A Finish! A Finish! ...and some new friends

It certainly has been a busy weekend.  The kids have taken their father for a cycle along the new Okaihau cycleway, which runs along a hundred or so year old unused railway track.  It is now raining.  I hope they're having fun.

I on the other hand have stayed home and put the finishing stitches into my binding of my Baby Billboard Quilt. Woohoo!

I have a lot of respect for those people who capture lovely pictures
of their quilts in all sorts of relaxed, natural scenes.

I completely lost my head and after congratulating myself on my rather limited purchases so far over the holidays, I ordered some new books (knew I should have stayed in bed), and some twill tape labels to add to the backs of my quilts.  I have put labels on two of the quilts I have made - I know - I'm naughty - but if I have some cool looking twill tape ones, there should be no excuse.  Fingers crossed that they are what I want... limitations of ordering over the internet I suppose... and they do actually look cool.

On a bit of a different topic, after much excitement (mostly me) and construction (mostly my husband) yesterday, we housed our two new guinea pigs - Cookie (the darker one) and Cream (the lighter one) in our back yard. 

Hutch a-la make it up as you go along design

The internal lodgings, complete with raised sleeping (and pooping)
platform and cantalevered steps (OK we watch Grand Designs too). And can
you see the guinea pigs cowering in the corner?

A bit of a closeup

They weren't too keen on getting their photo taken!

They are hopefully both female... and are slowly getting used to their new home.  With a bit of time they should get more friendly (instead of looking like their going to die everytime you approach them) and we should be able to handle them.  Well, that's the plan anyway.

Half Finished But having a coffee break

Gosh, I'm on a roll.  I'm already half way through my quilting my Baby Billboard quilt, and I was only stitching the backing together this morning.  Just goes to show what you can do when you put your mind to it, ignore the kids (well, they've been bad, bad children today), and don't get anything else done.

After much angsting about backing and batting... couldn't decide whether to use cotton or polyester... should I do a pieced backing like the original billboard quilt, or use the flannel I have tucked away in my stash... I measured the amount of background fabric I had left, and what do you know it, it was exactly the right size for the backing with the addition of some extra stripes from the left over jelly roll.  Right, one decision made, and just use cotton even though I bought it for another project, because I like how it quilts... it's predictable, and I won't have to live in guilt about wrapping a baby in polyester.

A minute of sketching came up with a perfect quilting design too... so everything just flowed.

An oldie but a goodie - certainly not original, but I also wanted to add
a circular element and the echoed "e" shapes work really well, and you can
enter and exit the design which ever way it suits to carry on.

Hopefully you can sort of see the quilting???

The connected boxes quilting is extra familiar to me, I spent quite a bit of time dreaming about it when I quilted my very first quilt - Dylan's baby quilt (which got finished sometime after Nadia was born).  It has had lots of love since then.

I can blame Alex Anderson for getting me addicted to quilting
after the Road to California block appeared on the reruns of the show (back
in the big hair days). 

I quilted it on my tiny Bernette sewing machine with a 4" throat space,
and used teal thread on top, and burgundy thread on the bottom, because
that's what I had left over from my dressmaking days.  My husband asked
why had I scribbled on it?  He knows better now!

Starting to feel a bit better about this one

So, I wasn't overly impressed with how my Baby Billboard Quilt was progressing.  Ms Lottie asking whether it was the front or back didn't help (best friends can tell you anything), but reaffirmed what I already felt, it just wasn't quite right.

A bit of tweaking later... success.  Well, I hope you can now tell that this is the front?

I pieced the row along the bottom with the alternating bright squares, and fused the strips.  I wanted something a little bit funky, a little bit different, asymetrical, modern, but meaningful at the same time - I think I achieved it.

Now, if you want to see something quite funny, you must check out Ms Lottie's chicken flower appliques.  You'll find her at The Slightly Mad Chicken Quilt Lady.  Her latest posting had me reminiscing about my floral basket quilt (still in the WIP stage) which also had a bit of an identity crisis with basket blocks in the centre...

And little floral sprigs scattered around the border.  Funny how a flower with four leaves looks undeniably like a flower, but the same flower with two leaves all of a sudden looks like Piglet?  Now, even I agree that it looks like Piglet, he just needs some little eyes...

And finally Santa has had his coat stitched... slowly getting better at the french knots... so just his boots and surrounding stars to finish.  And the next one to start...

Baby Quilt Progress

My baby billboard quilt is slowly growing.  Some of my design decisions haven't worked out quite how I had planned - so has been a bit of an evolving design - and I'm still not quite 100% satisfied with how it's going.

I have done blanket stitch around the words, but still have "dreams" to complete.  It is a bit of a mission doing the script words because they're all joined up... what I wanted, but takes ages to get right the way around.

I have been thinking about whether to add a bit of extra applique... perhaps some circles or something randomly placed... will see how we go.

Baby Billboard Progress

I know, I know, three posts in one day is just ridiculous, but I wanted to track progress - such that it is.

Firstly I finished the squares for the rest of the letters - aren't they gorgeous??  Now I just need to buy some more fusible so I can carry on with them.

Next, I attached the letters I had already done onto the background squares.

Starting to look interesting isn't it?

Baby Steps

I have officially started my sister-in-laws baby quilt.  Inspired by Oh Fransson!'s billboard quilt along - it was just a matter of deciding what I wanted my quilt to say.  Hmm??  By chance, Dylan had a reader one night that had the Maori word "moemoea" which means sweet dreams.  Perfect.  I also had a jelly roll without a purpose which combined beautiful rainbow colours... and Grandmothers Garden had some fabrics on blowout sales... so 3m of a lovely grey/blue-black mottle became a perfect background.  The letters would have looked STUNNING on a white background - but let's be practical for a moment, white and baby quilt just don't go together.  And I couldn't quite force myself to choose a black background.  So this seemed a good compromise.  I have also hmmed and ahhed over the choice of font - as nothing really matched the image in my mind.  But a bit of googling, downloading and playing - and this will do.

I have now run out of fusible web so the rest of the letters will just have to wait.  But looking good so far aren't they?