quilt top

We decided on a nautical theme for our nursery, and Marty suggested I make a quilt for it.  I started by looking through my  quilting books, but I didn't find anything I really liked.  I then turned to the internet, where I found this quilt for sale on etsy.com. We agreed, that it was the favorite of all the designs we'd seen.  But I didn't want to buy it; I wanted to copy it.  So I spent some time looking at it and the proportions and sketched it up, and started calculating fabric requirements.  A few days later I found the pattern for sale online (it's called "Row, Row, Row Your Boat" and made with Dear Stella's "Anchors Away" fabric collection).  For a few seconds I considered getting the pattern, but why?  I'd already done the hard part.

We decided to use some of the Dear Stella fabrics (which I found for sale online), but then the rest I already had in my stash.  One of the major changes we made was to use reds instead of oranges and then yellow for the suns.  I think I also deviated from how the pattern would have had me do it--In sketching it out, I identified nine 12x12in blocks with sashing between them.  But when it came time to actually cut and sew the white fabrics, I decided that working with panels rather than squares would be less cutting and piecing of the white--there were the panels of sails, masts, boats, and then water.  It worked really well this way.

I finished up the quilt top this past weekend--it was time to clean up the sewing room and turn it back into a guest room.

Now to find someone to help with the quilting....and hopefully before the baby's born.

Happy Halloween!

This is mine and Baby Arlander's costume from last night.  I like how it turned out (and that I was able to get it all together in about 30 minutes).

I recommend you focus on the pumpkin portion of the picture, because if you look much further you'll see that I look tired from a long day.  Also, I need to wash my hair.  You might also notice that the camera has added about 10 pounds to the vein in my hand.  Apparently there was no other place for the camera to add 10 pounds--the baby beat the camera to it.

Happy Halloween!