It's done! It's done! Welcome to Rigel VII

Hooray!!!          Hooray!!!          Hooray!!!!

Front of Rigel VII.

Finally,  after many a set back including my sewing machine being out of commission, I finally finished this quilt.  I present to you Rigel VII.

Wonky pieced quilt back.

How did this quilt come about?  Well originally it was going to be a blue and white hexagon quilt, like this red one:

Image from: Treasured Things Antiques

But that didn't quite work out.  Apparently I'm not good at cutting hexagons from a cardboard template.  If you ever want wonky uneven hexies, I'm your gal.

So I went on a search for a pattern I liked that I thought Mrblocko wouldn't dub "too girly."  I really liked the monochromatic blue and white of this quilt:

Image from: Jane's Fabric Patch

But I could not figure out how the thing was pieced.  It looked like crazy diamond pieces that were inset and that was way beyond my cutting and piecing and sewing skill level.

The pattern is called Hunter's Star, so I did a Google image search on Hunter's star quilts. Aaaaand I came across this beauty:

Image from: Betty A's Designs

Now that was something I could figure out.  It was just a bunch of half square triangles.  I know how to make half square triangles.  So a scrappy blue and white Hunter's Star quilt it was.

Now how on earth did I come up with the name Rigel VII?  Come with me down the twisted path I traveled to come up with that crazy name.  So I looked to see if there was actually a "hunter's star," but couldn't find anything.  So then I thought, well Orion is known as the hunter, so I wiki'ed the constilation Orion.

Source:Wikipedia

Well, what do you know, Rigel is the brightest star in the constellation.   Not only that, Rigel is a blue super giant star.  Well that was just perfect.  My quilt had huge blue stars!

Image from:The Sonia Show

I couldn't help thinking how much Rigel sounded familiar.  So I did a bit more searching and found that Rigel is featured in a lot of science fiction. Particularly Rigel Seven.

Rigel 7 is mentioned in the Original Star Trek Series Pilot "The Cage, " a  Star Wars Comic Book, and as the home planet of Kang and Kodos from the Simpsons.

(Although there is a bit of a debate whether or not their home planet is Rigel IV or Rigel VII.)

Fancy quilt label.

Well, Star Trek, Star Wars AND Simpsons?

Yeah, I was sold on that mega geekery.

And thusly, Rigel VII was born.

'11 Super Duper Dance Party Rave of Joy # 26: Pantry Quilt

It's done!  It's done!  It's finally done!  My first official real life quilty quilt of hugeness.  And huge it is.  I had intended it to be twin size, but it had a mind of its own and became a full size quilt.

The design is called a jar quilt.  Each jar and piece of the border fabric are different.   The quilt is for Blockette and I've titled it "Wizard's Pantry."  Each jar is something that I thought you might find if you were to take a peek in the pantry of a wizard.

For example, the above jars contain: mermaids, slime, snowflakes, fairies and butterflies, peas (hey a wizard needs to eat his greens too), a fairy, lightning, and coins.

I started this quilt last year once Blockette had started Kindergarten.  I worked on it for a 30 minutes to an hour each day she was at school. I finished all the cutting and piecing work, then took a break for the summer.

Once school started up again, I pinned and machine quilted it.  I think I spent more time trying to decide how to quilt the darn thing, than I did actually quilting it.  I had to revise my plan several times because my machine quilting skills are not very good yet.  I still need lots and lots of practice before I can attempt the more precise and fancy designs.

I settled on outlining the jars and doing a squiggly sort of stipple on the border.  Sometimes it was completely random, and others I went around the design of the border fabric.

I wanted to do something slightly different on the white blocks in the corners. It is supposed to be an abstract sort of palm leaf. Yeah. I know. Remember, I said it was abstract, so use your imagination.

Once I had the top pieced, I realized that I hadn't planed on a fabric for the back.  I was out of crafting funds at the time, so I needed to use the fabric already in my stash.  I found this wonderful Geisha fabric that I had no immediate plans for and thought it would be perfect.  Perfect, except for the fact that there wasn't enough fabric to back the entire quilt.

So I had to get creative and piece the back with other fabrics in my stash. The back turned out like this:

Not too bad for winging it.  There was only one problem.  I have no idea how it happened, but the black fabric on the bottom border ended up really wide in parts.  I thought I had squared everything of all hunky dory, but I guess not.  That's just character. And it makes the quilt really identifiable should anyone dare to swipe it.

Since I made this entirely while Blockette was at school, she has no idea that I've made her a quilt.  I haven't given it to her yet.  I'm debating whether or not to save it for a Christmas present.  I guess that is going to depend on how cold it gets in November, or if she decides to go in my craft room.  I mean it's just sitting out there.  The label is face up and has her name on it, so I guess it's going to depend more on if I can find a place to hide it before she goes in there.

'11 Happy Dance #11 Finally...The Fish Bag

I got this pattern for a Big Mouth Fish Bag by Katie Lane Quilts, exactly 12 million years ago.  OK, so it was more like 5 years ago, but it feels like 12 million years.  I think originally I had intended it to be a book bag of some sort.  Little did I know that Blockette would turn out to be a voracious reader.  A mac truck would be more suitable for her book transportation needs.

This little fishy does make a perfect overnight bag.  We took it with us this weekend when we did Relay for Life.  It fit all her "stuff" perfectly.  This bag is also great because, unlike her school backpack, it is too small to be able to hold more than she can carry on her back comfortably.

The pattern for this bag was very intimidating.  There were plenty of times where I took the pattern out, looked at it and just scratched my head in confusion.  Over the past 5 years I've made several stuffed animals and that helped me understand what I needed to do in order to stitch up this bag.  Really, this bag is just like a stuffed animal without the stuffing.  There were still a few of those "huh?" moments, but after reading the directions and playing with the cut pattern pieces, I was able to figure it out.

Blockette helped me pick out what fabrics she wanted in her bag. The stipulation was that she had to pick from the fabrics I already had.  At first she wanted an all pink bag, but I didn't have enough contrasting pink fabrics.  I told her that if the fabrics looked too much alike, the scales weren't going to show up.  I put all the pink fabrics she liked next to each other and told her to look at them from across the room.  She reluctantly agreed the pink fabrics wouldn't be good for the bag.

I suggested a rainbow fish bag and she thought that was almost as good as a pink one.  She was a little upset that the green is out of color order, but I told her I just didn't have enough purple fabric to make the tail.  Personally, I think the green on the tail and side fin makes a better contrast than purple would.  Then again, what do I know about these things.  I'm just the mom. 

The pattern includes directions for a shoelace closure, but I didn't think that would be a very comfortable way for Blockette to carry the bag. So, I made the drawstring into back pack straps.  I remember having a bag that had a closure like that in Jr High, so I replicated it from my memory of that bag.  Jr high was a long time ago, so I'm not entirely certain that I made it exactly the same way the bag I had was constructed.  I can get so particular sometimes that I had to tell myself it didn't matter, and that the bag was fine, maybe even better, the way it is.

I also thought it would be fun for the bag to have some pockets in it. I wasn't exactly sure how I wanted to make the pockets. Then I found an old pair of Mrblocko's jeans with the holes in the knees. Mrblocko won't wear hole-y jeans or cut offs, so when this happens they become free game for my crafting purposes.  Why make a pocket when you've got one already made for you?!

Originally, I was going to rip out the seam and remove the pocket from the butt of the jeans.  Then, I realized that the grommets at the corners of the pockets would make this impossible.  Plus, that was a lot of work, ripping out a double seam.  Then I thought, why not cut around the pocket and sew that to the inside of the bag?  It's easier AND it creates two pockets instead of one.  The larger pocket isn't the neatest looking thing, but it's on the inside of the bag so big whoop.

I'm so happy to finally have completed this project.  Blockette loves it, and I feel like I accomplished something big by finishing it.  There are several mistakes, but even I have to look really hard to find them, so I'm not going to beat myself up over it.  Now I just have to figure out what project I'm going to start next!

Project #10: Baseball Baby Quilt

I like to lovingly refer to this project as "That stupid quilt". Oh it gave me lots of troubles. You know, like buying the wrong amount of fabric, not squaring up properly while I was piecing it, evil quilting puckers and all that jazz. I'm sure I would have called the quilt something else if I weren't watching my language around Blockette.

This was the first quilt that I designed completely from scratch. The new-baby-to-be's parents are big White Sox fans, so I wanted to do a baseball themed quilt. Ugh. Do you know that the existing baseball patterns are way complicated? At least way complicated for my skill level. My second thought for this quilt was to use baseball themed fabrics in a 9 patch of some sort. But nooooo...I couldn't find enough baseball-y type fabric for that.

So I winged it and made up a simple pattern of baseballs bouncing on a black background. Why a black background? Two reasons: 1.) The White Sox team colors are white and black and 2.) The first colors a baby sees are high contrast colors like white, red and black. This was my first attempt at applique on a quilt. I am very pleased with how it turned out. Go ahead and click on the picture. I'm especially proud of the stitching on the balls.

The movement lines are appliqued strips of bias tape. I'm pretty pleased with thinking of that idea as well. Appliqueing regular strips of fabric would have been horrible. Here's the quilt label with more applique. It is a simplified version of one of the White Sox's logos. It looks better in person. The little sock is my favorite part of this quilt, well, aside from the baseball seam stitching.

For all my ornery talk, this quilt probably turned out the nicest. Any puckers are hidden quite amazingly by the flag print on the back. This quilt is also the first quilt to lay flat. The corners also appear to be square as well. I didn't check. All I'm concerned about is that it looks nice, actual accuracy is for the birds. Besides, what parent of a newborn is going to get out their measuring equipment. "Ah yes, it is 3 AM and the baby is screaming, but I want to know if that quilt is off from square by 1/8 of an inch. Damn that woman and her rotary cutting skills!" Yeah. I think not.

Anyhow the darn thing is done and over with. Hopefully the recipients will appreciate it and it will see lots of poop and pee and pukie.

Project #6: Fish Quilt

The birth of my husband's best friend's second child really snuck up on me. I mean I did have nine months to be prepared and it only hit me at the beginning of Feb that the little guy was coming in less than a month.

Normally I make a cross stitch birth sample of some sort for the baby's room. I just haven't been in the cross stitching mood. Since the last quilt went relatively well, I thought I'd make another baby quilt.

The theme of the new baby's room is aquatic so I scoured the interweb for a neat looking fish themed quilt pattern. I happened upon a picture of the up a lazy river quilt pattern.

Because I'm a cheapskate, and I didn't want to risk not getting the pattern in a timely fashion, I decided to tackle the design without a pattern. Besides, I didn't like how close the fish were in the original design. I figured if I was going to alter the pattern anyhow, I might as well use my own measurements. I probably violated some copyright law and they'll be knocking on my door with their semi-automatics to take me away any minute now. (Do you think if I ask nicely they'd let me take a shower first before they put me in the hoosegow?)

I'm very proud of myself that I worked out all the geometry involved on my own. The fins were such a bugger to get pieced together. I did the biggest mega-happy dance when all the pieces matched up. I guess this just goes to show that my mom was right all along, I am good at math. (Yup, mom, you read that correctly. I said, "You were right." Feel free to mark this day down on your calendar for posterity.)

Speaking of my mom, she was in town last weekend and helped me pick out the fabrics. I forgot to show her a picture of the pattern before we went to the fabric store so she was blindly putting fabrics together with me giving the yay or nay to them. It was great to have her along to bounce ideas off of. Mrblocko would have been no help at all.The photo is a bit washed out from the flash, and I thought I had all the ripples smoothed out as well. You get the general idea of what the quilt looks like from the photo though. I'm really proud of how it turned out, wonky stitches, puckers and all. Hopefully the baby will puke and pee and poop on it to his heart's content!

Project #3: I spy snowball quilt

I saw the idea for this quilt on Craftster. The person with the screen name ZumaGirl74 designed her quilt this way as sort of an accident. She didn't have enough fancy fabrics to do the traditional snowball pattern. I liked it so much that I kept the idea in my head for 3 years. When my nephew was born I thought it was the perfect excuse to test it out.

This was the first "real" quilt that I've made. I've made a denim rag quilt, but that didn't have any batting. I also made Blockette a cheater stain glass window quilt, but that didn't have batting either. The closest thing to anything quilted was place mats. Let me tell you, quilting a large baby quilt is quite different from a place mat. There is a lot more fabric to mess around with, and mess up. Especially if you are machine quilting the darn thing.

I was pretty pleased with myself that I only managed to get 2 or 3 little folds in the fabric from the quilting process. When I made the place mats I had at least that many on one tiny place mat. The seam ripper was definitely my friend. I left the little sewn in folds on this quilt though. The fabric is dark enough that they are not noticeable. I also used a thick batting which also did a good job of hiding the mistakes. I won't use batting that thick again, even if it was good mistake camouflage. The thickness from the batting was just too much of a pain to manipulate under the arm of my sewing machine. Thin batting is what I'll use from now on.

My nephew's quilt is actually quite large for a baby quilt. It measures a whopping 42 x 52 inches! I'm hoping his parents will use it as a floor blanket when he gets big enough for tummy time.

I chose bright, high contrast colors because they are supposed to be what a baby can see the easiest. I'm not normally into the color yellow, so it's weird that this quilt turned out to have a ton of yellow in it.

There was some debate between me and Mrblocko as to whether or not the yellow border fabric was too girly. The shirts on the fabric have hearts on them. I was not given the memo that hearts are girly. I thought hearts were for love. Again, I didn't get the memo that love was girly as well. I liked that there were hearts on the fabric, and since I was the one making the quilt, the border fabric stayed. Although you can't tell from the photo, the border fabric matches the rest of the quilt perfectly.

My camera did not like the black background fabric in this quilt. Thusly, the photos of this quilt are especially pooptastic. When I tried to take a picture without the flash, the camera wouldn't focus. Something about the tiny black dots on the fabric made the camera go all wonky. So my choices of pictures were either blurry or washed out. Washed out it is!

Front:
Back: (The white circle is the label. I named the quilt "I spy a snowball fight."
I think maybe I should refrain from naming objects after weather events. As soon as this quilt was finished we got smacked with a ton of snow!