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.

One of my FAVORITES!!!

Okay, so for the next week or so, I am going to post pictures of some of my quilts I made in the past. this one is one of my favorites (I wanted to keep it for my living room). I made this for my husbands best friend, Resse, and his wife Kim. They were expecting their first child and decided not to find out the sex of the baby (They had a girl, Delaney and she is so stinkin' cute!!). I chose these fabrics because they are very country and the Lord is a big part of their lives. I love how how the crosses pop out of the circles. I found a picture online (bad memory, I cant remember where I saw it) and it said the pattern was the scrapbuster quilt from Material Obsession by Kathy Doughty and Sarah Fielke. I immediately went online to purchase the book then found out there are 2 books (Material Obsession and Material Obsession Two) so of course, I had to purchase both books! hehe. FYI, this pattern is in the Material Obsession two book...

Well, just so you know the scrapbuster pattern doesn't look anything like my quilt and for a second I thought I had purchased the wrong books because I couldn't find it (Although I did find MUCH inspiration in these two books). But I was dead set on the cross pattern. I kept staring at the one labeled "Scrapbuster" and realized the other person whose quilt gave me the inspiration was that pattern just every other block was rotated. Here is what the original pattern looks like in the book - Beautiful huh!

So if you make your blocks a little differently, this is what I got

It is crazy how different they look! This is my first piano key border and love it! Will do it again on my next scrappy quilt. This quilt was pretty labor intensive as I wanted to have at least 5 fabrics in each wedge and only made my strip steps long enough to cut 3 maybe 4 wedges from it (I didn't want anyone to notice a repeat of the fabrics. I did stay consistent with the corner pieces being blue polk a dot and green polk a dot. I wish I would have done 4 different ones instead of two, maybe like a rust orange polk a dot and mustard yellow but what is done is done - I still love it.

My backing fabric, I did the fold over binding (this was before I realized I LOVE hand sewing the binding on)

A close up of my quilting I did on it - not the best but I was trying out the l's and e's I learned in a machine quilting class I took.

This quilt measures probably 70" square

My First Quilt

So, I am new to blogging. I have always went to other blogs for inspiration and ideas for new projects. I decided to start my own blog to help inspire other quilters (and non quilters) and share my experiences with them (good and bad). I have been planning on starting this for some time now and couldn't figure out where and how to start, then, while going through some old pictures I found pictures of my first quilt. This quilt was inspired by my oldest daughter, Emma. I had just found out that my husband and I were going to have a girl and I decided to make her a quilt. I had no quilting experience and it shows!!! haha. I didnt know about locking in seams, ironing or making sure my cuts were really accurate. We all learn some how, you just have to find the right inspiration. I started searching the internet for a fairly easy pattern and came accross Emma's on here. Modabakeshop.com has always been one of the first places I go to find a pattern or inspiration. I am one to never stick to a pattern, I always change it in some way. Okay, enough talk, here are some pictures...

About a year after I finished it, I decided I wanted to have it longarmed, I was not confident enough to try put it in my machine and do a meander all over like I normally would. The lady who longarmed it did an amazing job! Her name is Ina, in the north valley of Phoenix, that is all I remember (well, besides her amazing machine which she gladly gave me a tour of!!!! Jealous!!!!)

I had put another border on it so it would fit on a queen bed but I was not happy with it and ripped it all off right before it was off to the quilters. I am so happy I did that (and by doing that I saved $50 on the quilting!!! whooo hoooo)

Finally, over 2 years after I finished the quilt top, it is ready to be snuggled with! After it was quilted I was so scared and nervous about the binding, I wanted to do it the right way, sew on front, hand stitch on back. I just dreaded this part, but I finally got it done and realized that I really enjoy doing it! I sit in my oversized recliner, my dvr set to play Friends (such a classic, never gets old) and go for it. It relaxes me and I dont feel like a lazy bum in the evenings, love the feeling of being productive (while watching tv) hehe.

Here are some stats about the quilt

Pattern: from modabakeshop.com

Fabric: moda, Kate Spain, Verna the blue border and backing fabric are from different designers, I dont even remember - sorry.

Size: unknow at this time, I just made her bed to take the last pic, lazy moment - but it is roughly a full size