+bound+ staple dress and a giveaway! | 30 Days of Sewing with Art Gallery Fabrics

Hello and welcome to any new readers that have come over from Art Gallery Fabrics! As you probably know by now, September is National Sewing Month and when Art Gallery asked me to create something to help them celebrate I said sure! I decided to step outside of my comfort zone in the spirit of learning new ways to sew. I've made a couple garments in the past but they've always been out of quilting cotton and once out of a home dec weight fabric, so I selected a knit fabric and a pattern that I've been wanting to make for myself for a while, the Staple Dress by April Rhodes. The fabric is coincidentally by April Rhodes, too - the print is called painting morale and it's from her new collection for Art Gallery called +bound+. I've loved everything April has designed since her first collection, Arizona, and this collection is just as beautiful. I love the muted colors and organic, nature inspired designs.

After reading through the pattern I decided to enlist someone to hold my hand throughout the garment making process. With my limited experience with sewing clothing I didn't want to ruin this beautiful fabric! So I got in touch with my friend and sewing teacher Lorraine, and she agreed to help me one night a few weeks ago. I was familiar with Art Gallery quilting cottons already and I love them - they feel soft and luxurious compared to lots of other quilting cottons, and I fell in love with this knit, too. I cut and sewed up the whole thing in one night, albeit a very late night, with Lorraine's help along the way ;) The dress is so comfortable and easy to wear, and I think it's a great transition piece as we head into fall here in New England. I've worn it with sandals, these flats, and I plan to wear it with tall brown boots, too!

+GIVEAWAY+ [CLOSED]

The winner is instagram usedr @tinkerellen!

I love learning new methods of sewing, techniques, and how to use different materials and tools and this project helped educate me in many ways. I sewed with knit fabric to make a garment for the first time, and I used elastic thread to create the shirring at the waist which was really fun! For a chance to win some Art Gallery knit fabric of your own, tell me your what you'd like to learn about sewing! Let me know in the comments section (here or on my instagram post about this giveaway) to enter to win 3 yards of Katarina Roccella's Morse Dot Blue in knit from her Imprints collection so you can make your own Staple Dress, courtesy of Art Gallery Fabrics.  Make sure you check out the Art Gallery Fabrics app (available for android and IOS) for ideas on what to make, too! Giveaway ends Thursday, October 1st at midnight; a winner will be selected randomly and announced here and on instagram on Friday morning. Anonymous comments will be disregarded so please make sure you include your email so I can contact you. The winner must respond within three days or an alternate will be chosen. Open to US residents.

This blog post is sponsored by Art Gallery Fabrics; all opinions are my own. Thanks also to Lorraine for sharing her time and knowledge of sewing, and to my husband Matt for taking these pictures!

put a bow on it | a quilt for Norah

I made another quilt from start to finish in less than a week, immediately after giving the pinwheel quilt to Sage. I told Matt that I feel like a machine lately, and I don't know if that's a good thing or not. On one hand, I like being productive and prolific, but on the other hand I've found that I'm working so quickly lately that some of the enjoyment is lost. I've been trying to meet self-imposed deadlines (baby's birthdays, mostly) but I haven't been getting any quilts done "on time" anyway. I think it's time to slow down a bit, so I can concentrate on my work and the process rather than the end result. Anyway, this quilt is for yet another baby, the daughter of our friends John and Rachel. I made a quilt for their first child, Elliott, who was born just a couple months after Finn, and they loved it and appreciated it so much that I started planning one for their second child pretty much the moment I found out Rachel was pregnant. Originally I planned on making a giant saw tooth star block, but I've wanted to make a bow quilt since I saw this one from Piece at Last and to be honest, I felt like I needed to make something quick after the pinwheel quilt. Plus I have a few other designs in process and in my mind that I need to get working on, so this simple design was a great fit for this project. The original design can be found in The It's Okay If You Sit On My Quilt Book, but I just sketched out the bow and figured out how many squares and half square triangles I needed. I'm curious, what are your thoughts on making a quilt like that? I copied the design of another quilter though I didn't buy her book. I'm not profiting off of this quilt in any way though, so I think it's okay. Just wondering how others feel about this issue. It tends to come up a lot in conversations about handmade goods. 

Back to the quilt! I've had the fabric picked out for this quilt ever since I knew Rachel was having a girl. Rachel told me the baby's room would probably be decorated in coral and gold tones, and I know that Rachel appreciates vintage grandma style so I selected another of my quilter's quarters bundles by Denyse Schmidt for Joann. I was lucky to have been given one by my mom (she's nice like that) and I purchased a second one when I found it at Joann unwrapped and therefore discounted! And I confess to purchasing a third bundle on etsy as I was working on this quilt because I realized how much I really like these fabrics, though they aren't my usual style, and I didn't want to be without them. I didn't intend on making a scrappy background, but I decided against using solid white because I had some low volume fat quarters that coordinated with the Denyse Schmidt prints nicely and I'm trying to sew my stash this year. After the bow and background were pieced I decided to add a patchwork border because the quilt was going to finish on the small side, only 35" square, so I dug into my stash to find some more low volume prints. I don't have that many so there are a bunch of repeats and I think they kind of distract from the bow but I still like the way the quilt came out. The little animal faces print redeems the border for me, though you can't see them in the photos, I don't think. For the back I used a large cut of a sweet and subtle polka dot and ladybug print along with another DS print, and the binding is scrappy ladybug and DS, too. I had a lot of fun quilting this one. I attempted some more free motion and tried my hand at a large orange peel design. I did three rows freehand and then realized I did one section facing the wrong direction which was really annoying, but I tend to just go with my mistakes and wasn't going to fix it. Then my mom came over and I pointed it out and she said two things - 1. I should mark the quilting lines so the orange peels look better (subtext: your quilting looks terrible. Thanks, Mom! ), and 2. Did I want her to rip out the stitches that were going the wrong way? I sighed and then accepted her offer, and I did mark the rest of my lines and the quilting started looking much better. In fact, the original row of quilting looks terrible in comparison to the rest. Sorry, Norah! Mother does know best ;)

I tried to think of somewhere vintage-y to take pictures and I thought of this old church near our house, so the next time we went out I asked Matt to bring his camera and we stopped on the way home from Lowes one day last week. The front door is really pretty and the side of the building has old fashioned white wooden siding with stained glass windows, but as you can see, he only took two pictures because Ezra was yelling from inside the car (which was less than ten feet away from where I was standing on the steps) that he wanted to get out, again. Needless to say, we wrapped up the shoot pretty quickly. Next time I think I'll pick a quilt photo shoot location that's not on a main road or near water so we don't have to worry about the boys :) 

I'm going to quote a fellow quilter, Astrid, again today - "The problem with making stuff for other people is that one day you actually have to say goodbye to these things you've poured a whole lot of yourself into. Things you've fallen a bit in love with, in the process. But that's the point, right? To pour out, over and over, in order to make space for new inspiration. To share the bits of ourselves that perhaps others are in need of. And if it doesn't hurt a bit to give it up, maybe there wasn't enough of us in it." Norah, I hope this quilt keeps you warm and brings you comfort! My love and prayers for you are stitched right into it.