quilt 03 of 2015, for Lee

This quilt is the brother quilt to this one that I made over the summer. My friend Amanda wanted to make a quilt for each of her children. I had taught her how using Amy Smart's amazing beginning quilting series the summer that I was pregnant with Ezra and she was pregnant with her second daughter, Sophie. I made this quilt and Amanda made one for Sophie alongside me. Then she made one for her daughter, Amelie, and when she got pregnant with baby number three she bought fabric to make a quilt for him. She ended up not loving how the fabrics worked together (that's the difficulty of shopping online!) and ordered some others. I would periodically ask her how it was going, and when I learned that she had put it aside I offered to make it for her. By this point she was already pregnant with their fourth child! So I told her I would make quilts for both of them.

The feature fabric is Heather Ross's guitars from Far Far Away III and the rest are low volume prints that Amanda picked out - a couple chevrons and one that looks like a maze, but you can't actually solve it. I know because Ezra tried... mazes are one of his favorite things to do lately. Because so many of the fabrics were light and lacked bold color I decided to use the guitars in a few different places to give the quilt some life. I think it worked! More straight line quilting (I think I have so many projects going on lately that I can't put any creative energy into interesting quilting - I'm just trying to get things checked off my list!), and it's bound in more of the chevron fabric, both colors. 

I was super excited to be able to use my new quilt label, too! I've had the idea for them in my mind for months but needed Matt to design them in photoshop for me and I kept putting it off. I finally pinned him down a couple weeks ago, sent the files off to inked papers, and had the labels in just a little over a week! I definitely recommend using them if you're in need of labels for any kind of sewn items.

So Lee finally has his baby quilt! No matter that he's almost three ;)

half square triangles and school buses | quilt 02 of 2015

This baby quilt was commissioned by my dad whose former bus monitor had a baby last year. He wanted to give a quilt to her son before the end of the school year and I was happy to make one for him. I had a bunch of half square triangles left over from the quilt I made for my nephew last year and had been itching to use them up and this was the perfect opportunity.

I didn't have nearly as many as I thought though, so after I finalized a design for the HSTs on my design wall I looked through my stash for the fabrics I had made them with and added them to the sides. Alexander Henry's 2d zoo and teeny tiny zoo are my favorites, and then there are a couple polka dots, and some random frogs that I've had in my stash forever. While I liked them, it was one of those prints that I'm glad to say goodbye to!

The back is made up of a couple large cuts of fabric that I had in my stash - green seersucker, typewriter keys, and school buses! I was so excited when I remembered I had school bus fabric in my stash. I used it as a table runner for Ezra's second birthday party and hung on to it, sure I would never find a use for it, but since my dad drives a school bus part time and this quilt is for a bus monitor's son it couldn't be more perfect! 

I quilted it with straight lines on either side of all the horizontal and vertical seams, and bound it in the green seersucker print that I used on the back.