Quick Quilt for the Nursery

OK, I'm not showing you this quilt to account for some amazing technique or talent.  Maybe it's only to account for my time. :-)  We have quite a number of young children in the nursery at church.  So many that we have divided them into several different nurseries.  One of the nurseries needed a quilt to sit on for snack time / lesson time.  I looked through the fabric that had been given my by a friend when she was cleaning out her mom's house (after taking her to a home that could watch her better with the dementia she was suffering).  Lo and behold there was some printed fabric to look like a quilt that had a matching back.  What I used for the top had been cut - there was a big square with a hole cut in the center (maybe a tree skirt) and a cut from the middle of one side up to the hole.  There was a rectangular piece left over of the printed fabric.  There was also a plain green bagged with the fabrics that was close, but not an exact match of the green on the printed fabric.  Looked like a perfect way to quickly throw a quilt together.

I used left over batting and pieced it together. Then tried out a couple machine quilting stitches the plain green areas.   The rest of the quilt just got a "stitch-in-the-ditch" type quilting, nothing too complicated.  Finished it all in 2 days (piecing the batting took a lot of time).  But presto, a quilt that cost me nothing (but a little time).  And the children can eat snacks and contain the mess.

January Quilt

Where has the time gone?  I'm sure most of you feel the overwhelming load of work from time to time.  I'm no exception.  Since our furnace just went out overnight with the outside temperature in the single digits, now would be a good time to show you my January wall quilt, made 15 years ago to grace my wall each January. (Don't worry, we have a fireplace insert and it's keeping us pretty warm in the front room). 

My sister Tamia did most of the designing for this.  This was the first of the wall hangings I finished quilting and I used regular variegated thread.  Pretty thread, but didn't withstand the vigor of hand quilting.  The thread kept breaking.  Then when all was done, you couldn't even see the colors in the thread, nor the snowflakes I quilted into the big blue areas.  So not worth it. . . .  I learned that hand quilting thread is special for a reason - and worth it.

New Lunchboxes for the Girls

Well, it took me 3 extra months to get the girl's lunchboxes done, but I finally did and gave them as gifts at Christmas.  They were done in leftover fabric from the Toujours Bleu et Blanc fabric as well as the matching Blue and White Porcelain fabrics from Michael Miller's new Blue and White Collection.  They are fully lined and washable as well as insulated with Insul-Bright.  They have an inside pocket and elastic for holding a bottle upright. Two pockets on the outside as well.

Here you get a quick view of the interior.  I plan on putting up a tutorial at some point.

Silky or Magic PJs for the kids

My sister, Emerald made pj's for my kids.  The girls got matching silky pajamas and the boys got matching Magic The Gathering pajamas.

Here we have the girls, Fiona and Karina had been begging for silky pajamas after Emerald made some for Fiona when she was 3.  She grew out of them and Karina inherited them and wore them until she couldn't put them on anymore.  The fabric is so hard to work with and the seams can't take a lot of pressure.  So Karina rolling around on the floor and doing cartwheels in them have ripped out seams twice in her armpit area.  We may need to put a gusset in.

Donovan and Sterling really enjoy the card game "Magic the Gathering" and have instilled that Magic cards are "cool" in their younger brothers.  Donovan has made decks for them and Gideon will play with him (rather randomly as far as which cards to play when, but enthusiastically, none the less).  For Christmas, Gideon had put on his wish list "more Magic cards than Donovan."  Emerald made them each pajama pants then scanned in their favorite magic cards and printed them on the special fabric paper that you can print from your computer.  She then appliqued them down the sides of both pant legs.  The little boys also got their favorite card (based solely on the picture, not what it does) on the shirt.  They LOVE them.  As soon as they are washed, that's the pj of choice.  Porter wore them the last two nights in a row since they had been washed in between.

Fiona's Panda Skirt

Sorry it's been so long since I posted - I've been playing hookie from work, at least the work that I normally do when kids are at school, and have been focusing on having fun with them on their Christmas Break.  Here is the Panda Skirt I made for Fiona - my panda girl - for Christmas.  I discovered that appliqueing on silky, slippery fabric is not the easiest thing to do.  The panda cinched in that red triangle of fabric and the thickness makes it not hang as well, but she doesn't mind.  Fun idea and really a very simple skirt to make.  If I were to do it again I would either put the panda on one of the straight panels (the black here) or change the way I put the applique on so it wouldn't be so think in the end.

                                         And a close up . . . .