Monday, May 18, 2009

More Wonky Words

I really enjoyed making a trial run of wonky letters a few months ago. Sadly, life has intervened and I haven't had a chance to do anything with them.

However, just a few weeks ago, Lazy Gal Tonya put out a call for free pieced words for her "Halloween Noises" quilt. I figured this was a good time to make some words with a purpose. I originally signed up to do a word in a "rounded" font. After a couple of trial runs, I figured out I was trying to fly a bit too high and should stick with what I know. So here's my Halloween noise: "Hoot". (Unfortunately, these are horrible pictures since it's raining outside; they don't do justice to the cool orange animal print.)



I put huge, neutral borders on it because Tonya has plans to hand quilt this and I wanted to leave her lots of room to do whatever she wanted with it. It looks very tiny in the below picture, but the word itself is almost 10" across.

Sunday, May 17, 2009

T for Tristan

Last weekend I whipped up a quilt for a friend who just had a new baby.



It's all scraps from my scrap bag. I had been wanting to play around with colors and shading/gradient effects for a while, and this was a small scale project around that.
I outlined the rainbow section and the "T" and then stippled the outer, muslin border. I didn't prewash anything and love how much the muslin shrunk up.



I also did a pieced back using up some of the small scraps that I had leftover after cutting the strips on the front. Then I miscut a piece of muslin and, being unwilling to waste anything, added another colored strip to make it all fit. Not sure all the effort was worth it, but hey, fewer scraps for me!

Monday, May 4, 2009

Felt Food

Due to a swap I'm involved in, I ventured off the beaten path of quilting and tried making some felt food. There are a lot of sites devoted to making felt play-food for little kids and some of it is astoundingly creative. I stuck to making strawberries because they were very easy and (in my opinion) adorable.



I used this wonderful tutorial from mrmonkeysuit/Auburn Studios. It's a great tutorial (although I left off the yellow seed embellishments because I'm lazy. As you can see, it makes a pretty realistically sized berry.



For the swap I'm in, six of us are exchanging different items. Each person will get 4 berries from me. At the end of it all I should also end up with ravioli & tomato sauce, carrots, beans, burger w/ bun, lettuce and tomato, a Popsicle and other assorted goodies. While I don't have kids, I think this might be perfect for my little cousin and his play kitchen. All in all, this is a really neat idea and I'm glad I tried it out.