courtney rebecca

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've been falling a bit behind on my goal of making something new once a month this year. Jason is in Texas this week to attend Summit at ACU, so as soon as he left, I got busy sewing! I pinned this tutorial a reeeeally long time ago (26 weeks ago to be exact, thank you Pinterest for knowing that) and I finally decided to try it. I picked out the fabric for the skirt a long time ago too... June, I think? Whenever I took that quilting class, I picked it up. And I've had this tank top for YEARS (probably since high school) and it's always been too short. Perfect project for it! This tutorial would have been really easy if I had a sewing machine that worked well with elastic thread. Alas, I have a Brother, which has a drop-in bobbin, which makes it a nightmare to work with elastic thread. Awesome. I decided to attempt it anyway, and gave up on my Brother after about 30 minutes of frustration. Luckily! I still have the Kenmore that my cousin gave me. It has some bobbin i...

I am so proud. After over a month of working on it (off and on), I finally finished my first quilt! For some reason I was having anxiety about quilting and especially binding it, but it ended up being totally fine. I don't know why I was so worried. It turned out great! Mission accomplished... he likes it!

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!

I took my first sewing class a year ago. I really wanted to learn how to sew, but even more, I wanted to learn how to quilt. My grandma, Tutu, made a lot of quilts when she was alive. She even taught my older cousin Michelle how to quilt. By the time I had any interest in learning, Tutu was too old to teach me. Or I at least assumed, because I never asked. Tutu passed away two years ago this month, and I am finally learning how to quilt. I have to believe that she would be proud of me! I took an Intro to Quilting class yesterday at this adorable local fabric store, Fabric Bliss. I've taken two other sewing classes there, and I absolutely love it! Today we made a tiny little quilt called a "mug rug." I couldn't believe that it came together so fast! We only did one block, but we pieced it all together, did the batting, and did the binding. So now I know how to do everything I need to do for a large quilt as well! I think the tiny quilt turned out pretty cute. It...

Happy day after Mother's Day! I hope you got to enjoy the day with your mom, or if you can at least talk to her on the phone. I'm writing this the week before Mother's Day, but I plan to Skype with my mom, and my mother-in-law will be in town staying with us! I really wanted to make something for my mom and mother-in-law this year. I can only make so many random things for myself, so I love getting to make things for my family! Sorry family, expect homemade things for Christmas and birthdays this year... I'm having way too much fun to stop! My Mother-in-law Karen has a Kindle Keyboard and a Kindle Fire. Conveniently, both devices have almost the same dimensions. Sweet! So I made her a soft case for whichever one she chooses. Jason went to the fabric store with me and helped pick out the fabric. He specifically wanted something purple. We picked the outside fabric first, then had a bit of trouble finding a coordinating fabric for the lining. When Jason saw this...

I've been working this year on making something new with my sewing machine every month. Last night I decided to make my item for April, and it ended up being WAY easier than I thought it would be! Everything I learned in a recent zippered clutch class at Fabric Bliss made it easy to put together this  little case. I got a Kindle Touch for Christmas and I absolutely love it. I have a leather case with a light already for it, but I was always worried about getting the leather case scratched up when I put it in my purse to carry around. I had seen a lot of cute soft cases on Etsy, but I was pretty sure I could make it myself. Turns out, I really could make it! It took about an hour and a half. I was shocked I was able to make it so fast. I love that it fits so snugly and I don't have to worry about my Kindle getting scratched up. And it's super cute! It's polka dot on the outside and a really cute grey houndstooth on the inside. There's padding to make it extra sa...

So I've been doing well with my personal goal of making 1 new thing each month. I think it's going to get even easier, because earlier this month Amazon was having a great sale and I got this: I had been using a sewing machine that I got from my cousin, but I dropped it right when I got it and it messed up the bobbin. Jason figured out how to fix it, but it would break periodically, usually in the middle of sewing. So I bought this beauty! It's a Brother CS6000i computerized sewing machine. It's the same one I learned on when I took classes at Fabric Bliss, so it's super easy for me to use right away. Over Spring Break, I've been working on my first project on this machine, and my project for March! I decided that I needed a Euro style pillow for our bed. But I wanted it to have texture. So I got on Pinterest and found some tutorials for a ruffle pillow cover. I read a bunch of them and used a hodgepodge of what I learned from them to make my own. I hav...