Birdies in a Tree Whimsical Quilt

Ta da! Announcing my newest creation, a sweet strip quilt with whimsical applique birds in a tree. All a custom one-of-a-kind design for someone very dear to my heart, my sister. My sister is having her first baby, and I wanted her to have something to cherish from me. I showed her a few quilt ideas and she showed me a few of her favorites...and using the bird fabric I found as my inspiration springboard, this quilt was born.

I was very excited to use the whimsical tree. I love applique and the compilation seemed so exicting, that I neglected several other things so I could finish this to take to my sister last month! (We live four states away.)

While working on another quilt, I had a "happy accident," as my high school art teacher would say. I sewed some ribbon to the backside and it formed loops in and out of the quilting stitching. While I had to unpick that quilt, I gave me a fabulous idea to do a ribbon ruffle and ricrac around the applique tree boughs. I love how it turned out. 3-D things on quilts are so much fun! Here is a closeup of the sweet daddy bird flying home to his nest.I love the quilt's color combination of raspberry, dark chocolate, cream, and lime green. It's almost good enough to eat! I used soft raspberry-colored minkie fabric for the backing and stop border. I love minkie! I hope the baby will snuggle up in it and know it is a hug from her aunt.

I had a lot of fun quilting it, too. That's a very creative process for me as well. I quilted butterflies, spirals, trees, stripes, flowers, and puzzle patterns all over. And I am getting so much faster at quilting, too! It only took me two days to quilt this one.

You can see the quilting stitching details better here. Really, this sounds like I am bragging, but is it bad to love something you made so much?! I am already tossing ideas around in my head for my brother's baby-on-the-way...stay tuned for a new design in a couple of months!

Katelyn

Here is my most recent Baptism Keepsake Book for a little girl who is not into girly frilly pink stuff. Katelyn loves blue, so I gave it a feminine edge with just a sweet tailored look. (I also turned my pink baptism paper blue.) I like how the flowers turned out. Making each book custom fit to each child is kind of fun.

So Soft Doggie Quilt

It's finished! It's even in the mail. Here is a project that I thought I could whip out quickly because it was simple. My friend Carissa is so inspirational, and has shared her incredible talent for quilting with so many of us in Omaha. She introduced me to the idea of the strip quilt. Since I absolutely love stripes, I became very excited to try one out. "Why not do two at once?" I reasoned with myself. So in January, I cut out the strips for a quilt for my nephew Elijah and the other strips for my baby Nicholas. You can see that I really tried to follow the pattern of the fabric, so my quilting stitches are very intricate. I probably don't need to have the design so close together next time. But I had battles with my old sewing machine for two months trying to do the quilting before I gave up on it. My old Singer was a good starter machine, but certainly was not built for free-motion quilting. (Which is probably a big reason why I quilt, I love to come up with the designs my stitches make. It's like drawing in stitches!) And so enter the Baby Lock Elluré ESL. It was sleek and beautiful with a pearlized shell and sewed like a dream. Sort of. I thought maybe it had a learning curve, but after constantly breaking thread and tension issues, my sewing machine repair shop found an issue with the needle hitting the casing around the bobbin case. (That's what I get for buying it second hand, it needed some TLC.) So lots of money and four months of sewing machine issues later, I am set!

Nicholas at least got to enjoy this while I was working on it. Once quilted, it did take me a while to hand stitch the binding to the back. In fact, I put it down for a whole month and saved it for our drive to Maryland. It was the perfect road trip project!

I absolutely love the color scheme and tying in the doggie elements. I based the colors off of the main patterned fabics I found at Hobby Lobby. The doggie print fabrics tied in nicely, along with the tactile fabrics. The 2 kinds of soft furs add such a fun and unique element, and with all the other textures (minkie, corduroy, butter fleece, fleece,) and the texture the quilting makes, it is perfect for any toddler to love. I really hope Elijah loves it, and I can't wait to finish Nicholas's now!

I have started my next project, a patriotic quilt, and am whipping it up super fast because I am so excited to see how it turns out. Oh yeah, and maybe I'm excited because it's the first quilt I am making for myself to keep!

Boy's Baptism Keepsake Book

I just made another 8" x 8" Baptism Keepsake Book, this time customized for a boy. This particular one is for my nephew Devan who is turning 8 in a week. I made a new custom "baptism" paper to decorate the album, as well as some ribbon ties for the front. I really like the dark blue with white.

This is a look inside at the first and second pages. There are spots throughout the book to insert photos from the baptism day. There are 12 pages in all. If I were there, I would take the photos, format them and print the photos and present them with the book. But I hope that even though we can't make it for this special event that this will be a nice reminder for him anyway.

Here it is complete with instructions and label! I think I am getting the process down pat after doing these books for three years now.

Baptism Keepsake Book

I have designed and created several keepsake books over the past few years. I enjoy making custom books, from the choosing of fabrics to designing custom papers and page layouts. I began with a 6 in. x 6 in. Baptism Keepsake Book for the Primary children in our last ward. I decided to make a custom personalized one for my niece, and there branched out to making custom Wedding Keepsake Albums for my brother and his bride and my sister and her new husband, in their wedding colors and special fabrics on the covers. Here are photos of the most recent Baptism Keepsake Book I created for my friend's niece. I am posting them because I get a lot of comments from people that I should sell them. They are a labor of love, however, and I could not make enough money to compensate my time in producing them unless they were outrageously priced. Hopefully I can make them for my nephews and nieces and the baptism-age Primary children in each ward I have been in so far!
This is the front cover with fabric, custom paper I designed, and ribbon and flower embellishments.The inside of the book has several pages with spots for pictures and places to write thoughts and information about the baptism day for the child. I think that these special events should be remembered with a special keepsake for the child to look at and remember their day for the rest of their life.