More For The Sake of Play

After cranking out tons of yarn bowls for wholesale and prepping for a craft show, I was feeling in a sewing funk. So I decided to take this week and just play with scraps and ideas I've been putting off and just have fun sewing for the sake of sewing versus sewing with a deadline. And it. felt. good.  On Thursday, I made the rainbow mini quilt as seen in the previous post. And on Friday, I pulled out a pile of hexagons that have been sitting basted just waiting to come to life since last summer.

I didn't really have a plan of what I wanted to do with them so I just played around laying then or on a large scrap of white fabric until I had an arrangement I liked. I then glued them on and quilted them down based on a tutorial by Modern Domestic for making "Modern Hexies".

It turned out quite fun and I even had some scraps of binding left over from other projects that complimented the mini quilt quite nicely. 

So this has become my favorite way of labeling my quilts lately - a nice little corner label with minimal hand sewing and just enough information to know it's mine. 

It felt good to just play and have fun and to sew for the sake of sewing and making something new and beautiful. 

I added this mini quilt along with some I've made previously and 2 I received in swaps last year to a little corner of my bedroom.  I'm in love with how they look all hung up together. My husband doesn't even seem to mind too much - he says it's cute because it's "me". :)

Rainbowey Scraps

This past fall, I made up a pile of tic tac toe blocks to donate to the #quiltblockstohealviolence project headed up by Jackie Gillis over on Instagram.  I was left with a whole pile of little half square triangles left over from making the blocks and I couldn't bear to just throw them out.

Instead, they have been sitting all together in a baggy in my scrap bin.  Well, yesterday, we had a rainy day after a week of gorgeous spring weather providing a needed break from all the yard work I've been doing.  And since I didn't have any pressing projects that I wanted to or needed to be working on, I decided to pull out those scraps and just play.  Half square triangles are so fun to play with and when they are in rainbow order - oh the possibilities!!

I went with a rainbowey diagonal stripe layout and just had fun sewing up those tiny triangles - not stressing too much about getting them perfect.

I framed it with some Essex yarn dyed linen and went to town quilting it.  Two layers of batting combined with matchstick quilting made for all kinds of yummy texture on this little quilt.

Feeling lazy and not wanting to make some new binding, I dug through my binding scraps and found enough of this teal blue Pie Making Day fabric from 3 different projects to use as binding for this mini quilt! Score!

And now I've got a sweet little mini quilt for my wall and a day well spent playing with scraps and color. :)

Catching Up

Huh, look at that.  It's all ready been over a month since I last posted about my crafty doings here on my blog.  Where does the time go?  Oh, well this time, I actually have an answer to that!  I spent a week out of town on a road trip with just me and my 2 little boys to visit family back in New York state.  And the rest of this past month has been spent sewing like a crazy woman to get 3 wholesale orders out and prep for a craft show!  Yes, so many really fun opportunities have come my way since March. 

 

First, a few maker, entrepreneur and mom, Kat (whom you can find here on Instagram or here where she and her business partner sells gorgeous hand dyed yarns and rovings), spotted some rope bowls I had been making and posting about on Instagram.  Instantly, she had a brilliant idea to have me make some rope bowls that would be the right size and shape to be used for yarn bowls.  Umm, yeah! After a few trial runs, we landed on something that was just perfect. :) (First picture is the right size/shape. Second picture is the snap/loop finish we came up with to provide a loop for the yarn to travel through while also making it possible to take a project out of the yarn bowl before it's finished)

 She wholesale ordered 10 of them from me for a fiber expo they were having a booth at in Chicago a few weekends ago. 

Well, those 10 rope bowl/yarn bowls sold right out, and she needed another 10! for another fiber expo they were doing in Ann Arbor the following weekend!  

And those nearly sold out too!  Crazy right?!?!  It's pretty exciting to be a part of the collaborative project with a fellow maker and to really be a part of "makers supporting makers"! I love it! 
So, as if that wasn't enough to keep me busy, out of the blue, I was contacted by a lovely lady who owns "The Happy Woman" shop in Sutton's Bay, MI.  She had seen my rope bowls that I had listed up in my Etsy shop and loved them and wanted to wholesale buy them from me to sell in her lovely shop!  Not gonna lie - I totally squealed and did a happy dance when I got her email!  :)  Here are my rope bowls in her shop.  They fit in quite nicely with the other beautiful things she has curated for her shop. 

I also had another opportunity work out to sell my handmade sewn items in a brick and motor shop in Traverse City, MI called "My Secret Stash".  It's a nice little shop filled with beautiful, fun and unique items from fellow Michigan makers and artist.  Things are sold on commission so I'm going to try it for a few months and see how it works out.  Right now, I've got a nice selection of Elephants, Bunnies, Pencil Pouches, Fabric Baskets, and Pacifier clips in this shop. 

And then, to top off all the crazy busy fun going down around here, I had a craft show this past Saturday!  Naturally, it also happened to be the first truly nice Saturday of the Spring!  So it was a little bit slow and not as large of a turn out as craft shows that I've done in the fall, but still, I did fairly well at it. Well enough to consider it a successful day! :)

Oh, and one last thing! Remember how I've started to make shop samples for the local quilt shop?  Well, I was in there earlier this week and she had the 2 I've gotten done thus far all hung up!  How exciting is that?! :)  They are the large quilt hanging up above the ladies and the mauve/gray quilt next to the owl and hedgehog. 

Plus, I do have a few other finishes that I want to show you, but that will have to be in a few other blog posts which I'll get up soon (hopefully!). :) Thanks for stopping by!

Bunny Parade and Pencil Pouch Mountain

There has been lots of finishes around here in the last few days including a whole pile of bunny softies and pencil pouches.  I'm trying to work on upping my Etsy inventory to I'll be all ready for a craft show in April.

These bunnies turned out so cute!! So many possibilities with these, it was hard not to make more than 20 of them.  And! Making these bunnies put a small dent in my scrap bin too. :)

How cute are these bunny buns??!!

I also got a whole mountain of pencil pouches finished up as well.  I keep telling myself to embrace the mantra of making what I love. And what I love it lots of colors.  There's some really beautiful pouches in this batch but then again I might be biased. ;)

You can find all these bunnies and pencil pouches in my Etsy shop.

The Retro Plaid Quilt or The End of Year Teacher Gift Quilt

 Sometimes I get an idea of something I want to make for a specific person, but then I start to second guess myself and can almost talk myself out of doing it.  Thankfully, I have crafty friends who get the need to make and usually talk me back into it.  That was the case with this quilt.  I had kind of wanted to make a quilt for my oldest son's preschool teacher for an end of year gift because she has been such a fantastic teacher and I have seen so many positive changes in my son since he has been in her class.  But then I started second guessing myself that maybe it would be too much or that she wouldn't like it or yeah...  Thankfully, I was chatting with my friend Sarah Thursday morning, and I brought up the idea for the quilt for Ben's teacher.  She totally jumped at the idea and her excitement gave me the permission I needed in order to go make this quilt all ready! 

 

Before I could talk myself out of making the quilt again, I set right to work making the quilt.  I had spotted this fun Retro Plaid quilt by Suzy Quilts and knew it would be a fun modern quilt to make that would fit my son's teacher's personality really well.  During nap/rest time Thursday afternoon, I printed off the pattern, pulled some long forgotten fabric from my stash and even with kid interruptions, by 5 o'clock I had a completed quilt top!  woot woot!

Friday morning, I ran into JoAnn's to pick up some lovely aqua blue minky for the back of the quilt.  That afternoon I got the quilt basted and started on quilting it and by Saturday night, the quilt was completely finished!  I love when a quilt comes together so quickly. :)

Even though it was a bit gray out today, I made my husband stop by a lake on the way home from church this morning to snap a few pictures of the finished quilt. 

I hope that my son's teacher will like it and will know how appreciated her influence on his life has been.

The Wild & Free Plus Quilt

In the fall of 2014, Maureen Cracknell was releasing her first collecting of fabric called Wild & Free and I just Had. To. Have. It!!

And then it sat and sat and sat on my shelf because it was just so beautiful and while I knew it was destined to be a quilt, I couldn't settle on a quilt pattern for it.  Finally, in January of this year, I decided to just stop over thinking it all ready and go with something simple that would let the fabric truly shine.  I ended up going with a simple plus quilt design which now that the quilt is finished I think was the perfect choice.  As I was cutting up the fabric, I realized that there was enough for a queen sized quilt if I added in some coordinating blue, red and yellow solids! Yay! My bed was in need of a new quilt (well not according to my husband but ehh, too bad ;) ).

I did have to order more of the yellow flower print in the line to use for the binding and I'm glad it did because it tied beautifully with the front and back of the quilt.  My husband was kind is surprised that I went with yellow since I'm not much of a fan of yellow, but this yellow reminds me so much of golden sunshine that I love it.

And yes, I backed the quilt all in a Cotton & Steel Arrows in Navy print. That I had in my stash. That I still have a few yards left over of.  Hey, when you love a fabric print, you might as well buy 10 yards of it just to have around just in case.  He he Please tell me I'm not the only one to do this!

I quilted this one on my new Juki TL2000Qi and oh my goodness! It was a dream to quilt!  I've only made one other queen sized quilt before and I quilted it on my tiny Baby Lock BL9 which was definitely a work out! And almost made me vow never to make a queen quilt again!  But quilting a queen sized quilt on my Juki was amazing! So much room to maneuver the quilt! And gorgeous even straight lines of quilting produced by my Juki!  I seriously can't rave enough about my new sewing backing (which I do quite a bit over on Instagram...).

I finished it up last night, washed it this morning (oh yummy, fresh from the dryer crinklyness!), and the sun, kids and husband were all cooperating so I could get photos of this quilt this afternoon! Which is no small task! A ladder and some tall trees were definitely involved.

And now, it's going to live on my bed where I get to enjoy it every day!

The Crocus Falling Stars Quilt

Lately, I've had an every growing list of things I should be sewing and things I should be making.  And lately, I've been just plain exhausted from keeping up with my two boys.  So, as you can imagine, any motivation to sew has been kind of low. Especially since the growing list of things I "should" sew is feeling a bit creativly stifling. 
So anyways, this past Sunday morning, I was looking at my recent order of zippers and was fascinated by the color combination. 

 Aren't those colors pretty?  Well, after lunch Sunday afternoon, I still couldn't get the colors out of my head and before I new it, I had this little pile of fabric pulled from my stash and paired with a quilt idea I'd scribbled out on some graph paper a little while ago.

 My dear sweet husband was willing to humor me and since the boys were both in pretty chill moods Sunday afternoon, I set to work turning an idea into a quilt.

 I decided to do a spin on a star quilt by using half rectangle triangles and keeping the shapes simple.  I added some interest into the quilt by varying the sizes of the blocks.

 By dinner time, I had this sweet little quilt top all put together.  The boys' bedtime couldn't come soon enough.

 I pulled some soft aqua blue dot minky from my stash for the backing on the quilt and did a quick job of basting this quilt thanks to spray baste!

 It had been a while since I gave a quilt the spiral treatment and it seemed like a nice simple way to accent this quilt. 

 Keeping the spiral quilt lines spaced at 1.5 inches apart, the quilting of this quilt went pretty quickly and before I knew it, it was time to trim up the quilt and get some binding ready for it.

 I happened to have the prefect fabric in my stash for the binding - a nice teal blue with hints of pink and green in it which tied in nicely with the colors of this quilt.

 By bedtime (ok, well more like an hour past bedtime), I had a mostly finished quilt!  It still need a couple of threads buried from the quilting and the label needed to be finished, but still not so bad for an afternoon and evening's worth of work. 

 I finally had a chance this afternoon to get some photos of the finished quilt out in the sunshine.  I love how bright those stars look on the white background.  They almost remind me crocuses peaking up through the snow - hence the name "Crocus Falling Stars".

 Indulge me while I overshare for a second. 

 That binding is just the perfect touch to tie into the colors of the quilt.

That spiral quilting on the back is just so good.

 Last one!  Thanks for humoring me. :) It felt really good to just ignore the "list" and make for the sake of making simply because an idea popped into my head.

You can find this quilt listed in my Etsy shop here.