Finished custom cross quilt

My list of projects to sew has reached epic proportions. Truly epic. I blame it mostly on the fact that next week is Selfish Sewing Week and I have big plans to participate this year...a few tops and a dress or two ought to keep me busy. I'm looking forward to the new additions to my wardrobe!

This lovely new house of ours is also inspiring me these days. I've done so much sewing over the years, but you'd never know it looking around this place. I've started a special list of project just for our home...a custom-fit bathmat for our crazy tiny bathroom, a set of new napkins, a cushion for the bench near the front door, a pillow for the couch to name just a few. It's a lot of work, but I know I'll enjoy busying myself away in my little private workroom out back...which reminds me, I still need to share some pics of the new space!

But before I can tuck into all that fun, I had to clear one last custom order off the list: the custom cross quilt I started last month. I had it all finished up and delivered last week. Turns out it was just in time! I was told the baby it would be given to was due in May, but as babies are wont to do, it arrived early! Still don't know if it was a boy or girl just yet, but I do know the new mum is loving the new quilt. Man, I love doing custom work!

Thank goodness tomorrow is a holiday and I have some vacation days coming up at work so I can get on with the next wave of projects. Looking forward to sharing more with you soon!

WIP Wednesday: Custom cross quilt

 

Such a simple design. Such satisfying progress. It feels so good to be on here happily settled into our new home with the move behind us and this pretty little project already well on its way to a finish.

This quilt is a custom order that came in...ahem...quite some time ago. It's been a while since I've worked up this particular design - one I first whipped up way back in 2011! This time around the colour scheme is quite different, but I did use the same iron-on interfacing technique that I first experimented with on the original quilt.

The customer and I hashed out our fabric choices weeks ago and came up with this classic combo of red, green, blue, grey and white. The backing will be a beautiful blue linen - a first for me! I certainly do love linen so I'm sure it's going to look beautiful but fingers crossed that it doesn't cause me any unexpected headaches!

Oh, and in case you didn't hear my squeal of delight the other day, the tutorial I wrote for imagine gnats was featured on the DMC Threads blog. Happy, happy, joy, joy!

Personalized patchwork Christmas stockings

These personalised patchwork stockings were recently shipped off to a customer back home in Canada. Today I got a lovely email with the sweetest thank you from the buyer so I know they arrived safely and I'm in the clear to share these pics here on the ol' Milkybeer blog. I'm so incredibly pleased with how these turned out and so is the customer!

The design is based on the DIY tutorial I posted a few weeks ago [still plenty of time to whip up your own before the holidays!] but with a layer of batting added to the back and a cuff and cross-stitched names added to the top. The customer chose the fabrics from a wider selection of options I photographed for her to choose from. We decided early on to go for a monochromatic colour scheme on each one and I love, love, love how it turned out. Not a Christmas fabric in the bunch, but don't they look festive?!

I plan to add stockings to the shop for next Christmas season as custom order items. They will be available in a range of colours (at least these three) and could be personalised or left plain. If you're a super keener and know that you would like to order some for you family for next Christmas, drop me a line at heymilkybeer[at]gmail[dot]com. The cut-off for ordering will likely be early to mid-November 2014.

Also, may I just say how weird it is making stockings and getting ready for Christmas in the heat of summer? It just feels so bizarre. Guess I'd better get used to it though!

One last custom quilt

I do hope you're all enjoying the holiday season. We're having a great time here on the West Coast. With the Christmas season, family visits, and getting ready for our upcoming move, there hasn't been a lot of time for sewing lately. In fact, I got my last custom order shipped off just in time for Christmas. I'm thrilled with how it turned out and it looks so nice in its new home!

At 91" x 91", it's the largest quilt I've ever made - and with 151 hand-stitched circles, it certainly took longer than any other quilt I've ever made!

The fabrics were all purchased at Spool of Thread here in Vancouver. Man, I`m going to miss that shop once we leave.

Once the holidays are over, we`ll be in the home stretch before the move, so I don`t expect to be posting here too often. So much to do! Thankfully our NZ visas arrived yesterday and we confirmed the dates for the movers to come so the biggest hurdles are now behind us. Time to tackle the last few things on the to-do list and then we`re good to go! I`ll be back to blogging and running Milkybeer Handmade in a few months - see you then!

The Positively Patchwork quilt

I made up this quilt a little while ago for my sister-in-law after she asked for my help coming up with a gift for a good friend of hers who'd recently had a baby boy.

Now, truth be told, I'm not known for creating quilts that scream "BOY!" so this was actually a challenge for me. Obviously the jumping off point was this cute little froggy print. Little boys and frogs go hand in hand, don't they? Besides, who doesn't love such vibrant colours! All of the fabric is from my favourite little sewing spot - Spool of Thread.

Like all of my quilts, I created the design myself. I'm a sucker for simple patchwork, but I love how the careful arrangement of squares, colours and patterns can produce a much more intriguing finished project.

If you'd like to make your own Positively Patchwork baby quilt, the pattern is now available as a PDF in my shop. The pattern also includes the basic instructions on how to do my unique circular quilting pattern in case you've ever wanted to know how I do that.

Best use of scraps ever: memory game

A few weeks back a friend sent me a message on Facebook asking if I could make her this:

There was no explanation, no link, just this pretty photo. At first I thought it was a set of fancy felt coasters, but then I realized it was a memory game. See how some of the tiles are paired up and not all of them are face side up? Yeah...that was some brilliant detective work on my part. A quick search on Pinterest revealed that the photo was actually from this fabulous tutorial for Emily's Memory Game over on the purl bee. With instructions, of course I could make a set for my friend!

After tracking down some lovely wool felt from the sweet folks at Collage Collage, I dug right to the bottom of my scrap bin, pulled out my best fabrics and created my own version...

I wound up making two sets of 15 matching pairs which means I became very well acquainted with my rotary cutter, rulers and iron. I gotta say I loved working with felt for a change. Going to have to do more of these I think.

I'm so happy with the results and hopefully my friend will be too!

A new dress for Abner

::

It's taken a while, but I finally got around to making my popular reversible dress in a size big enough for preschoolers. My list of orders is already long, but Abner was pretty excited to get the first one to come out of my sewing room. So excited, she didn't even mind posing for a few photos. [Well, she didn't seem to mind for the first 50 or so...I may have been pushing my luck at 76.]

The force is strong with this quilt

Behold -- my first Star Wars quilt!

Well, okay, it's actually Clone Wars, not Star Wars. Whatever. Meet Commander Wolffe - the leader of the 104th Battalion's famed Wolfpack squad (never having watched Clone Wars, I'll have to assume Wookieepedia knows what its talking about). All I know is that he is my nephew's favourite Star Wars character and I had to find a way to immortalize him (Cmd. Wolffe, not my nephew) in quilt form.

After staring at this image for an hour or so, I sketched out this pattern for a 40 x 50 inch quilt:

The design is simply the Cmd. Wolffe helmet pixelated in 2-inch squares -- over 500 of 'em. I managed to piece the entire top in a single day and applique the accents a day later.

To quilt, I opted to tape out each colour area and outline each area in complementary handstitching.

The back is a Clone Wars sheet taken from the bedding set my brother bought ages ago for my nephew. I love how the quilting can be seen quite well on the back so it's kind of like Cmd. Wolffe is on both sides of the quilt.

The whole quilt came together so beautifully. I can't wait to make another one. Wouldn't Boba Fett or Yoda  look awesome as pixel quilts? No, no...wait...R2D2! Oh man. I think I may be addicted to making pixel quilts.

Anyhow, my family Skyped me in for the big reveal after Easter dinner tonight. I gotta say, I think my nephew really likes his new quilt. Auntie of the year, I am.

Pretty in pink: oliver + s messenger bag

One of the best sewing books I've purchased in recent memory has got to be oliver + s: little things to sew. I drooled over it in the bookstore and was so excited when the first project I completed (the reversible bucket hat) turned out beautifully. My second project turned out equally well, don't you think?

This is the kids' version of the messenger bag pattern. I used an Old Navy twill backed with light-weight interfacing for the outside and lined it in a super cute Michael Miller for Vera Bradley fabric called Tea Garden (which I can't find online anywhere to link to!).

The pattern was super easy to follow but I did have to improvise when it came to the adjustable strap. Apparently you just can't buy 1.5 inch strap adjusters in this town. A buckle did the trick, though it is a wee bit bulkier than the strap adjuster would have been. Ah well - it works, and that's what matters.

I was also too lazy to manually make bias tape in the width suggested so I used my bias tape maker to quickly prepare some slightly narrower binding. It made things a little trickier to be sure, but I'm happy with how it turned out. Plus, it saved me about a half hour at the ironing board! Perhaps Santa will bring me another bias tape maker...hint, hint.

This little bag is off to a new home for Christmas, but I think I just may have to whip one up for Abner in the new year.

Talk about the eleventh hour!

At about 9:00 pm last night, we had a knock our door. An odd time to be knocking, indeed. But understandable when you realize it was a sweet little grandma coming to pick up the advent calendars she'd ordered for her grandkids a few days earlier. I literally finished them just moments before she arrived [now you see where the title of this post comes in.]

So how did I come to be making advent calendars the night before advent starts?

This woman had gone looking for advent calendars at a few craft sales but hadn't managed to find just the right one yet. A vendor at one of the sales mentioned seeing advent somethingorothers at my booth at an earlier sale so she suggested she look me up. Which she did...finding her way to my Facebook page...where she read that my products are now carried at Groovy Mama...so, she called Groovy Mama to see if they had any of my advent bags...which they didn't...so back to the Facebook page she went and posted a comment asking I had any advent calendars...which led to a bit of electronic back and forth and an eventual meeting in a coffee shop in downtown Regina.

A few days later and several hours of sewing, these are what she picked up:

I used the same linen as my coasters and mug rugs and used some Christmas fabric I had kicking around for the binding.

After toying around with the idea of stitching on buttons in the shape of a tree as decoration, I opted to trim the calendars in red and green patchwork instead. Since these were going to university-aged grandkids, I didn't want to do something too cutesy. My take is that using non-holiday fabrics in very traditional Christmas colours will give it a classic look that will hold up for years to come.

Every single number was cut by hand from stiffened felt and machine stitched on. If anyone ever spots pre-cut stiffened felt numbers, please let me know. I don't know that I would do it by hand again...actually, it wasn't the cutting that was difficult, it was guiding my machine along those teeny little numbers [they're only about 1.25" tall.]

The pockets, loops and backing were done in red Old Navy twill.

In other advent-related news...

Thank you to everyone who has had taken the time to check out my advent activity cards printable. I never expected it to be this popular! I would love to see some of the activities that readers and their families get up to with the advent cards, so feel free to send in photos. Either put a link here in the comments, or email heymilkybeer [at] gmail [dot] com. Be sure to let me know if I can post your pics on the Facebook page!

Of course, we are getting our own advent activities going today. First up - "Make a Christmas card for someone you love."