Party Animals.

Jason and I had a VERY busy weekend.  We were MAJOR party animals.  My grandma turned 80 last week and Jason's grandmother turns 85 this week.  On Sunday we went to my grandma's party and Saturday we went to his grandma's surprise party.   



Oh boy was she surprised.  She thought she was going dress shopping for an upcoming wedding. 



I love the look on Uncle Tom's face here.  He looks so afraid that cousin Jenna is going to dump all those candles on his lap. 



Uncle Tom is turning 60 sometime soon, so he also got a pair of cakes.  One 6.  One 0. 



Grandma Vrooman, Jason and I. 



Jason and I had made something special for Grandma Vrooman's birthday.  This is her opening the box. 



The label I made for the back using my mom's floating eight-point star tutorial.  Thanks mom!  It was a breeze to whip this one together!

Jason made fun of my use of commas, but whatever... I like my punctuation to be correct; even if only on a quilt label. 



This is the full quilt draped on my bed.  It turned out ENORMOUS and really heavy.  The neutral I used is a fabric called Osnaburg.  It has a beautiful texture to it and I really like the way it looks, I just didn't like the way it handled.  It was an experiment, so we'll chalk it up to a learning experience.  The Osnaburg stretched and skewed and frayed.  I had several spots I had to repair before and after quilting because the seam allowances had disintegrated.  Even though I really like the way it looks, I don't think I'll use it again.

The quilting on this one seemed to take FOREVER.  I used a pantograph by Willow Leaf Studio called Whirlygig in a pretty gold thread.  I thought the design was just the right density of quilting for this one.  Unfortunately, I had a few issues with thread tension, borders, and stretching fabric and it took me 7 hours to finish!  Phew!

I had a bit of help from Jason on this one.  He did about a 1/3 of the hand sewing part of the binding.  Without him this quilt would have taken forever to finish.  I forgot to measure it when it was all said and done, but I think it was about 98x115.

Sadly, none of the pictures I snapped at my grandma's party turned out well enough to share with you.  Maybe next time. 

maggie makes

Remember these guys?





















Karen at maggie makes wrote a post about the two little quilts I made for my grandparents' birthdays a while back. 

Head on over and check out the nice things she has to say about my little quilts. 

Gramma's 79th Birthday

I know how to spell Grandma. When I was little, I misspelled it Gramma and it has just stuck. Don't make too much fun of me.

My Gramma turned 79 last month. Since my grandparents really don't need anything, I decided to make something for them to brighten their day.

I started this photo of my gramma & three of her sisters.


I put it into Photoshop to crop and alter it. I used the cutout filter to blur it a little bit and determine how many colors (6) it should have.

I printed that out and traced it onto tracing paper. Using colored pencils, I colored each fabric a different color.

Then I cut a chunk of freezer paper for each of the colors. I translated the colors into a pattern and traced the pattern (backwards) for each onto the freezer paper.

After that I ironed the freezer paper to the back of the fabric and cut out each piece.

Once all the pieces were cut out, I layered them and used fabric glue to build my image.

Once that dried I machine quilted the mini quilt top on top of a layer of felt.




Then I put it in a frame.


It was a fun project to do. I think my gramma liked it. I love the thank-you cards she sends... the card for this one conveyed a little awe about the project and that I had come across this photo. Whenever I make her something, there's a story about the subject in the card. This one was about the dress she was wearing (her favorite) that she got to close to the pot-belly stove and burned the front off of.

I got the idea for this from an article titled Creating Figures in Fabric written by Leni Levenson Wiener and published in Quilting Arts Magazine's February/March 2010 issue.