Number 5

Finished quilt number 5 for the year. This one has been a long time coming. Last year I had the genius idea to make a quilt for my grandma for Christmas. There are 11 girls on my mom's side (3 sisters, 1 sister in law, and 7 cousins) which would work out great to make a 12 block quilt (easy enough for me to make two blocks to fill that last spot). Well I should have known it wouldn't go together like I planned. It took me forever to do my block and just as long for everyone, except my one cousin, to do theirs. Two people opted not to participate so that also presented the task of creating the extra two blocks. Luckily my cousin Jamee decided it would be fun to come on over to my house and make a couple blocks and her mom also made two blocks. So between the three of us we made the extra three blocks. They were done in time for Christmas so I gave those to grandma and then took them back. I got the top sewn together for Mother's Day. And I stayed up much later than I would have liked last night finishing the quilting on it for her birthday (which was yesterday). So now it's all done! She didn't get it FOR her birthday, but it was finished BY her birthday so I'm counting myself successful. :) Next time I see her she'll get this cheery warm piece of love to always remember us by. :)

Nothing says I love you

I had a mission companion who always got socks in her packages. In her family, they had a saying that "Nothing says I love you like a new pair of socks". My equivalent to that would be "Nothing says I love you like a quilt". And now, a story.

Sometimes you start the second grade and you make a new friend and she becomes one of your best friends and she just happens to live down the street and you just love her. Then in the 8th grade she moves across the state in the pre cell phone, pre email days and you write letters and get special permission from mom to call long distance to see how things are going. Then you get your first email and keep in touch that way and THEN you are finally saved by facebook and texting. 22 years later you are still laughing about Welkerpoo on the nintendo and the ridiculous songs you made up in your "band". Along the way you have marriages and babies and missions and sometimes, you actually fail at being the friend you wish you were. This is where I am going to make a confession. My best friend of 22 years is pregnant with her 4th baby. I'm really good at baby gifts. I LOVE babies and all things cute and little and baby. I give baby gifts to coworkers whose wives just had babies and mission companions I hardly ever talk to and people I've only known for a few years casually at church, but with all that great gift giving, I have NEVER made anything for ANY of my friend Dana's babies. WHAT. THE. HECK!? So this time around I decided to repent and make sure I made this one count. Make sure I got it done in time to actually hand deliver it and not have the excuse that I just never made it to the post office. Because really, nothing says I love you like a quilt, and I really do love her. SO I found the perfect fabric that just screamed Dana to me, found an adorable (and relatively simple) Charm box pattern from fatquartershop.com (LOVE their youtube videos) and went to work.

I was bummed when I looked at the instructions and it said I needed 2 charm packs when I had only bought 1 from missouriquiltco.com and when I went to order another one, they didn't have anymore. :( So I headed to the fabric store to find a couple prints that would work with it and grabbed some great minky that was on sale at the same time. Luckily I found a few fabrics I thought would work okay and got to sewing. It went together SO fast. A couple episodes of Chuck and the top was done!

My visiting teacher came on Sunday and asked me if there was anything I needed. I told her to message me in the middle of the week to see how my quilt was going since I have a tendency to procrastinate when I'm close to finishing, assuming I'll have all the time in the world on (insert day of the week) but then 12 things come up and I regret not working on it when I actually did have time.

But I was on top of it and finished it Tuesday night! It turned out SO good. Probably one of my favorites ever.

Seriously so cute. The minky back was different to work with and made it difficult to slide around when I was quilting it on my machine, but really other than that it was a easy enough. Maybe Dana is lucky I've been such a slacker with her other kids. ;)

I'm definitely lucky that she has been willing to put in the effort required to keep a friendship in contact through the ups and downs and distances of life. It was so great to get together with her this weekend for our annual October Conference ice cream run. Four hours later and we were mostly caught up and only departing because it was so late. She loved the quilt and I LOVE HER!

Nothing says I love you quite like a quilt. 

Did you know?!

Did you know you can have custom fabric made!? I'm working on some ideas for Christmas gifts and I stumbled across spoonflower.com. You can upload your own design to be printed on fabric or use a custom design someone else has submitted. Sure it's crazy expensive, but it's also CRAZY cool!! There are quite a few on there that I like, but I just have these other images floating around in my head that would be SO fabulous. Only problem is, I'm not very artistic when it comes to drawing. Stick figures and crayons are about as fancy as I get, and you might be able to guess what I drew. Maybe.
I have a friend who is an amazing artist, but is crazy busy. I don't think she really understood what I was asking for either. Oh well. I'll figure something out. It might be best that it doesn't work out anyway. Save my pocketbook a little $$$$.
But really, if you know anyone who is super great with drawing and computers and stuff, who thinks it would be cool to see their art printed on a piece of fabric, send them my way. :)