Five Quilt Finishes

I have been out of town for the past 12 days, but am home for the next 12 hours until I leave town again for a few additional days. Upon my return, only 1/14 nights will have been spent in my bed, 4 countries will have been walked in, and 4 major cities in Texas will have been slept in and visited.

I should be soaking up this precious at-home interlude with some quality sewing machine time, but it feels silly to start something now. So my back-up plan was to blog, because, well, why not?

Look!

A blog!

INCONCEIVABLE!

Ahem. Instead of saying it has been so many months since my last post, I will say it has been 5 quilt finishes since my last post. All 5 of those finishes are in this picture-heavy blog, so please keep reading (or scrolling without reading)!

So what have I been working on over the past few months? Lots, actually.

I started working with English paper piecing, especially hexagons and have truly fallen in love with their portability. As a professor, I often find myself with 10 minute breaks while my students are taking daily attendance quizzes, or between classes. Such a short amount of time is not enough to run up to my office and accomplish anything worthwhile, but hexies fill this time quite nicely! I can baste up a few hexies during a break, and stash them away in seconds. All of the supplies take up as much space as a pencil bag, which means it all fits nicely in my purse.

Here are the hexies I have done, thus far. They are for an eventual quilt for myself. This quilt is going to be an ongoing project.

On the cruise I just returned from, I started sewing some into rosettes. Yippee! There are no pictures of that stage yet.

Now, on with the quilts! This one is the baby quilt for my cousin, his wife, and their new baby, KT.

The reason I am leaving town again tomorrow is to go visit them and meet the baby! She was a premie and had some health issues. This meant she was in the NICU when I tried to go meet her. Luckily, she is out of the hospital and healthy as can be. So excited to meet her!

Her father (my cousin) and I were like brother and sister when we were growing up, so she definitely feels like my niece.

Here is the pretty back fabric for her quilt. Notice that it is not babyish at all. Yep, that is common with me.

I even made a cute little reversible tote bag to give the quilt in! That would be pink starry fabric on one side, with sock monkeys on the other!

I also finished the wedding quilt for my friends on time! It came out better than I expected, considering I made up the pattern and the sheer size of it. The groom is very tall, and this turns out to be big enough to almost completely cover him.

In an interesting turn of events, I actually got to sleep with this quilt last night. The couple I made it for hosted a New Years Eve party/slumber party at their new house, and the quilt was up for grabs so I snagged it. This was very exciting for me, because I had never used a quilt of my own making. Mmm, it was so warm. Now I am exhilarated and ready to speed up my personal quilt projects.

I also finished the door-prize quilt for the giant Christmas Scuba Club party thingamajig.

And even completed the two surprise quilts for another cousin's kids. These are the quilts I was stuck on way back here.

Chloe's quilt (Pattern found here) just needed to be basted, quilted, and bound. It came out nicely! FYI: Both of these quilts are tied because the batting was a thicker loft and I found it frustrating to quilt on the machine.

Jonathan's quilt was completely started over with a new pattern and new fabric. For whatever reason, my brain is not capable of completing the Moda Zig-Zag pattern. From now on, any zig-zags I do will be with HSTs.

Here is his new quilt, that is actually completed! (Pattern found here!)

And a close-up shot of the Spider Man detail on his quilt:

The backings ended up being the same as originally planned. Yay!

Wooo! Five completed quilts and a photo-heavy blog post: I am on a roll!