Mystery Block of the Month

Last post of the night. I joined a mystery block of the month club through Fat Quarter Shop. The squares end up being 12 inches big and I get 1 square a month. I have 5 squares so far and have put together 2. I do have the others cut out though. These are the 2 I have done so far.

Monster Wreath

Pretty sure I should post as I go, instead of doing it all at once. Anyways, on Pinterest I found this little fellow.

So I bought a straw wreath, since it was $2 and foam was $8 (blech), and 2 foam balls. I found the foam for the teeth and the tulle in our sewing room and came up with this.

His teeth are sparkly and I realized after I hung it that the tulle was poofing in the wrong direction, but I love it.

Chandelier

I have a thing for chandeliers and recently decided that I wanted one for my room. I have a really low ceiling so it would have to be a small chandelier. I scoured KSL and Ebay for one that would work, but they were all to big. Finally I went to George's Salvage up in Salt Lake. That place was really cool. It was a little house packed with building materials, and I mean PACKED. The garage was packed, the yard was packed and a barn in the back was packed. There was all sorts of stuff I wanted to get for recycling projects but I limited myself to this....

Cleaned up fairly well.

I taped it and hung it up in the garage so I could spray paint it. Pretty sure Mickey, our senile old cat that lives in the garage, wanted to get high because she kept trying to sit under the chandelier as I sprayed it. Stupid cat.

I also got a lamp from DI for $5 and spray painted it to.

I even got a medallion to install with the chandelier that I really liked.

Then I got bored waiting for it all to dry.

I think it looks better than the green did. After it all dried I went to Joanns and bought fake pearls, silver jump rings (to hand the crystals it came with), paper and ribbon. I wrapped the center pole with ribbon. I used paper to cover the "candles" and wrapped those in ribbon too.

Haven't hung it yet, but I think it's aweseome.

Salem's Epic Quilt

Behold the epic alphabet quilt.

This started with my mom saying "We should make Salem an alphabet quilt that has pictures for all the letters" Naturally, I inundated her with pictures of other alphabet quilts I had seen. I finally decided on doing a 30 square framed quilt, with 4 extra squares to do what I wanted with. I bought an egg blue layer cake because I can't cut straight lines. I also found a jelly roll I had bought over a year ago on sale I had completely forgotten about.I pulled out the weird flower based strips that I didn't like and used those for the binding later. I also pulled out the blue based strips. I cut the remaining strips into ten inch strips for the right of the block and 12 inch strips for the bottom of the block. I then scrounged around in my remnants and found the fabric for the letters. I also cut the border out of fabric that Bree had left in the sewing room. I precut the borer into 12 and 16 (for the corners) inch strips that were 4 inches wide and sewed them onto the blocks before I assembled the whole quilt because I knew by the time I finished that I wouldn't want to put a border on. The border ended up being a little wavy but it worked.

The letters I cut out with my Cricut machine. I starched the fabric and put heat n bond on the back of them, then cut them out 5 inches high using the Winnie the Pooh font cartridge. I put it on the slowest setting with the highest pressure. Other than when the blade went close to the edge, it worked very well. If the blade gets too close to the edge it pulls the edge up and is a pain in the butt. After that I started finding pictures to go with each letter. I put on pictures of Grandma and Grandpa and the Aunts, Uncles, Cousin and his Mom and Dad. I also printed out "Salem's Quilt" "The End" and a picture of him with his grandparents and him with his parents for the corner squares. Salem is a huge Sonic fan so I found this picture online and used as many as these characters as possible. Made it so much easier.

I also used Disney and Spongebob whenever possible. I printed all those out, trimmed and heat pressed them. After that I ironed the Letters onto the squares and sewed those down. I started with a satin stitch, but it kept skipping stitches, so I went to a buttonhole stitch, that skipped stitches too, so I tried a zigzag stitch. Surprisingly, that skipped too. So I ended up doing a blind hemstitch which worked very well. Unfortunately, I can't sew in a straight line either, so the stitching around the lines is a little wobbly, but it worked.

For A you have Amy Alex and Amy (from sonic). For D you have Dad, DJ, dog and dalmation. For E you have Eggman, Eva and Espio.

For B you have Bree, Brian, Big the Cat and Buzz. For C you have Cream, Charmy, and Cat in the Hat. For F you have Fish, Fox in Sox and Flute (for Shelly). For G you have Grandma, Grandpa and Gamma. For H you have Horton, Hippo and Hudson Hornet.

For I you have ice cream cone and Iron Man. For J you have Jet, jaguar and Jeff. For N you have Nemo and Newt. For O you have octopus, Omega and Owl.

For K you have Kaylee and King. For L you have Lindsay and Leo (unintentionally upside down, oops) and Lightning Mcqueen. For P you have penguins, polar bear and Patrick. For Q you have Queen of Hearts, quail and quilt.

For M you have Mom and Mater. For R you have Rouge and Red (the firetruck)and a rhino.

For S you have Salem and Sonic, Shadow and Spongebob. For T you have Teddy Roosevelt, Tails, Tikal and Tigger. For X you have X-ray and Xylophone.

For U you have undies, umbrella and the LAST unicorn. For V you have violin and Vector. For Y you have Yak and Yo-Yo. For Z you have Zebra and Zizzer-Zazzer-Zuzz (thank you Dr. Seuss)

For W you have Wave and Woody. I stuck Knuckles on the end because I couldn't decide where to put him because he sounds like N but starts with K. Confusing for little ones. The back was flannel we had in the sewing room and the yarn was left over from a different project.

All I can say about this quilt is NEVER AGAIN.

Butterscotch Quilt

For this quilt I used the Shortcake Quilt Pattern

and the Butterscotch and Roses jelly roll

and got this

I haven't finished it, it's just a top right now, but hopefully I'll be able to machine quilt it. I'm trying to learn how to do it on my little machine but I'm not sure I'll have figured it out by christmas. We'll see.

Sun Bonnet Sue

Personally, I think that Sun Bonnet Sue is one of the cutest blocks there is. I decided to make a quilt using her as the center for this quilt instead of the appliqued flowers. Here's a pic of the block done by Melissa Corry...

Here's my take on it...

My plan is that every time I make a quilt, I make a Sun Bonnet Sue quilt out of the left over fabric. Hopefully in the next week or so I should have a Sue made from the fabric of my Shooting Star and Butterflies quilt. Fingers crossed.

Shooting Star Foundation Quilt

So, I took a class from Janette Barker at Heartfelt Creations so that I could learn how to do foundation piecing. I would explain what it is, but it's something that's easier to show than tell. Anyways, here is the block that we learned how to make. It's a foundation pieced tulip that i'm pretending is a shooting star.

We made 20 of those, which took a whole lot of time and paper, but eventually I managed to put it all together and got this...

Here is a closeup of the border fabric, which I am absolutely in love with.

I am currently working on figuring out how to quilt using my sewing machine instead of by hand. As soon as I feel comfortable with that method, I plan on quilting it this way. P.S. Here's a pic of Bree's square, which is freakishly cute!

Mongo Flower Bag

This is a bag I made for my younger sister. It's called the Mongo Flower bag. I got the pattern for it at The Material Girls Quilts in South Jordan. The pattern was printed on regular printer paper and I had to cut out the pieces and tape them together, but other than that it's a great pattern. We got the fabric from Heartfelt Creations. It took me about four hours beginning to end, but about half an hour of that was trying to figure out how to do the rosette in the middle of the flower. I gave up and pinned a red/black lace flower from Paparazzi on it instead. Personally, I like it much better than the fabric rosette. So far, it's held together really well, which is saying a lot considering how my sister treats her purses.

Busy Butterflies

This is my butterfly blanket. I got the pattern from the quilt shop at Gardner's Village. It's called "Busy Butterflies"...the pattern, not the shop. The fabric for the butterflies is called Chrysallis by Moda, the rest of it I got from Joann Fabric. This was super easy to put together, quilting it by hand took forever though. Didn't help that Boo (the cat) claimed it as her own. Every time I pulled it out she sprawled out on it, regardless of what I was doing. I'm not entirely sure what I'll do with it now that it's done, but I absolutely love it!

Reindeer Tammy

This is called the Reindeer Tammy, I made it as a gift for Christmas in 2010. It took me about a week to make and is made out of alpaca yarn. This is one of my favorite hats I've made.

Fuchsia Fizz

This is a shawl I knit out of a yarn called Fuchsia Fizz. It seriously was the prettiest yarn I've ever worked with. I got the yarn from Three Wishes Fiber Arts

My random crafts

This is a blog about the random crafts I like to do. I tend to go through the crafts in cycles. I just switched from knitting to quilting so for now it will have both of those. Enjoy