Monday, December 29, 2008

Pilgrim Costumes



Another of those wild and wacky projects - 11 pilgrim costumes for the preschool. I love our preschool so this was no problem. A little tricky on hat sizes but we made it - Rob was an absolute blast with the glue gun! Everyone seemed to enjoy.

Nuts and Robolts Quilt

My friend and design partner, Natalie, and I came up with a fantastic design for P&B Textiles' Nuts & Robolts fabric. This is an easy quilt to whip up on the weekend and will really please the little robot fanatics in your life. Picture coming soon.

You can buy any of the fabrics from here.

Pillows for Holy Family School



Last year at Christmas, I helped the 5 year old and 3 year old class at my kid's preschool make pillows for the holidays. Basically we cut out all the pieces and the 5 year olds arranged the houses on a block with fussy cut animals and such. Design inspired by Quilt It for Christmas. The 3 year olds made flowers with Minkee in the centers, lots of petals and fuzzy chenille leaves and stems. My design.

Oh and what was I thinking, I embroidered each child's name on the back of each pillow - all 52 of them.

Auction Quilt for Fox Valley Montessori




I wanted to share some of the pictures of the charity quilt I helped the kids do for Fox Valley Montessori. This art quilt was made with direct input by about 22 (3-5 year olds.)

We cut 200 1 inch strips of blues and let the kids lay those out the way they wanted the water to look. Later on, I cut and ironed steam a seam paper to white muslin. Using lots of free coloring book downloads, we printed out two fish and some coral for each child to color. They painstakingly colored in the fishies with non-toxic Shiva Paintstiks. Later on they glued glitter and beads and tiny bits onto the fish to decorate. Each child's fish was labeled with their name.

After cutting out the fish, the children used a large flannel piece to layout the fish and coral on the background strips. Other than a few small adjustments, I sewed exactly as they laid them out. I later quilted the piece with aqua, blue and silver metallic threads to look like the water.

The bidding took off at auction and the piece was auctioned for $1000.

Benartex Floral Quilt


I went to a quilt store over towards Lewisville, TX and they had the best quilt on the wall. It was the lovely Flower Show 2 from Benartex done up in this great quilt that will work fantastic in Paige's bedroom. It is called Hope's Garden but I've added 3 rows and 3 columns like they did in the shop. I adjusted the outer borders to make the quilt slightly larger.

It is really fast and easy. The trickiest part is to make sure that you cut the fabric the correct direction and sew in order since some of the fabric definitely has a single direction. I also didn't care for the cornerstones so I just used solid borders.

This is the freebie quilt picture and I'll post mine asap. The instructions for the quilt are free at http://images.benartex.com/fabrics/quiltgal/flsh2/hopegrdn.pdf.