Festival of Half-Square Triangles

I have been so excited for this linky party! I went to a birthday party recently and I needed a gift to take with me. I found this tutorial awhile ago and thought a table runner with these blocks would make the perfect present. It was also about that time that I began seeing Megan's posts about the Festival of Half-Square Triangles linky party. What great timing!!!

I had a small fat quarter bundle of Kate Spain's Good Fortune fabric that I used for this project, along with some Kona solids. The polka dot backing/binding is from the Aunt Edna line by Denyse Schmidt.

 As per usual with HST's, I started with a bunch of squares (for measurements to make your own, check the tutorial HERE on the Freshly Pieced blog).

Here are my finished HST's. I then sewed them together to start forming the blocks.

I wasn't sure how to quilt this one (I usually become stumped at this part of the process) so I turned to twitter for some suggestions. I got a few suggestions for straight lines so decided to go with that. I did them on the diagonal to go with the lines of the fabrics.

I debated whether or not to do more quilting with diagonal lines going the other way for a criss-cross effect, but that would have been way too much.

This is the finished product and I absolutely love how it turned out. The birthday girl liked it as well. I hope you do too!

Go check out Megans blog to see all of the other wonder HST creations, and if you have a HST project you've made recently, link up so we can see yours too!

Here Comes the Sun

I love spring. I hear the Beatles song "Here Comes the Sun" play in my head every morning. In case you don't know that song (or love it and want to hear it) here it is. It's definitely my anthem for springtime.

There is one thing, however, that I don't like about spring. I feel guilty about sitting in the house sewing when it's so gorgeous outside. Because of that I have gotten literally NO SEWING done for 2 weeks now. But I shouldn't feel guilty about sewing since I can go outside and take pictures in the sunshine when I'm finished! Tuesday was my 32nd birthday, so this week has been especially lazy. It has been dubbed "birthday week" around here.

The things I love about spring far outweigh my one complaint about it though. I hate shoes. I mean, I love really cute shoes (as all girls do), but I hate wearing them. That's why spring is great! Because I get to wear flip-flops! Which also means I get a pedicure for my birthday!

I also love sun streaming through the windows when I wake up and sitting out on the deck to have my morning coffee. (And this is my new Keurig, also for my birthday. A present to myself!)

Lots of cleaning up was done outside yesterday. The yard still doesn't look beautiful, but much better than it did. I have empty pots waiting for some pretties to be planted in them.

Spring also means morning walks with my husband. I had to stop and take a picture of this beautiful tree I saw during our walk today:

What is your favorite season? I think they all have good things about them (except winter...) but obviously my favorite time is now. I suppose it depends on where you live too, since weather is different everywhere. I am inspired to make pretty things in bright, fun fabrics, but am also inspired to play outside and be a kid again.

Gettin' my Swoon on

I have had the Swoon quilt pattern by Camille Roskelley for a long time. I have been rather intimidated by it, but I finally gave into the Swoon.

A Flickr group was started awhile back for a Swoon-a-long by the lovely Miss Katy. Seeing all of the finished blocks and beautiful quilts gave me the push I needed to get started. I have a big empty wall over my stairs and I thought a smaller version of the Swoon in bright, happy colors would look great there. This pattern is great because it gives you the number of pieces you need for just one block. Most quilt patterns just say to "cut _ pieces of color #1" etc... to make the whole quilt.

I got out a couple of fat quarters and decided to make a practice block first just to see if I could do it without too much frustration. After a few hours (yes, it took me that long) I had this beautiful block: 

It was time consuming, and I did get confused quite often with the color 1 and color 2. But that was my fault for not paying close enough attention. This block is huge. Each one measures 24" square. I'm going to use this practice block as a mini quilt.

I gathered together my bright, cheerful fabrics and I'm all ready to go!

Pillow!

I love Heather Ross fabrics, but I usually can't afford to buy any. A few days ago I found a pretty amazing deal at my LQS. I was browsing their sale fabrics and I found two Heather Ross prints from the West Hill collection! Of course I snatched some up...

Last week I had a special treat come to me in my mailbox. Miss Tula Pink has a new book and, being her #1 fan, I had to have it. There are 20 awesome projects in here (10 quilts and 10 smaller projects) and I have been dying to make something. *Sorry! I can't get my picture to turn!*

I decided to make the Vortex Euro Sham using my new Heather Ross fabric mixed in with a bit of Lizzy House.

This is the top after I got it all pieced together. I used a light peach perle cotton to hand quilt it.

And here is the finished pillow! I really love it. The colors of the fabrics go together really well, and it  matches my couch perfectly. I'm thinking though, that I need some bright colors in my life and I may need to make a ton of these to throw all over my living room in cheerful springy colors.

Making

This post will be a bit picture heavy, as I have been sewing quite a bit, but not blogging. I'll just show you what I've been working on with a little caption under each photo. Deal?

This is a mini quilt I made for Lizze for Christmas. I used Parisville fabric in a Dresden plate pattern.

A Kindle cover I made for the shop, but I fell in love with it, so it's now mine.

Here's a few more Kindle covers. These ones actually will end up in the shop eventually.

And two custom Kindle covers I made for my friend Christine's mom. She chose these fabrics from what I had on hand.

This is the pincushion (plus a few extra goodies) I sent to my partner for a swap. I got mine in the mail a few days ago, along with another pincushion for a swap I did with Lizze. I'm saving those for their own post though. I'll show you soon!

I loved the cathedral window pinnie I made for my partner so I decided to make one for me.

I have wanted to knit socks for a long time. I found this gorgeous sock yarn at a local yarn shop here and couldn't resist.

Since I had never made socks before, I decided to try with a cheapy yarn for practice.

This is my sock progress so far. It's slow going because I have so much to do lately, but hopefully I'll have a pair to wear very soon.

Settling In

We moved into our new home 3 weeks ago and we are settling in very well. It has been so great to spend time with friends and family. I have gotten to spend a lot more time with my husband too, since he isn't spending 2 hours a day commuting. His work is now less than 10 minutes from our house. The sun shines here, even when it's cold. The sky is a color of blue I haven't seen in a very long time.

This was the weather on moving day. If I ever move again, will someone please remind me that winter is not a good time to do it?

The kids and the dog were pretty cozy in the car though. The bad weather didn't seem to bother them too much. Of course, they just had to ride along.

It took a few hours to get over the mountains and into central Washington. When we left Puyallup the skies were grey and dreary. As soon as we got over the pass, the sky became blue and there was a huge bright ball of light in the sky.

This is what the sky looks like everyday where we live now. It was the kids' first day of school here and there was a rainbow! Can you spot it? Can you spot the cute little boy too?

My favorite room in the new house is the living room. It is so bright and cozy. I love sitting on the couch in the morning with my coffee.

There really has been a lot to do here so I need to get back on a blogging schedule. I have been sewing so much! My new sewing room/closet has been getting quite a bit of use. Everything is organized and has it's place. It kind of has to be that way when you have a smaller space. But it makes it more enjoyable to sew because I'm not spending half an hour looking for a specific fabric or a pair of scissors before I can start making something. I share my sewing space with my clothes and that's okay because I don't have many of those.

The next post will be FULL of tons of sewing and knitting stuff! I promise! No more talk about moving. Let's get back to the making =)

Bee a {modern} Swapper

Against my better judgment, I signed up for a year long swap/bee. It looked like a ton of fun so I decided that even though I didn't really have time for it, I'd make time. The sign-ups are closed for this round, but you can always check out the photos and see when the next sign-ups will be HERE.

February is the first month and we are doing a pincushion swap. I have only ever made one pincushion and I hate it. I was so excited about this because I really, really need a new one. I wondered about what to do for my partner. That's the tricky part about swaps; you don't know your partners likes and dislikes very well. They try to tell you a few key things in an e-mail, but mostly you have to do a lot of stalking, ie: sift through their flickr favorites, their blog, their twitter account...

I was looking for online pincushion tutorials and I found this one on the My Go-Go Life blog. I have never made a cathedral window. Never even wanted to. I have always been intimidated by them, but really, it wasn't as difficult as I thought it would be.

I poked around through my scraps and found some Parisville by TulaPink in there (of course). My partners first favorite color listed was purple so this seemed perfect.

This is where I started. I was pretty pleased with myself at this point because I could see that I was actually doing it!

Here it is finished, before adding the stuffing. I wasn't really happy with it here. It just didn't look right. In the center where the points come together, only one point was correct. I didn't fold the white fabric correctly, I think. I was going to start a new one, but I figured I may as well finish it. So I stuffed it and added a button to the center.

The button completely covered the center and I love the way it looks now! I think this will be a good pinnie to swap, but I'll post it on Flickr to see what my partner thinks before I send it out.