Just had to share...

Okay, so I have 2 beautiful girls, Emma age 2 and Rayann age 1. I just had to share these adorable pictures of my princess'. (been going through my million pictures on my phone and stumbled across these) the pics are a few months old. Gotta love looking back at our kiddos, so bittersweet...

This is Emma. Our neighbor had a princess themed birthday party and I didnt have any princess dresses for them to wear so I whipped one up really quick. Yes, i know it is kinda weird that I had all that fabric in my stash. haha. I just love the cheeto face. I just wanna kiss it!!!! muha!!!

This is Rayann. I origionally made this outfit for Emma while the kiddos were napping so I couldnt really tell if it would fit her or not. Well, it didnt. So Rayann got it. I had no idea what I was doing, no pattern and I dont really sew clothes that often. There is NO stretch to this and has to be horribly uncomftorable. Rayann didnt seem to care, she is such a happy baby!

After the first one I made went bad, I decided to give it one more try. I used a stretch knit and just made a basic jumper (or tube top thingy with shorts). This worked out MUCH better and is nice and soft on the inside. I just love the look of lace and cowgirl boots. ahhhh

(oh, right after I took this picture, she went into the bathroom and found lipstick, I suppose she wasnt camera ready then, here she is all dolled up for you...

Shinning Star Quilt

So, tonight I am going to share with you my absolute favorite quilt I have made to date. My inspiration (okay, I pretty much copied the block) came from Red Pepper Quilts. I saw this and just fell in LOVE!!! I made this quilt for my Brother-in-law and his wife for their new baby boy, Brycen. I had won this fabric on facebook only contest from a magazine. It was a fat quarter bundle from P&B textiles called Spring Street. This fabric line has been my ultimate favorite. I have made 2 quilts from the bundle and have enough left for one more! Talk about getting your monies worth! (well, if I had to pay for it). okay... here it is

The quilt that Rita at Red Pepper Quilts made had a large white sashing that created other little stars in the meeting points, I didn't have much time to do all that and to be honest, I was done with the half square triangles (well, for a little bit). There are 64 pieces in each block. I had planed on doing a 3 x 3 quilt but ran out of time and went with a 2 x 2 and added 3 borders (white, colored blocks and another white.

I just love it! My wonderful and amazing husband bought me a basic longarm machine (bailey pro 15) for Christmas and I was able to use it on this one. My favorite pattern to use on my quilts lately is this drunken feathers pattern. I bought the pantograph at quiltscomplete.com.

I know it is kinda hard to see. I have only been taking pictures of my projects with my phone (Never thought in a million years I would have started my own blog!!) I also put this in the mail before taking final pictures of it when the binding was all done. I did a really scrappy binding using all the fabrics in the quilt top - just made everything pop. Maybe this summer I can sneak it away and do a mini photo shoot with it and update this post.

Fire quilt

So, my mom wanted me to make her a quilt for her and my dad. When I was trying to figure out a pattern and color scheme, I decided I wanted to make them one for their camper. They like to be at the beach or a lake when they go camping so I thought these fabrics work so well in representing a lakeside campfire. Every time I see these pictures, I want to sit in a nice comfy chair by a cozy fire and snuggle up with this quilt (maybe even have a fruity umbrella drink in my hand) ahhhh....

These fabrics are 2.5" precut strips from timeless treasures.The pattern I got from my quilt shop, I can not remember the designer but I believe it was called sea glass. I did tweak the pattern a little bit by adding an extra row. The original was a 3x3 and I wanted to make sure it was big enough for a grown man to snuggle with it.

There is Emma again! silly girl.

You can not really see the quiting, it is a medium size meander in a variegated thread. For the binding I did the fold over from the backing fabric. I will do a tutorial on that in the near future. Basically after you are done quilting, cut the batting even with the quilt top and then cut the backing fabric 1" wider than the quilt top. Fold in half and iron and then fold it again and stitch it down. Super easy, super fast.

Merry Christmas to me!

okay, so last year around this time I decided to start making myself a quilt for my living room. I had never made myself a quilt yet and since I was in a christmas mood (dont know why, but I was just ready to get my christmas on!!) I decided to make one using my favorite pattern. This is really easy and is charm pack friendly. I made this is soft pink and blue floral prints too - check out my blog post on Bowyns Stars.

sorry for the poor picture quality, most of my pictures of my older quilts were taken on my phone. These fabrics are from my local quilt shop - a big mixture of different designers. They all have some metallic gold in each print so it is nice and sparkly!

Bowyns Stars

I made this quilt for my brother-in-law and his wife's baby, Bowyn. I just love the soft colors and florals. I was going through a floral phase when I made this. The fabric if from RJR Fabrics, that is all I can remember. This quilt is super duper simple and would be great for charm packs. I will do a tutorial on this quilt with charm packs probably in June or July when some of my charm packs I ordered come in.

This is the first quilt that I actually custom quilted. I had always done a meander on my quilts but wanted to try something new and fun. I watched a lot of youtube videos on free motion quilting and came up with these patterns to fit into the star and the borders

 Here is the backing, I actually forgot that I did the backing like this until I found these pictures. I kinda like it. good way to show off the large scale print and the border acts like a frame for it. That would be my oldest daughter Emma trying to get in on the picture. My girls LOVE quilts. I can not lay one out to take pictures or to just look at without them running on to them and wrapping themselves up in them. Makes me so happy!!

Another Favorite

okay, I realllllly love this one, probably one of my top 3 favorites that I have made. I love this one because the bright colors. It is just fun. I originally started this quilt with the intention on using just one block pattern through. I had rented a book from the library, Carol Doak's 300 paper pieced blocks, which I failed to return and found out that I owed $50 for it! Totally worth it though! I was so excited to start paper piecing. The only problem was that when I finished my first block, I didn't want to do the same one again because there were so many other blocks in the book that I wanted to try which actually worked out great in the long run, I got to make 9 different blocks and it produced a very cool quilt. I made this for my brother-in-law and his wife for their baby, Gwenyth. I really hope she enjoys it as much as I did making it.

Here is a close up of one of the blocks, you can kinda see my quilting - I wanted to keep it geometric feeling with the quilting and didn't want to distort the block with meandering. I really like the way the quilting came out. I used a water soluble pen to mark where to sew.

Another quilt block. Most of my fabrics in this quilt came from Joann's - gotta love the 99 cent fat quarters!

The flannel backing

American cancer society charity quilt

So a few weeks ago an old coworker contacted me and told me that his 13 year old daughter was diagnosed with cancer back in September. I couldn't believe it! I hadn't seen or heard from them in probably eight years or so and was a total shock because I remember her when she was just a little girl coming into the office on Fridays with her mom to pick up her dads paycheck. With that said, Megan (cancer survivor) was trying to raise money for the relay for life event in her town. Her mom was my Facebook friend and knew that I was pretty crafty and asked if I would make a purple quilt to go in the raffle for Megan's team. I of course couldn't pass up this opportunity, the only thing though was the time limit I had and the bazillion other projects I was trying to finish along with opening my own online quilt shop (katiesquiltshop.etsy.com) I did some research online and didn't find much for cancer survivor quilts but I did find one picture that looked easy enough to finish in a few weeks. I really wish I could have had a little more time to do a better pieced quilt but oh well, I got it done and that is what counts. It was super easy, strip piecing, quick going together and a larger meander quilting pattern on it. Okay, after 20 minutes of research, I finally found the quilt that inspired me (well, pretty much just like hers without the border, no time to tweak it to make it my own) you can click here if you would like to check hers out.