Happy Christmas

Doesn't that face just say it all?

We had a lovely time at DD's on Christmas Eve. Her house was much less toxic than the last time. Along with other gifts I presented DD with this stack of receiving blankets. I made four of them and the other two were made by my son who sews.


I also managed to include two preemie size onesies. They're not easy to find! (Especially when you have to rely on the shopping abilities of a young man.) Of course there was also the piece de resistance, the preemie quilts:

I think both of these pictures were taken before I backed and quilted the tops but they look essentially the same. I just turned them pillowcase style so there's no binding or anything. You may notice that I managed to include those animal panels DD had given me to incorporate into Sunflower's quilt. Ta daa! There are more panels left over so there may be additional linens for the twins that feature the jungle animals. I have no specific plans at the moment.

DD seems to be holding her own. She's still having contractions periodically, and they're more intense, but so far there's been no reason to make an emergency trip to the doctor or the hospital. Tuesday will mark 31 weeks.

Meanwhile, I think I had the least toxic Christmas I've had in years. Gifts were purchased early enough, for the most part, so that they could off-gas before being presented on Christmas morning. The worst offenders were the items of clothing. Those that are not going back to the stores have been laundered and now are fine. The biggest surprise I had was the pocket size digital camera my DH gave me. We've been jointly using his digital SLR but it's really more camera than I want to cope with. I will probably continue to use it for my quilt photography but now I feel like I have more freedom of movement (such as it ever is) with the smaller, lighter equipment. Woohoo!

Mission Accomplished

Ha! Both preemie quilts are done! I amazed myself yesterday by getting the blocks for the second quilt sewn into a top and then backing and quilting both little blankets. Woohoo!


Technically I could now return to work on Sunflower's quilt but I doubt that will happen right away. There are a couple of major distractions coming up in the next day or two after all. ;- )

Another event to celebrate is that DD has made it to the 30 week mark. whew! She has an ultrasound scheduled for her 32nd week so she and I are counting that as her next big goal. Her doctor would like to see her make it to 35 weeks. We'll see. The prayers and medication are working though so maybe it will be possible.

The current plan is for us to drive over to DD's house for Christmas Eve. We'll get to see the granddaughters (and DD) open a few gifts and then we'll head back home to have a quiet Christmas day here. I say quiet because this will be the first year we will have so few of our family members in our home for the holiday. It's going to be a different sort of day for me, that's for sure. At my age and stage of life most of the fun is in watching the little ones experience all that Christmas encompasses. Unfortunately most of their new treasures will be toxic for me to be around. {sigh} Oh well. It will still be a warm, special day with loved ones. There are an awful lot of people who don't have the blessings I enjoy every day.

Stars & Sparkle

I don't think I've shown you the last of the blocks for Sunflower's quilt yet. I have a total of 25 now, plus two from the first set of blocks that I might be able to use. Right now the plan is to only use 24 but you know how things can change.

The aliens dropped into another block...


And you can't make a quilt for a young child anymore without including a clown fish because at some point they are going to be in love with Nemo and Dora!


Meanwhile, I have begun assembling blocks for the preemie quilts. I'd like to keep the quilts a surprise for their mom, my DD, so I'm only going to show snippets for the time being. Here's today's clue:

DD seems to be holding steady at the moment, thank goodness. Her doctor was hoping to get her to 35 weeks before delivering the babies but I don't see that happening. She'll be at 29 weeks on Tuesday and she's already talking about "full-body epidurals." This is the girl who has delivered twice naturally and wanted to do the same with these twins.

Oh, and over the weekend I put together another Christmas tree. It's a little bland, but at least the topper sparkles in the light. ;- )

This one is going to the Post Office where it will be disassembled and redistributed to various parts of the country. We'll keep the prettier one here to enjoy through Christmas. :- )

New Homes for Orphans

Orphan blocks that is!

I got the word earlier in the week that preemie quilts would be collected at the next guild meeting. I'd set a personal goal of making and donating at least 12 quilts for premature babies this year. At the end of September I was right on track with nine blankets completed and six of those already donated. So I got out my bags of scrappy blocks and started playing around.


All of these quilts were made from the six inch Shoo Fly, Bow Tie, and Churn Dash blocks I was making a few months ago from my older yardage and scraps. I began by separating the Shoo Fly blocks into piles according to their background values: dark, medium, or light. I knew a strippy set would be fairly easy to pull together quickly and here it is:

It's a little dark, and not at all "sweet," but hopefully someone will be glad to have it. The next one definitely has a more juvenile feel to it, primarily due to the Precious Moments critters I fussy-cut from the large striped print.

I'd had my fill of the Shoo Fly block at this point and got out the Bow Ties for the next effort. Proportionally they seem a little big for such a small quilt top but we're not out to win ribbons here. I really like them set in rings this way. The borders at the top and bottom were added to achieve the necessary length while keeping the top visually balanced.

Finally I got out the Churn Dash blocks to see what I could do with them. This top may have taken the most time to create. I had a hard time finding a subset of blocks that would play well together. I still wasn't convinced until I found this rose print in my stash. Somehow it seems to make the whole thing work.

The quilting that holds the pieced tops to the flannel backs is very simple in all of these quilts. You should be able to click on the pictures to get larger images; you might even be able to see the quilting lines. It's all straight lines that didn't require marking. On the strippy quilt I stitched a giant zig-zag pattern down the narrow lattice strips between the columns of blocks. All the quilts have a double row of topstitching around the perimeters in place of binding.

I have time to make a couple more of these little quilts - the meeting isn't until Tuesday - but I'm not sure I will make any more right now. There are other projects tugging at the edges of my mind. I'm just delighted to be sewing again.

Another Preemie Quilt

What a difference 24 hours can make! Yesterday it was too hot to do much of anything. Today we have rain - real rain, not just that drizzly stuff we get so often around here - and it's so much cooler I've got long sleeves on again. This world never ceases to amaze me. (Yes, very often I do feel like an alien, like I wasn't made to live on this planet.)

Remember I said I was continuing to work with my red, white, and blue flannel scraps, shooting for 8.5" (raw) blocks? I made 17 of them and set 16 into this preemie top:

It's 32" square. Normally I design my preemie quilts to finish at 24 x 30" but both of these flannel jobs have come out bigger. Hopefully they will go to premature infants who thrive and get to be bigger babies. :- )

Here are the backs of the quilts. The red striped flannel is the back of the medallion top (which you can see in the previous post) and the cocker spaniels are on the back of the quilt above.

I don't know how well you can see the lines of stitching that hold the two layers together. Once I have a top complete I lay it, right sides together, on a flannel backing fabric. I trim the backing to size, and then pin and seam the two pieces together, leaving an opening about the size of my fist to turn the quilt through. When I have it turned right side out I make sure the corners are poked out all the way and take it to the ironing board to press the whole thing nice and flat. I pay particular attention to the edges so that you don't see the backing peeking over the edge from the front. I don't bother to hand stitch the opening closed. Instead I do two rows of topstitching around the perimeter of the quilt. The first row is about an eighth of an inch from the edge of the quilt and the second row is maybe an eighth of an inch inside the first. Then I find a way to do a bit of quilting on the interior of the blankets. Mostly I look for a square to outline or some other major shape that I can go around in the middle of the top. It's not like I use the quilting to add a design element in these little blankets. It's strictly there out of necessity. I try to make it as invisible as possible.

Then yesterday it was too hot to even think about sewing. It was too hot to think really. So, without thinking, I dumped the remains of my flannel scraps onto the cutting table and started sorting. It took a couple of movies to get the job done but in the end this is all I had left.

That's a 12" pizza box with the smallest bits and strings.

The grocery sack is full of wider and longer strips and the leftover chunks of flannels I've used in previous baby quilts. On top I have a bag of squares I've cut that can be used as leaders and enders. All of this has been tidied away into the closet to clear the way for the next project. I have quite the list I could choose from but I may just get out my scrappy orphan blocks and see whether I can whip up a third preemie quilt while I'm in that mode...

Preemie Quilts

Well, shoot. I've loaded the pictures in reverse order again. I wonder whether a sticky note on my monitor would help me remember...

I know I said I was going to show you the blocks for the new Foster Quilt I'm making.

I lied.

Instead I'm going to show you the preemie quilts I've been finishing up. Except that I'm going to start with one I haven't finished yet.

I don't think I showed this top when I originally created it several weeks ago. It started with a set of small crazy patch blocks I found in my orphan block box. I pulled out some leftover hearts too. There still weren't enough blocks for what I wanted to do so I made a few more crazy blocks, using some of the same prints that were in the original blocks. Most of the crazy blocks were made using the stack and shuffle method while others might be considered crumb blocks. I haven't backed or quilted this one yet. It's next in line.

This second quilt began as a pre-printed panel. I added a strip of green around the panel to bring it up to size but after that all I did was back it and quilt it. The artwork may look familiar. There were cameos of dinosaurs along the selvage edges of the panel. They were what inspired this pillow top I created a little while ago (which has actually become another orphan block in my collection).

I used a flannel monkey print on the back and then also used it on these Precious Moments quilts:

These quilts are not identical, but awfully close. Maybe they will be presented to a pair of twin boys :- )

And maybe I'll show you the new blocks in the next post!

Helping Others

There's a new badge on my sidebar. This one is for the Bushfire Quilt Project. It can be a quickie project for those of us who want to do something to help out the Aussies who have lost so much to the fires. Campfollower has organized an effort for quilters to make 12.5" maverick or liberated star blocks which will then get made into quilts of varying sizes. Hopefully the quilts will provide comfort and a bit of color to the lives of the survivors. The blocks need to be in Campfollower's hands by the end of March so don't waste any time hopping over to her blog or the Flickr site to get all the details. There's a tutorial for the 12.5" version of this star over at The Silly Boo Dilly.

I haven't made any of these stars yet but that will be next. I surprised myself earlier in the week by making a preemie quilt top. This is what I created:


It didn't turn out quite the way I had envisioned (partly because my brain wasn't fully functional at the time) so I had another go and came up with this version:

Sorry the photos aren't great. I will never be a really good photographer.

You should be able to click on them to make them bigger and have a better look.

I started with a yard of this print:

and still have half of it left. I braved the fabric store the yesterday to find something else that would work with it (I just don't have pastels in my stash!) and came home with pink stars:

If I use the same layout I could make two more preemie tops! Right now I can only make tops as I don't have enough of any one flannel to back even these small quilts. Not to worry though, there's some coming ;- )

Gizzy Quilts

Some time ago Lynne, over at The Patchery Menagerie, needed to raise money for vet bills. She came up with the idea to make smallish quilts for cats and see whether they would sell or not. They were a hit. You can read the whole story here. She has also kindly written a tutorial describing how she makes these quilts. (It's on the sidebar of her blog, towards the bottom.) The first time I read through it I knew I'd have to give it a try.

I made my first one a little bigger than the ones Lynne makes specifically for cats so I could donate it to the neo-natal intensive care unit for a preemie baby.



Yesterday I made another one, this time with a cat theme so I can donate it to our local Humane Society for their upcoming fundraiser auction. I have it layered with backing and batting but haven't done any quilting yet.



At the moment I'm slightly incapacitated. I pin basted the Halloween quilt yesterday before I started working on the cat quilt. I smoothed the layers out on my double bed and then slid a cutting mat between the backing and the quilt I've been sleeping under to keep that quilt from being pin basted to the Halloween quilt. My back didn't take kindly to being bent at that particular angle for an extended period of time. I probably would have been smart to lay down and rest it rather than moving on to the Gizzy Quilt but when have I ever claimed to be smart?

We're having such a lovely day here today that DH and I went for a drive. It was a route we've taken many times in the past, but it's so pretty that we never get tired of it. It's been such a long time since I've been out anywhere beyond the Food Co-op that I felt like a starving man at a banquet! The slight headache I have from getting out of the car to get a better look at this view is totally worth it.

And now I think I'm going to go check out Picassa per Tonya's recommendation. When I clicked on the picture of my Halloween quilt in the previous post it didn't enlarge. Guess I'm just going to have to bite the bullet and learn yet another photo program... :-P

Two More Finishes!

This is not a good picture of my completed journal quilt but it is proof that the quilt is done! I'm calling it "Summer Love" because it represents a place and a time of which I have very fond memories. The beads in particular don't show up well in this photo. There is a circle of beads in the center of my X/sun and a ray of beads extending down each leg of the X. That was the part that had me stumped for awhile, in spite of the fact that I thought that would be the part I would bead first! Ya just never know how things are going to develop.

When I finished the journal quilt I still had some energy left for more creativity. I dug around in my pile of UFO's to see what would fit the bill and came across yet another preemie top! I must have pieced it and not had time to assemble it right then. So yesterday I backed and turned it and quilted it. Ta daa!

That makes 5 preemie quilts to turn in so today I'm working on a sixth one to make an even half-dozen!

Preemie Quilts

Throughout the year members of my local quilt guild make quilts for babies in the neonatal intensive care units of our local hospitals. These preemie quilts are a minimum of 18" wide and 24" long to comfortably fit on top of the isolettes. You can imagine how they brighten up a sterile environment! Each quilt becomes a gift to the baby's parents. Sometimes when the infant does not survive it is the only tangible evidence of their baby that the parents have to take home with them.

This quilt...

and this quilt...

were made from orphan blocks I'd made in my early quilting career. Back then I would cut 2.5" squares from my fabrics as I used them in other projects. Eventually they were sewn into four patch units (on days when I needed to do some mindless sewing!) and then apparently abandoned while I went on to other things. As I am learning how to cope with my new health situation I have had time to go back through my old projects and bags of blocks. I'm having to make some difficult decisions about what to keep and what to pass on to someone else (or put in the trash). Some of those fabrics I bought in the early years are now hazardous to my health! Even though everything in my stash has been prewashed, some of those cheap fabrics have a sizing or something in them that off-gasses when hit with a hot iron. So out they go, no matter how much I like the color or the print! (In the early years I had three toddlers and no money so the $1.00 a yard cottons at Wal-Mart seemed like a good deal. Live and learn!)

Anyway, I was able to piece almost two preemie tops from just those four-patch units I made so many years ago. The pictures are actually in reverse order. I made the first one you see second and the second one you see first. I needed 6 more blocks to complete that second top (the one at the top of the page) so I dug around in my orphan block collection and found the pinwheels and the 16-patch block and the hourglass blocks and sewed them in randomly, only making sure I didn't have two of these "oddball" blocks in any one row. I think it's much more interesting than the one that is all four-patch blocks.

Below is the quilt that I referred to in my previous post. And as I said before, this one is my favorite of this batch. I made it from scratch, as it were, not from leftover blocks. Although it is almost completely created out of scraps. Nearly all of the strips were leftovers from projects of mine or friends of mine. When I got to the outer edges I had to break down and cut strips from yardage to get the lengths I needed in the colors I needed. (There are more strips and scraps of duller colors waiting to be dealt with someday.)

I piece my tops, back 'em with flannel, and do minimal quilting to hold the two layers together. All of these have been "stitched in the ditch" in a rectangle in the center of the quilt. Rather than bind them I finish them pillow style and then top stitch around the perimeter of the quilt, sometimes using a decorative stitch on my sewing machine.

Sometimes I fret that I don't make "pretty" or "cute" quilts for these babies. I just don't do pretty or cute! It's unnatural for me! Hopefully there are families that come in who appreciate these funky creations of mine. Even better, maybe the strong colors and busy prints provide energy and stimulation for the little souls trying so hard to survive. I sure hope so.