Little Dresses for Africa

This past month at Church we made pillowcase dresses for the organization Little Dresses for Africa.  I had never heard of them before, but it's a really cool cause.  Using a pillowcase, bias tape, and elastic you can easily put together really cute dresses.  The pattern isn't very difficult, so all levels of sewers can help out.

These 2 dresses were actually made out of regular fabric that we then made into a pillowcase before making the dress.  Janni showed us the coolest way to make a pillowcase ever!  It's called a Burrito Pillowcase.  It's really easy.  There's a video tutorial for it here.  I think I'm going to be making pillowcases for the kids for Christmas this year, because I'm in love!

The coordinating cuteness is almost more than I can handle. 

This is my first time using Ric-rac and now I'm trying to find excuses to use it on other things.  I like it.  I like it a lot!

Friendship Star

This month's block for do.Good Stitches Wish Circle is the Friendship Star.  When choosing colors, Steph asked that we match it to the backing fabric for the star and then scrappy off-white or low-volume prints for the background.  I like this color scheme a lot, but probably would have never of thought to did it on my own.

Backing fabric

Bird Leftovers

Remember the lovely bird who decided to make her home in my front porch light?  Well, after the eggs were hatched and the nest was abandoned we were left with quite a mess.  There were sticks and bird droppings in every crevice of that lamp.  I'm pretty sure we would have started a house fire just by turning on the light. 

A simple cleaning job turned into an actual project.  The whole porch light had to come down.  We looked like white trash for a while, because we had to put a bag over it to keep the wires from getting wet.

When all was said and done we had to go out and purchase a new front light.  Joel did a nice job of putting the new one up, so now we can be respectable neighbors again.

Disappearing 9-patch

The 9-patch is typically one of the very first blocks you learn as a quilter.  I think back to my first experiment with the 9-patch and cringe a little.  I think my very first time doing it was making a baby blanket for Little Man. 

As you become more advanced you try to spruce it up a bit and make things a bit more fancy, but there's something so fundamental and useful about the 9-patch that you never really leave it.  The July blocks for the Building Blocks Quilt Along gave a fun little twist to this classic block. (Yes, I'm a month behind on the quilt along.  It's been a bust Summer)

You make the block like normal, but instead of stopping there you cut them in 4ths and rearrange them to make this block.  It's a fun change up to a classic. 

Eking By

It may be the last day of the month, but I did manage to get my July do. Good Stitches Blocks done.  We were asked to make 2 Rolling Stone blocks using this tutorial here.  The blocks were supposed to be scrappy blues with the background being ivory/off-white low volume prints.

Wholecloth Journey

When I first started to really learn how to Free Motion Quilt a little over two years ago, I participated in a wholecloth quilt-along with Leah Day.  It was the first time I had ever done anything like that and really learned a lot from it.  I didn't have any idea when or how, but I knew that I would like to try something like that again.

Fast forward a year and a half and I get an email from a from from my mission in Spain asking if I know if there are any LDS Temple quilt blocks.  I had no idea, so I started asking around and was pointed in the direction of this website here.  They have the paper piecing and wholecloth outline for just about every temple and a couple of other interesting church things.  As soon as I saw the pattern for the Spain Madrid Temple I KNEW I had to make it my next wholecloth adventure, but unfortunately, life got in the way and I was just too busy to even think about tackling the project. 

Things finally settled down a bit and so two months ago I took the plunge.  The entire process has been a huge learning curve, because I had to completely design how I wanted it to look.  I just had an outline to work with.  I found this picture of the temple and used it as a rough guide:

One thing I found particularly hard was trying to make a 3 dimensional object look good on a 2 dimensional surface.  I used darker thread for shadows and let the over hangs pop out to try to help.

There are so many things I would change if I did it again, but one thing that really interested me was the contrast on the back with the dark chocolate color as the background.  It completely changes the look of the quilt.  I originally thought a neutral closely resembling the stone color was the best choice, but I am realizing that I shouldn't have been so afraid of bold colors.

 In the end, I'm just really excited to have completed this project and am grateful for all that I learned while working on it.  It was a really good learning experience for me.  And most of all, I loved working on this quilt, because it reminded me of all the wonderful experiences I had a decade ago as a missionary in Spain.  I'm sending this quilt off across the Atlantic to Spain with a special smile on my face.

Linking up to TGIFF.

Quilting Catch Up

I'm thrilled that I got all four of the June Building Blocks quilted last night for FNSI.

I'm not usually a huge fan of quilting pebbles, because they're time consuming and rather unforgiving, but I do admit the finished product looks pretty cool. 

It feels good to get last month's blocks finally done, but I'm well aware that this month is over half way done and I haven't even pieced together July's Building Blocks or done my do.Good Stitches blocks either.  I'll just enjoy the moment with my June blocks for now and worry about this month's blocks later.  :) 

Prepping

For the first time in over a year I'm going to participate in Friday Night Sew In.  Joel's headed to the temple and I'm going to quilt.  It's the perfect motivation for me, because I have barely touched my sewing machine recently and I'm over a month behind on the Building Blocks Quilt Along. 

I marked all four blocks and layered them, so that I'm ready to go as soon as the kids are down to bed tonight.  I'm hoping to get 3 of them quilted tonight.