courtney rebecca

My goal for 2013 was to finish 4 quilts. I ended up finishing one twin size for Jason, making 3 baby quilts, and making 4 tiny quilts for mug rugs. I would call that Mission Accomplished! The first complete quilt I made this year was a very special one for a little girl named Mila. Our friends Aaron and Erin are missionaries in Russia, and they had their first baby this year! She is precious, and though we haven't gotten to meet her yet (failed trip to Texas in December... stupid ice storms.) we love her so much! I used Moda's Simply Sweet and backed it with pink minky. Bound it with red and pink polka dot fabric from Simply Sweet. I can't remember if I used fat quarters or a precut charm pack, but I  think it was fat quarters. I seem to remember cutting out these pieces. The next quilt I made was for a very special little boy! My best friend Cayce had her first baby in July. I was absolutely thrilled to get to deliver this quilt in person. It was amazing ...

I have made some serious progress on Jason's quilt. But as I was working on it (for SEVEN hours today) I realized that maybe it was a big ambitious of me to attempt a twin size quilt for my second quilt ever. Yikes. I really love choosing a pattern, choosing fabric, cutting out the pieces, and piecing together the front and the back. And then we get to making the quilt sandwich. Ugh. This is the worst part. I need to do some reading about how to make this part not suck, because it makes me feel absolutely crazy! To make the quilt sandwich, you need a space big enough on the floor to lay the whole quilt out. Preferably on a hard surface, or when you start pinning, you'll pin the quilt to your carpet. We only have hard flooring in our kitchen & dining room, so Jason helped me move the table, then clean the floor really well so I could lay the quilt down. You lay the back down first, right side down. Then the batting. This time I used Warm & Natural cotton batting, a...

Today I... Took Kingsley to the vet Went grocery shopping Made pancakes for lunch Made an entire twin size quilt top. So the vet took 30 minutes. Grocery shopping took 45 minutes. Making pancakes took 15 minutes. Making an entire quilt top? Well, that took 4 episodes of Jericho (42 minutes each), plus 2.5 hours of Pandora listening. And there were 2 episodes of Jericho spent on it last week cutting out pieces for the top. Wow. I just felt like once I started though, I wanted to work until the end! It's such a pain to put everything away in pieces, and it's always hard to remember how everything fit together... Tomorrow I think I'll start working on the back, then I can sandwich and quilt it next weekend! It's going to be a twin size quilt for Jason to have as a throw blanket. I don't have a picture of the quilt top yet, but here are the fabrics I used. I love them! The plaid and two solids are from Michael Miller  and the stars are from Zoe Pearn ....

I finished my first quilt top today! I think it turned out pretty cute. Now the only thing left to do is baste it, quilt it, and bind it. Ha, only. I did forget to buy binding fabric and backing fabric when I bought the original fabric, so I'm going to have to wait until it gets here to do it. I'm thinking of the back being all the polka dot fabric, but with a cream background instead of black. And then the binding I'm thinking... yellow. Or maybe green. I wanted red, but I couldn't find anything that worked. I probably won't finish this until the end of July, since my family will be in town next week and then I'm going back with them to Texas the following week. I'm sure I'll have plenty of things to blog about between now and then though. For now, it feels amazing to have made (half of) something that looks like a real thing!

These pictures are awful because they're from my phone, so bear with me. I promise I'll take much better pictures when I finish this project . I cut out squares for my first patchwork quilt today. Can you tell what I'm making? It will be 4 inch squares once it's sewn together, and it is 8 squares by 9 squares. That should make it about 32" x 36" when it's finished. Won't that be the perfect size to put in Kingsley's crate for him to snuggle? Yes, my friends, I'm making a dog quilt. I need to make something small to practice and I don't have any friends here expecting babies right now, so I can't practice on baby quilts. Hence, the dog quilt. It also may not be perfect, so I won't mind if he tears it up or gets it dirty eventually. Hopefully he will enjoy snuggling it, and I know for sure that Kingsley won't mind my mistakes!