3.28.2011

Goals for the day: Run errands AND finish housewarming quilt!

You may think by now that all I do is quilts! It definitely seems like that has been a large portion of the recent projects. That is partly because quilts are great to allow my hubby to participate in (he often comes and helps pick out the fabric (such as the last one I did)) and also I can get the majority of the items on sale.

A chair I found for Jules' room.
You should check out the sales flyers at JoAnn Fabrics and Hancock Fabrics- you can get some great deals. Also, I love Fabric.com to get large amounts of fabric. I have a huge bin of cottons and upholstery fabrics, and curtain material and such because I have an obsession with decorating/recovering furniture. (I'm sure that will be a goal for the day coming up at some point). I like to get great deals so when we come across a good piece of furniture I only look at the skeleton. I then go and find a coordinating fabric and cover it!
After recovering it.

I have done this with a few pieces- for example the glider we found for Jule's room (see pictures to the side here). This chair was really nice, except for the ugly duck covers. Now it is a lovely brown to go with her room (which is mostly white, brown and sage green for decor). See how crafty I can be :) I wish I had pictures of my furniture downstairs pre-recovering because it is definitely the most drastic change (one chair was aqua, the love seat was brown with tan specks and the coach was black with geometric pillows in black and tan (see picture of couch)). So I recovered them all in the same fabric I had originally obtained to cover just the loveseat (thank goodness I bought WAY too much). I recovered the cushions in another fabric because I was running low on the black...it wasn't until later I found out light blue and maroon was a trend (I'm so trendy, not really).
Not bad, but doesn't match the others.
The couch moments after finishing recovering.

My little model likes to be involved with
all my projects.
Here it is hanging in Jules' room
she got a bunch from friends so
mom's is hanging :)
I'm sure this is all really interesting, but I think I was talking about quilts. My bad! I am really a tangent kind of talker. Anyway, back to quilts. I have made a few now. I did my first quilt in 2002, the summer before I met and fell for Elliot. That quilt was a queen size and was on our bed up until June of last year when I got very determined to finish the quilt I was making to match our room (I started the quilt in 2008) which was quite complex (I painted fabric squares to put in it to match a silk I had painted and framed that hung in our room). So here is that quilt. It was a king and I can guess you can see why it took two years! After that success I determined (that being 7 months pregnant) I would probably be fairly busy after the baby came (I was right) and if I wanted Blueberry (we never found out the gender, but called our little one Blueberry as a placeholder) to have a quilt I made I was going to have to make it before the arrival. So I immediately set out to do the one for the little one. Elliot picked out the pattern (called blueberry basket) and I set to work.

So since then I have done other craft projects, but I find I love the quilt as a gift. It is so useful and not something everyone gets all the time. It takes a bit of time to do, but the results are well worth it. So, my goal is to finish a friend's housewarming throw quilt (at least the quilting portion) and run all my errands (between work and naps of course). One of those errands: mail that last quilt :)

1 comment:

Elliot said...

I like how involved you make it sound like I am. For the record, yes I do help pick out fabric and patterns, but after that, the execution is all you. I help pick up quilt squares and hand them to you and keep the cat from getting too helpful, but other than that, I'm pretty much a spectator. I love you and you're awesome!