Holiday Projects

I have gone almost a month without actively working on a knitting or crocheting project.  I got distracted, and my creativity ran off in another direction.  Behold, one of the most selfish Christmas gifts ever.

 My mother has a large supply of novelty cotton prints for the making of I-spy quilts.  She would like to reduce this supply.  She would also like to produce some blankets appropriate for a small child.  I wanted to try my hand at patchwork and quilting.  I therefore was granted permission to raid my mother's fabric stash over the holidays and use her sewing machine.  With a few coupons to a fabric-selling big box craft store, I selected a few additional fabrics and off I went.

I hauled my very own rotary cutter and ruler across the ocean for this.  I did purchase a new cutting mat for my mom, though.  My mom's sewing machine is brand new a Brother CS6000i.  This thing was the greatest deal, guys.  I am almost a little jealous.  I took to calling it the mighty midget, because this sewing machine has a bunch of nice features for quilting while feeling like it weighs next to nothing.

The pattern is Warm Wishes, which I found in Volume 1 Summer 2015 of Quiltmaker, and I think it does an excellent job of framing up the different prints.  It also consists of entirely of on-grain straight seams, which was good for beginner-me.  I insisted my sister help me pick out the blue, green, and yellow (what appears to be cream stripes is actually tiny yellow squares on white), as this blanket will likely go to the young son of one of my little sister's teachers.  My brothers assured me that all the prints I selected were both sufficiently masculine and not too frightening for a boy.

It was also bigger than I expected.  That's was bad assumption on my part, since the top came out exactly the size it was supposed to be.  The size just happens to be big enough to generously to cover a toddler bed.

Anyway, in the course of my holiday, I got the top pieced and edged, the backing sewn together, and the top, batting, and backing sandwiched together with many, many pins.  I even started in on the quilting.  However, that is where I ran out of time.  I had hoped to not leave my mother with an unfinished project, but the last days of my visit were busier than anticipated.  When push came to shove, I opted to spend time with my brothers instead of holing up in the basement to sew.  My mother promised that she could finish the straight-line quilting I had planned, as well as the binding.

Now that I'm back in Europe, though, this UFO has appeared.

The future holds patchwork.