Monday, May 21, 2012

I am in love...

with Sarah Jane's new line Out to Sea. Living on a sailboat means I'm always noticing when new nautical prints come out but they are always in blues and sometimes greens but never pinks. And I have to say I LOVE pink. So I'm pretty excited and will be anxiously awaiting its release.

morning coral collection webdeep sea jewel collection web

You can read more about the line on her blog SarahJane Studios.

Saturday, May 19, 2012

Bloggers Quilt Festival

This is one of five quilts I did for Christmas gifts last year. I wish I photographed it better because I love this quilt! It was made for a 4 year old little boy who loves anything that moves. I started with the fabric with the vehicles and new that I wanted to fussy cut them. That was all I knew I wanted to do when I started. The quilt evolved from there. I also wanted the quilt to not feel like a baby quilt since he is quickly growing up and has a big boy bed now. I decided to use the design of the bed as the layout for the quilt and use overlapping squares. 

Initially I was going to do red, blue, and yellow with secondary colors as the small squares where they overlapped but when I started looking through my stash blue, orange, and green complemented the vehicles better. This left me to choose a color for the small overlapping squares and decided I'd use purple with deep chocolate brown (the color of his bed) for the actual squares. When I fussy cut the vehicles they were slightly askew since they weren't printed straight on the fabric. To compensated for this I bordered and squared them up. This is why they float inside the larger squares. It took me awhile to get the balance right. I kept moving the squares around on my design board until I felt I had it just right. I'm really happy with how this quilt came out because I think that it is something he will enjoy for a long time.

I'm linking up to the Bloggers Quilt Festival. Stop by if you get a chance so you too can see some other awesome quilts!

Amy's Creative Side

Friday, May 18, 2012

May Bee Blocks


I'm finally back to sewing my Bee blocks - actually back to sewing at all and not my Bee blocks. My mom has been covering my blocks for the last few months till I got back to the boat and my machine (thanks Mom!) I was ready to go at the beginning of the month and then realized I didn't have the Kona Coal that I needed and have no idea where to get it in Australia so my mom and I swapped Hives this month. She's doing my Hive #2 block and I did her Hive #4 blocks.

Funny story about the blocks is that my husband looked at me last night and said "So you have to get some sewing done right?" I answered "Yes." Then he proceeded to ask "How many days do we need to set aside for this?" He really didn't believe when I said I'd only need an hour (which really meant three hours). He expected me to be at my machine for days and days well into the night to get these two blocks done. I was up until 1:30 or so working on them and boy did it feel good! Nothing better than a cup of tea and sewing into the night...except maybe my baby boy's smile in the morning when I wake up exhausted and don't want to get out of bed :)