Crafty Intentions Quilt Edition: Pillows

When I was learning to quilt, one of the things that I became obsessed with was quilting 10 pillow shams for each season of the year.  I ended up only making about 30 of them - 10 for spring/summer, 10 for Fall, and 10 for Christmas/winter.  These are my Christmas winter ones.  What was fun was that they are so small that piecing them was not overwhelming, quilting them was an experiment and I could get creative with it.  They are envelope shams, so they come off pretty easily and we wash them after the 4 months or so they're on the pillows.  They look so festive, and I never get tired of them because we change them out with the seasons!

10/10 would highly recommend this project!

Crafty Intentions: Quilting Edition

My first quilt was a BIT ambitious.  It seemed like a good idea, at the time, to start out with a King Sized scrap-pieced Square-make-up Rainbow Extravaganza.

It was not a good idea.

In fact, I didn't even own a sewing machine when I started working on it.  My husband nearly had a nervous breakdown watching me painstakingly hand stitching scraps together and did his own research and bought me one.  I did not want a sewing machine.   I didn't like machinery and doo-dads and it seemed complicated and unnecessary when I could hand-stitch just as well.  What a n00b I was.

Sewing machine turned out to be a pretty awesome idea.  But even with the sewing machine the Quilt (Started in 2008) it would still take 7 years to complete.

It took me a year to piece together every square, and then another year to join every square into the quilt top.  In my defense, in that time I also had a baby.  This is us cuddling on the completed quilt top, circa 2010.

Then I basted the quilt with batting and a backing, folded it up SUPER nicely.... and put it away for 4.5 years.   My sewing machine barely made it through piecing the quilt top together.  There is NO WAY she would have made it through the quilting process.  I thought about sending it out to be quilted by a professional, but why pay money when you can be super stubborn and declare that NO ONE WILL QUILT THIS BUT ME.  In 2015 I met a new breed of sewing machine: A cast Iron Antique.  My new Singer 201-2 aka Marceline was DESTINED to quilt this thing.  So we did.

Slowly. And Painfully.  But I did it.  And then I hand sewed the edging.  And then, I declared victory by cuddling the same (now 5 years larger) baby in that same (NOW COMPLETE) quilt.