A jacket for a little guy!

I've been sewing, but not sharing any of it.

I traveled north and west recently and crashed with friends who have the cutest little guy ever. They've been nice enough to put me up several times this summer, so I wanted to reciprocate their kindness with a sewn gift for their kiddo. And I really, really, really wanted to sew a little-kid jacket.



The pattern is School Days Jacket by Oliver+S. I have the Little Things to Sew book, so I was familiar with their patterns and how well-written and easy to follow they are.

The outer fabric is wool that I bought for probably $4 a yard at the Knittn Kitten in Portland two summers ago and have been hoarding ever since. I'm so glad I saved it for this project. I was nervous about sewing with wool (all I've used it for is to sew a stuffed fish ... how very Montana of me). But it was awesome to work with.

I used my walking foot for the whole thing, and had no problems. The lining is an organic sherpa by Robert Kaufman that I can't find online anywhere. I got it at the quilt store in Bozeman for half off, so all in this jacket probably cost $15. And I had all the materials on-hand, except the leather button loops and buttons.





I seriously love sewing clothes for little kids. It doesn't take long (I taped together and traced the pattern onto freezer paper one night after work and sewed the whole thing the next day) and the payoff is awesome. I still get amazed every time when I follow a pattern and it turns out to be a real coat or pair of pants or whatever. It's like magic. :)

The little guy it's for loves bikes, so I added a patch of bike fabric. He LOVED it. He turns 2 in February and I made the 18-24 months size. It fit perfectly and looks like it'll last through winter.



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I hectically finished a baby quilt recently, too.



First time using a flannel back, and it went great.



I love corners.


My friend made half the blocks, and I made the other half and quilted and bound it.







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And now, the usual dog shots. :)



Buddies ...

My quilt

It's been a seriously brutal last two months.

The big quilt on my bed and its owner moved out.

It sucked. No other way to put it.

The day it happened, I started cutting into my Denyse Schmidt fabric. I had a clear plan: to make a bed-size quilt for myself.

Part of the idea was to keep myself busy and to not stop doing the things I love.

It was important for me to fill the void by making something to replace that quilt and not buying something. And it feels like a new step -- to have something on the bed that was made just for me, by me, not something created with someone else's preferences in mind.

So here it is:

The front.





The back.



It's always windy when it's time to take quilt photos.

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I started with quarter-yards of most of the fabric on the front. There were about 12 different prints.

I bought a few quarter- and half-yards for the back, and then pulled from my stash (the swans and orange). My favorite fabric in the whole thing might be that green floral in the center. The back is basically just a big log-cabin block.

The quilting is all straight-line, with some variation in horizontal and vertical.



The dogs sure seem to like it. They sleep on the bed with me, which is starting to make me rethink my preference for white and light-colored quilts. Good thing quilts are washable!







I love it too.

Help with the binding

Yup. "Help."







In their defense, all the other soft places to lie down were in the washing machine or otherwise occupied.

A wrinkly quilt top!

It wasn't wrinkly, but the first time I went to take a photo of it, the wind came up. It wasn't windy all day ... until the second I put the damn quilt on the ground. So I rolled it up haphazardly and left it on the table for later. Hence the wrinkles.



I went outside over my dinner break with the top and four cans (two of beans, two of tomatoes) to hold down the edges and get a photo, but the wind had died down by then. So I was just the crazy girl outside with lots of fabric and cans of things.

Lately ...

We've been doing a lot of this:



Things have been generally crappy. But at least there's quilting.

I've been working on these blocks:



Totally wonky log cabins.



Make with various prints from two (I think ...) Denyse Schmidt collections at JoAnn. The bolt ends just say DS Quilts, and so do the selvedges, but the receipt I looked at the other day said something about Aunt Edna and maybe Sugar Creek?



The pieced part of the blocks vary in size. I'm going to frame each in white to make them all 18.5 inches, of 18 inches finished. At this point, I think the final layout will be 4 by 5, or a quilt that's 72 by 90 inches. It might end up square at 90 by 90. Who knows.

I've been thinking about quilting ideas, and first considered a loop-d-loop, but I think I'm going to go with vertical straight lines, equally spaced. I have one quilt on my bed like that, and I love the drape. Plus I like how those kind of lines look over so much negative space.

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The garden plot got all gardened:



These guys were already there. A good sign?



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Old buddy ...



It is baseball season, after all.

Half-square triangles finish

It's done.



And I'm linking up to the Festival of Half-Square Triangles over at Canoe Ridge Creations. I'm so glad the festival was happening, because I needed some serious motivation to finish this quilt.

These aren't the colors I'd normally use, but this quilt is for someone else to give as a gift for a new baby. So they picked the fabric from a fat-quarter pack at Fabricworm.

I took a long time deciding what sort of quilt to make from the fat quarters. I wanted to feature the animals from the Urban Chiks Hullabaloo Zoology print, but I didn't want big blocks. So half-square triangles it was. I like how you can see snippets of the animals peeking out.

I cut charm squares (5-inch) from the fat quarters, and then divided the fabric into a blue-yellow pile and a pinkish pile. I then paired up squares (one from each pile) and sewed two lines just off the middle and cut each in half. Like this. I used a Clover Hera marker to mark the lines and it worked great.

I trimmed each finished block down to 4.5 inches to make it extra accurate. It was a lot of trimming, but worth it. There are 121 squares on the front, and all the leftovers on the back.

It took me several days to pick out the backing and binding fabric. When I work with colors and fabric I wouldn't normally use, I lose all instinct for making choices.



As hard as picking backing and binding fabric was, the quilting was a breeze. I think I spent longer trying to decide how to quilt it than the actual quilting. It's a good feeling when you can do something that use to be so hard with a measure of ease. It's not perfect, but it's much better than the results from the hours I spent on my first quilt.

I went with an all-over free-motion pattern. I like the drape it gives the quilt, and (I have no idea if this theory is legit) it seems like this type of quilting will hold all those seams down.

When I make a quilt, I want it to last a lifetime, but that thought is especially true for baby quilts. I think of all the blankets and quilts I've drug around my whole life, and I hope that what I'm making gets packed up for college in 18 years. Or something like that ... you get the idea.










I ran off to Butte this weekend for a much-needed escape and tried to get a cool photo there, but it just didn't pan out.



I sure miss that town.

Throw a quilt down on the floor and dogs will emerge. It works 100 percent of the time.

I sewed a shirt! And then another one!

The Tova shirt, in fact.

It was awesome.





It fits and everything!

This was my first garment sewing that I actually finished. I've started a skirt (six months ago), but it's not done yet.

The pattern was super easy to follow, and the whole thing only took four hours, including reading through the pattern a few times and assembling and tracing the pattern pieces (I bought the PDF version, only $10!).

I started when I got off work at 1:30 a.m. and finished at 5:30. I didn't plan on it going that way, but it was one of those snowball things, like:

"Oh, if I finish this hem, I might as well attach the back."

And then 30 minutes later: "Now it looks like a real shirt, so I might as well sew on the sleeves."

Then another half-hour passes.

"And since it's basically done, I might as well finish it ..."

And then it's 5:30 a.m.

But so worth it.

So worth it that I made a second one the very next day. I'd been eyeing this Lisette collection fabric at JoAnn for awhile. It's twill. And I sort of thought the extra-small would fit better than the small I made the first time (it does).

So, this happened!





I wore it to work today and got a complement on it, BEFORE I bragged about sewing it.

The second time around, I realized I over looked a step on the first shirt -- topstitching the inset. It makes it look so much nicer. It's funny what you catch the second time through.

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And on the quilting front, I'm ready to sew the binding on the HST baby quilt!



I basted and quilted the thing last night, all in like an hour. I probably spent longer deciding how to quilt it than the actual quilting took. I had all these grand plans for some straight-line quilting, but in the end I went with an all-over free-motion pattern. I think that will make a nicer drape and longer-lasting quilt, especially with a baby quilt that will get washed lots.

Picking the binding and backing was hard. Those colors aren't easy to match. I planned on using the binding fabric for the backing, but I didn't want to use a different thread in my bobbin, so I went with some lighter blue dots on a natural background.

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Here's hoping I finish it up soon. There are lots of distractions lately, with the warm weather and these two mutts (who escaped for SIX HOURS on Easter and ended up having a sleepover at the shelter. Super lame.)




One thing I've learned from this quilt (besides how awesome trimming is) is that it's hard to pick fabric for a project that doesn't fall in your normal color zone. I've got no instinct in what looks good.