Sewing for Others

A bit of non-garment sewing.  First up a quilt using a  free pattern from Quilting in the Rain la-conner-stars-free-pattern.html

 I was responsible for 16 quilt blocks for a queen size quilt. The other 48 blocks were made by my sister, sister-in-law, and my best friend from college.  These were for a quilt for DIL#1.  She thought that you went to a "Quilt Shop" to buy a finished quilt.  We had to explain that wasn’t quite the situation.  And since she loves pink, and we all had pink remnants in our stashes, we decided to make her a scrappy pink star quilt.  I did a lot of quilting in the late 80’s and early 90’s and have more than enough quilts to cover every bed in the house. But it took sewing a few blocks to remember the best sewing and ironing steps to get accurate blocks.   Every type of sewing has its tips and tricks. The quilt top was laid out during a family get together weekend, with everyone, spouses and pets, helping out.  

Quilt top layout

 I volunteered to put the blocks together and did so in four days.  That was a task. Four different makers that had pressed their block seams in different ways, trimmed their blocks in different ways, etc.  But it was finished, was actually square, and is at the professional machine quilter as we speak. 

My husband and I are becoming grandparents this year. No to one, but two grandbabies. The invite to the baby #1’s shower, held in Virginia, was done by Evite and had links to suggested gifts requested by the parents to be. We bought a combo stroller/car seat through the links, and it was sent straight from the vendor to the couple’s house in Louisiana. But I still wanted to take a gift to the baby shower.  I made this darling stuffed lamb from a pattern I found on Etsy. Lamb pattern 

I had to source my fleece fabric from Amazon, now that JoAnn’s Fabric stores are closed.  My backup source was the paint aisle at Lowe's Home Improvement store, where they had big fleece mitts for applying paint finishes. The fabric was a knit backed fleece that had the annoying edge curling tendency found some knits.   So, I was dealing with narrow seams, with fleece in them, that wanted to curl.  Got it done and was happy with the result.  My husband called it “Lambchop” after the lamb puppet that was in a popular child show back when he and I were kids.

Here is the father to be trying out the new rocking chair in the nursery with Lambchop.