WIP Wednesday: Newborn Edition

Just popping in quickly to share our newest WIP of the non quilty variety, baby Nora!

We are already so in love with this little 7 lb 7 oz miracle and soaking up as many baby snuggles and cuddles as we can!

N is for Nursery

While we are still waiting for our little lady to make her appearance, we finally had a few beautiful days of sunshine this weekend to get some pictures of her finished nursery!

I really could not be more pleased with how it has come together, the perfect mix of DIY, Etsy purchases and store bought items to feel welcome and inviting, yet stylish and pretty and perfectly "girly" without pink from ceiling to floor, which was my hopeful vision all along.

I've blogged about may of the DIY stitchy crafts here and there, like the curtains, the Drona bin covers, and crib skirt.



This view is from the far corner of the room, between the windows and the closet.  I was a little nervous about how the alphabet bead board project would hold up, as it is pretty heavy, but the heavy duty wire picture hanger combined with some heavy duty Command strips on the bottom corners to keep the behemoth in place when baby eventually is kicking her legs and flailing her arms during diaper changes, seems to be doing the trick and keeping things in place.  The changing pad cover was made using this tutorial, and the basket was made using the Noodlehead Divided Basket Pattern.



I think this is my favorite part of the nursery, the super cozy rocker and paper lantern/tissue pom corner.  I envision lots of rocking, feeding and baby snuggles going on here, and lots for baby to look at during those hours and hours.  The paper lanterns came from Michaels, and the tissue poms were purchased from FiestaPomPom on Etsy.  I had thought of DIYing those poms, but was running out of steam, and this was much much easier!  To affix to the ceiling I just used fishing wire and clear push pins cut at different lengths and arranged how I liked.



While this little lady certainly has a plethora of quilts awaiting her arrival, this was the most recent and final quilt (for now) I stitched up for her, of course matching the nursery colors.  More to come on this quilt in a future post.  The elephant and "N" came from PaperPlanePrints on Etsy.  They are 11x14 and after hunting down a few white frames I liked, and using my new favorite tool, my trusty laser level, hanging them was a breeze without nine million nail holes in the wall!



From left to right:  1.  Wooden letters that were a gift that I recovered using the same method as the ABC wall hanging 2.  Hombre elephant paint chip art a la this tutorial  3.  Name puzzle letters that were a gift, and elephant button art from this tutorial

Whew!  This nursery certainly was a labor of love, and we can't wait to welcome our baby girl home to this warm and inviting space!  Come on baby girl, mommy and daddy can't wait to meet you!!

Modern Bee: 13 Quilts to Make With Friends {Blog Tour}

Hi all!  I am so so excited to finally share more about the book Modern Bee: 13 Quilts to Make With Friends that I had the honor of being a part of!

This book all started when the Mod Stitches Bee was formed just about two years ago, at the end of 2011.  Things started just as any bee usually does, Elizabeth virtually gathered 12 quilty friends, some of whom I had known previously, and some I hadn't, to begin a 12 month quilting bee, making blocks each month for one "bee mama" that would  ultimately result in enough blocks for each member to put together a finished quilt.  

While we were getting started, Lindsay had the awesome idea to turn our bee into a book!  She documented our quilting journey, and not only describes how to create each of the 13 different blocks and resulting finished quilts, but also provides information to start and run your own virtual quilting bee!  Lindsay really is one talented lady, and has a gift for writing, as Modern Bee reads like she's talking to a friend, giving helpful tips and pointers to someone she's known a lifetime.  

This is a picture straight from the book of my contribution, Trellis Crossroads.  I love the look of quilts using blocks turned on point, but usually they require block trimming and adding sashing, and I wanted a design that would come together with just the blocks themselves, no extra work for quilt assembly, and after working through a few design possibilities in my head, this quilt was born.

This was my test block, and as you can see, the trellis design comes together quite simply by sewing together the blocks of each each row and then each row into a finished quilt.

I cannot say thank you enough to the wonderfully talented quilters I had the pleasure of working with, and of course to Lindsay, as without her this book would not be!



And of course no blog hop is complete without a giveaway!  To enter to win, click here to complete the Rafflecopter form for your chance to win a Modern Bee gift bag* filled with sewing goodies from Coats and Clark, FreeSpirit Fabrics, Olfa, Pellon and Timeless Treasures!

*Winners will be randomly selected after October 18, 2013 from all comments received. If the winner lives outside of the U.S., they'll win a Modern Bee e-Book of instead of the gift bag.

Be sure to follow along with the remaining stops on the Modern Bee blog tour for book reviews and more sneak peeks from many of the book contributors!

Modern Bee Blog Tour:

Monday, 10/7:  Sew Mama Sew + Stash Books

Tuesday, 10/8:  SewCraftyJess + Sew Sweetness

Wednesday 10/9:  Ellison Lane + Diary of a Quilter

Thursday 10/10:  Katie's Korner + Pat Sloan

Friday 10/11:  Fat Quarter Shop + imagine gnats

Monday 10/14:  Quilting is My Therapy + Hot Pink Stitches

Tuesday 10/15:  Live a Colorful Life + Craft Gossip

Wednesday 10/16:  SewCanShe + Maureen Cracknell Handmade

Thursday 10/17:  Craftsy + Jo-Ann Fabric and Craft Stores

Watermelon Seeds: Completed Quilt

Just popping in (still pregnant!) with one more quilty finish before the little lady makes her appearance!  I'm not sure how many more finishes I have in me before d-day, the basting kills me!  After basting this little guy on the kitchen floor I felt like I'd just finished an hour long workout in the pre-preggo days.  I'm hoping to squeeze in one more finish for the babe herself before she is here, but I may have to enlist the hubby's help to baste that puppy.



This is a super special quilt that needed to be finished, as its for a dear friend who is also expecting a little girl.  She's been my pregnancy buddy and the go to for when weird things are happening that only another expectant mom would not be grossed out by understand.  She just passed her due date this past Friday, so I'm counting on her to go first and tell me the good, the bad and the ugly first hand...although maybe going in with no expectations is the way to go.



Anyways, back to the quilt.  Her little lady's nursery has lots of bright pinks and greens, so when pulling fabric for this quilt, these prints just sort of made a stack all on their own.  These prints remind me of happiness, sunshine and summer, which describes my friend to a T.  I don't think I've ever seen her without a smile on her face, so I'm expecting her daughter to naturally be the same.



I've had this simple rail fence zig zag quilt on my "to try" list for sometime now, and it certainly didn't disappoint.  The quilt top came together so quickly, as in just a few hours on a Saturday while the hubs was working, thanks to strip piecing the prints/white fabric, and then cutting squares from there.  I sort of just figured it out as I went, but I found this pdf tutorial after the fact explaining the process.  I cut my strips at 2.5" wide, so this exact quilt would be even easier if you had an extra Jelly Roll laying around with precut strips!



This quilt is off for a good tumble through the washer and dryer for a proper crinkling, and then it will wait for my friend's little miss to make her appearance!

Quilt Stats

Name:  Watermelon Seeds baby quilt

Pattern: Zig Zag Rail Fence on point (kind of like this tutorial)

Size:  41" x 43"

Fabrics Used: Various fuscia/grass green prints from stash and Kona White

Backing: Amy Butler Love print and leftover strips from the quilt front

Binding: Random pink dot fabric found in my stash

Quilting:  All over loopy FMQ

let the sunshine in

Or I guess I should say "keep the sunshine out."  I promise I think this will be the last nursery DIY post that I will overrun you with, and then we will return to our regularly scheduled quilty programming.  But I'm pretty darn proud of myself that I sewed my first set of curtains, black out curtains to be exact AND they ended up just about the same length as one another!!  I had anxiety throughout this entire project that my panels were going to end up wildly off in length but luckily I think they are off by just about a half an inch (don't look too closely!), which I can totally live with.



After muttering quite a few curse words while measuring yards and yards of fabric on the kitchen floor and cutting without the safety net of my quilting rulers and fabric that measures a nice 22" when folded and fits nice and perfectly on my cutting mat, you can believe I did the happiest of happy dances after putting in that last grommet and getting these bad boys hung.  I am so so incredibly pleased with how they turned out that I don't even remember those muttered curse words and stress now that its over (that's how childbirth works, right???)

I used the Premiere Prints Zippy Chevron in Storm (which I see is now on sale!) and it was the perfect weight for curtains.  Definitely a home dec weight fabric, but not too heavy.  I backed these with Ron-Loc white blackout fabric that I picked up at Joann's and also grabbed two sets of 8 plastic grommets for hanging on the curtain rod.  This was my first time using grommets period, and it was so so incredibly easy.  I spent quite some time looking at different tutorials for lined curtains, and ultimately settled on this tutorial, as it didn't require using my blind hem stitch (I'm a quilter and have no idea what that is!) and was relatively easy to follow along with, definitely recommend it and will use it again if I ever get the urge to sew more curtains.



These guys really do a great job and blocking out light, after my husband saw these, he requested a set for our bedroom as well.  Of course I have a few other things on my mind at the present moment, but perhaps after things settle down, I'll tackle a second set.  This might just about do it for nursery projects, we have an electrician coming to install an overhead light for the room, and yes I'm grumbling that none of our bedrooms have overhead lights, and a few more storage type bins to pick up and the nursery should be in  the books!

This weeks goal is to get the hospital bags packed and be ready to go, I cannot believe how quickly time has gone, I feel like we were just telling people about being pregnant and here we are (hopefully) 4 weeks away from D-Day!!

a gal can't have too much voile: {completed quilt}

Really, the title of this post should say "a gal can't have too many quilts," because things may be getting a little out of hand here, and yes, I'm not ashamed to admit I have one more baby quilt in the works that will match the nursery colors, grey and yellow (with bits of pink, of course).  We have scheduled a newborn photo session with a local photographer, and I'm really considering taking all these baby quilts and requesting a photo like this one, or this one, as what would be more fitting for a baby of a quilting mama, than a picture on a giant stack of quilty goodness.



This quilt was made using my fat eighth bundle of AMH voiles from Westwood Acres and I could not be more pleased with how this quilt has come together.  The voiles have such a nice hand, so soft and luxurious.  I used Red Pepper Quilts Postage Stamp Tutorial, only increased my strip size like she did here, so that my finished squares are 2.5".  I sorted my bundle the best I could into cool fabrics and warm fabrics, and when pairing my strips alternated cool and warm, as I wanted to make sure I didn't end up with the same fabrics right next to each other, or big pools of cool or warm prints in different areas of the quilt.  This approach worked perfectly and I'm really happy with the finished layout.



I actually have enough fabric left from my fat eighth bundle to make a second of these quilts, which I'm thinking will be destined to a good friend who is also due with a little lady of her own in a few short weeks.



As for the quilting, I briefly thought about hand quilting this with perle cotton, but ultimately decided against it, as I didn't want to get stuck half way through and not finish.  This quilt is just too pretty to end up in the WIP pile.  I went with super simple straight line quilting 1/4" on either side of the seam lines.  I think the simple quilting really lets the fabrics shine.  I'm thinking I just channeled my inner Rita for this entire quilt :-)



I was a little hesitant when I started quilting, as I've heard horror stories of quilting with voile, fabric shifting, puckers and lots of not so nice things happening, but I'm happy to report I experienced none of those.  Of course I used my walking foot and went slowly, but I also was sure to baste extra carefully, using a combination of spray basting (my usual), and then pin basting every 10 inches or so to make sure no shifting occurred.

This quilt has since been washed, dried and sufficiently crinkled, and is now up in the nursery just waiting for the little miss to make her arrival next month!

Quilt Stats

Quilt Name:  AMH voile postage stamp baby quilt

Pattern:  Tutorial by Rita of Red Pepper Quilts

Size:  40" x 40"

Fabrics Used:  AMH voile fat eighth bundle 

Backing:  Heather Bailey Daisy Pop

Binding:  Violet Craft Madrona Road Haystack in Fuscia

Quilting:  Straight line quilting 1/4" from each seam line

now I know my ABC's

Baby girls nursery is starting to come together, and actually resemble a place where baby can sleep and eventually play.  Way back when we first found out I was pregnant, I think one of the first things I did was start scouring Pinterest for nursery inspiration.  I came across this framed wooden letter alphabet snapshot and knew that whether boy or girl, no matter what color scheme we decided on, I had to make something like it.



I really could not be more thrilled with how this turned out!  After finding a whole slew of alphabet wooden letter options on both Etsy and Ebay, I settled on this set, and was really pleased with what I received.  Their customer service was also top notch, as Amanda was super sweet when I contacted her concerned that I was missing letters, and had duplicates of others, when in fact I had the "y" upside down as an "h", the "q" upside down as a "b", and was convinced my Q was missing.  Needless to say she very nicely sorted out my mess of letters.  I blame pregnancy brain :-)

I went back and forth deciding how to finish the letters, and ultimately settled on modge podge and scrapbook paper.  This tutorial explains the process perfectly and was so incredibly easy, I covered all the letters in one weekend.  Instead of using an Exacto knife, I found scissors worked just fine, and I skipped the sanding step, as I was mounting them on the wall, it seemed a little overkill.  As for the scrapbook paper, I was less than thrilled with my local craft store's selection in yellows and greys, so I nabbed a few digital packs from mooandpuppy on Etsy and had them printed on cardstock at my local Office Max.



As for finishing off the frame and display, I bought a sheet of bead board from Lowes and had them cut it for me in the store to my desired dimensions, and then bought 2 strips of prefinished baseboard trim, that I took over to my parents and had my dad miter cut into a frame.  A little Elmers wood glue worked perfectly to affix the letters to the board, as well as to attach the outer frame.  I did use a few clamps when attaching the frame portion to make sure it really stuck together.

Again, I am so so incredibly pleased with how this turned out.  It is very large, measuring about 3 1/2" feet x 3 1/2" feet when all was said and done, but I'm ok with that as its sort of the piece de resistance of the nursery, centered over the dresser/changing table.



There's a whole smorgasbord of DIY happening in this little area of the nursery...who am I kidding, there's a whole lot of DIY throughout the entire nursery!  But for this little portion, I did make a cover for the changing pad, one of Noodlehead's divider baskets and a fun little hombre paint chip elephant display.



I couldn't find a changing pad cover that I really loved in grey and yellow, so I decided to make one myself.  This was incredibly easy, only requiring me to buy a yard of Minky and elastic, and using a half yard cut of Riley Blake yellow chevrons I had on hand.  Within an hour I had finished the cover and am pleased with the finished product.  I followed this tutorial, and the Minky was much easier to work  with than I had originally envisioned!  I actually grabbed another yard of Minky in yellow and paired it with a grey accent cotton piece to have as a backup.



I also decided I needed a divider basket to have diapers and changing essentials within arms reach, and of course it had to be cute :-)  Enter Noodhead's divided basket pattern.  Best $6.50 I have ever spent.  This basket came together quickly and easily in about 2 1/2 hours one evening, and easily half of that time was spent cutting out pattern pieces.  I see a few more of these baskets in my future, as baby can never have to many cute baskets to hold all of her cute things.

I am digging this nursery so so much, and am glad we went with a more neutral color palate with bits of pink here and there.  Lord knows this child has enough pink clothing to stock a boutique, so I figured we could do pink-lite in the nursery.  I'll be back with a few more projects, and hopefully a full nursery reveal soon!