and the year and so on for her to. I can't wait to get a little more time to work on it, it's going to be so cute!!

~ Rosina

Coming Together Nicely

I thought that I would share an update on how L's little hexagon dolly quilt is coming along. I think I'm actually going to get it finished in time for Easter and have time to spare! There's only a handful of them left to sew together and then it's on to the binding, backing and so on :)

I'm actually amazed at how well all of the little hexagons fit together. I was slightly terrified that if any of them were off in size at all that it would throw the entire thing off but it's quite forgiving! I've had a few that are a couple of millimeters to long or short on one side or the other but they just sort of work in to the next hexagon without any fussing. So if you were thinking of tackling one similar to this I say go for it! *grin*

L's been eyeing up my craft bag as I've been whisking it in and out of cupboards, under fabric piles and skulking in shadows with it to catch little moments to sew on it during the day. LOL. She knows that I'm up to something but can't figure out what :)

It did get her excited about doing some fabric pictures and she put together this one using some of my scraps. She spent the morning cutting out shapes and stitching them on to the fabric until she had a story to go along with it. So cute! I think I'm going to have to get some more hoops for her or we could just switch out the fabric every time she wants to do a new one because she's already cutting out pieces for a new one :)

~ Rosina

1 Hex, 2, Hex, 13 Hex?

I just love my little rainbow of hexagons :)
So colorful yet so confusing *grin*. I can definitely understand now why I needed to number each of them before starting to sew them together! I had packed them with in the truck today when we headed into town but quickly realized that I couldn't just pull them out one by one to stitch them together and to top it all off I had actually forgotten which way I had arranged them the other day on the table for the finished look. Apparently I'm suffering from short term memory loss these days :)

My little pattern indicated that I was definitely not to sew them all together in a straight line but in a zig zagging sort of pattern. So number 1 was stitched to number 2 and then number 13 was attached to number 2. I'm just whip stitching them with a bright green thread because I thought that it would look fun since some of the stitching is going to end up showing a bit on the front side anyways. I've got 5 together so far and I'm going to do a few more tonight and then I'll show you how I'm progressing again :) I must say it's a fun little project!

~ Rosina

I'm Late, I'm Late, For A Very Important Date!

I have been literally counting the days until I could show you what I made for my Alice in Wonderland swap partner *grin*. I wanted to keep it top secret so that it was a total surprise so I restrained myself from sharing any hints! Today I received an email letting me know that it had arrived and she liked it and I'm so happy :)

From the information that I had I knew that she loved bunnies so I knew that the White Rabbit was a must do! The only problem was that I had no pattern *gasp*. I wasn't sure how I was going to tackle making a rabbit having never made one before.

I thought perhaps I would sew one from fabric but I was stumped. I'm a sucker for felt as you know so I knew I would have to use felt in some shape or form and then it hit me. I would create the white rabbit in a mixture of embroidery, felt & found objects!

I started by going completely high tech and sketched an outline of the rabbit onto my muslin canvas with a pencil *grin*. As I was stitching I wanted to give him the illusion of being furry so I made a hodge podge of irregular stitches all throughout his face and bottom so that he looked ruffed up and I think it turned out pretty well. If you're a pro at embroidery please don't slay me for bad form! LOL

Next was to tackle his clothing and give him a bit of a 3D effect so that he looked like he was popping off of the canvas :) Leaving the embroidery thread to just stitching on the pieces I made his tunic and collar from my felt stash. The sleeve on the right is actually sewn so that you can look right up inside of it and see his embroidered arm and for the collar I folded some blue felt accordion style and then snipped and tacked it until it fit just right :)

But he still looked incomplete. He needed a scroll and a watch since in the movie he is always checking it and yelling out he was late but I didn't want them to be flat pieces to my puzzle by using felt or more embroidery. So I hit the second hand shops until I could find an old wrist watch that was dainty enough to be his pocket watch :) I wrapped & glued some embroidery floss around a scroll made of some stiff handmade paper I had from scrapbooking and then stitched it and the dangling watch head beneath it to finish my white rabbit creation :)

I'm pretty darn pleased with how he turned out and the last little touch I added was to paint the ecru colored muslin with a bit of light blue paint in irregular strokes to give him a bit of a whimsical look. The kids actually thought that it looked a bit like he was flying and I thought that was perfect since Alice had fallen down a rabbit hole.... perhaps my white rabbit was on his way flying through his rabbit hole as well *grin*.

Such a fun swap!! If you want to see more of what others made for their swap partners you can check out the flickr group here and have fun watching the new Alice in Wonderland movie this weekend! We're definitely going and I can't wait :)

~ Rosina