#TBT - Throwback Thursday - Grace and Evan

When I was pregnant with Grace, I didn't know if we were expecting a boy or a girl. In my hormonal fog, I decided to make two quilts instead of just making one that would work for either.


For a boy (Evan Patrick), I made this adorable sailboat quilt from PS I Love You:


For a girl, I made this priss-pot, girly-girl one patch quilt (after two sons, how could I resist?).  It might look familiar to those of you who have followed me on social media for awhile:


Today, that precious girl turns fourteen. I can't believe how quickly the time has flown by. I can't believe that klutzy me managed to birth a girl who is such a jock, who likes to run and get sweaty. I can't believe that your dad's and my tone deaf genes somehow combined to create a girl who can sing and play the piano. I can't believe you're already almost as tall as me!

Happy birthday, sweet Gracie! We love you so much!

An InLinkz Link-up

First UFO of 2010...One More Memory Quilt

It's DONE! Done done. All the way done. With a label.

The quilt I started last year as a 40th birthday gift for my cousin's wife, the one I had to give as just a top and then take back, the one I promised to finish by Thanksgiving and then Christmas, is finally done. It's my first finished UFO of the year, and gives me some breathing room from being Queen of the Stashbusters list.
This was a super simple pattern. I just printed photos and salutations on 4 1/2" squares of those fabric sheets. Then I cut pairs of scrappy 3 1/4" squares, halved them diagonally, and sewed them on. You can use this excellent tutorial for a Square in a Square block, or just guess based on a foggy memory of Geometry and see how many tries it takes before you get it right. (Guess which one I did!) I used the leftovers for a scrappy border, quilted around the squares, and bound it with the infamous bias binding experiment. The hardest part of the whole thing was getting the messages from some of the most important people.

But now it's done. What a tremendous relief. I will be bringing it to guild tonight to collect my bead and then deliver it to its owner. Yippeeee!

Hope today finds you crossing things off your list.

Miles and Miles...

Holy Smokes!

I mentioned that I finally sent my first-ever king sized quilt off to the longarmer (thank you Jan Kramer!). Jan even got it back to me in plenty of time so I could bind and label it in time for my anniversary; but the thought of making that much binding and wrestling the cotton croc through my machine was too overwhelming.

Finally, I decided to cross two things off my "to do" list at once: I made a continuous bias binding for the first time ever (I know, I know) and sewed the binding onto my quilt.

I found some pretty simple directions in a book that look almost exactly like the ones seen here at Quilter's Cache. The only difference is that the directions I had didn't say exactly how much it would make, just that a 36" square made enough "for a large quilt." Well, I have a very large quilt - 105" square - so I decided to use a 40" square of fabric to make my binding.

Can I just say, in my own defense, that geometry was not my best subject? No, the irony is not wasted on me that I took up quilting as a hobby.

The directions worked great. The binding turned out perfectly and quickly, as promised. I am a convert to the method. Sewing it onto the front of my ginormous quilt was not nearly as challenging as I had feared. In fact, I already whipped down 2 of the sides while watching Law & Order reruns that TiVo so kindly recorded for me. The only miscalculation?

This. This is the leftover binding. Yes, the leftover. This is what I have after binding my entire king sized quilt. From a mere 40" square of fabric. How is that even possible? It boggles even the mind of someone less mathematically challenged than I. I haven't measured it yet, but it makes me giggle every time I look at the bundle.

The Quilter's Cache link above has a great formula for calculating the size square you actually need to cut. I needed 420" plus some for my quilt. Let's say 450" for comfort. Multiply that by the width of the binding you are using - in my case 2 1/4". That gives me 1012.5. The square root of that number - 31" - is about the size square I needed. All easy with a basic calculator.

But if you reverse the process and multiply 40" x 40" (the size square I actually used) you get 1600. Divide that by 2 1/4" (width of binding) and you see that I made about 711" of binding. Only about 261" more than I really needed! Luckily it was all out of my stash and I will surely find a use for it.

All in all it was an inexpensive lesson, and one I won't soon forget. I hope you learn something today, too! Drop me a line and share what it was, or link to your blog and tell us all.