Happy Birthday my boy!

I did it! Today at 1.46 am I switched the sewing machine off and had a finished quilt. The last steps were quite hard but I did it. He was so happy this morning.
It all started with a wish and a plan to full fill this wish: a quilt! Big enough to snuggle in and of course it had to be cool. So why not make a quilt with his favorite things: maths and chess! That was the plan and that was the map therefore ...

I have to be honest - the heart was not cool enough so we had to make a hexagon instead. The whole quilt is divided in 2'' squares which was my grid. The main blocks were the numbers 1 to 9 followed by the mathematical operations +,-./ and *. To fill some blocks I added the shapes: triangle and hexagon, cube and sphere (or circle). He loves chess so one corner is occupied by the black king while the white rook protects the other. The last spot I drew a bar graph which he made into a book shelf .... and this is how it looks

This quilt measures 27x37 squares which should make it a size of 54x74 ''. Almost 1000 squares later the quilt got a diagonal quilting and a binding and I a good sleep. Now I am totally done! Happy Birthday!

Linking up with finish it up Friday at Amanda

Half way through ...

If you ever have plans for midterm think about that someone could bring home Chickenpox which break out on Sunday (best day to get a doctor) and you are "imprisoned" for the break. That was what happened. The only fun part was on Thursday driving through the big M for food. So not much sewing was done the last week and not the pressure is on. Friday is the big day and today block number 16 (out of 24) was done: the cube!

I am happy that my girl immediately saw the cube. So this means I have done it right. Tomorrow I hope to finish the last blocks so we can go and arrange the top to be sewn on Wednesday. This is going to be a tight timetable now. Fingers crossed everything goes right.....

Little extra ...

Working on one single quilt with no distraction can be really boring. So I was so not in the mood today to keep working on the quilt. There are at least two blocks that might be a little tricky and I did not do the maths therefore till now. But I did the maths for something else. My son loves chess and last year his team made it to the All Ireland Finals. So why not make him a pillow matching the fabrics from the quilt. I thought it will be faster but it was still quite tricky. Finally it is hidden until his birthday in 2 weeks.

This pillow  is about 17'' square. The pawn is arranged on a low volume background as it will be in the quilt. There is a border of 1'' around in the same pirate fabric.

Linking up with "Finish it up Friday"

18 days to go ...

There is not much going on in the house these days. I managed to finish the last seam from the bag and she took it happily today to  her dance class. The shoes fit perfectly and the extra bags on the side give space for a small water bottle or the socks. Thanks to the bag feet and the grid it keeps perfectly in shape. With the long zip it is easy to find things in the bag. I love it and I am so happy it is used now!

large enough to fit the shoes and some other goodies

The other thing I am working on is still the quilt for my son. It will be so different. The two huge blocks are done. Now there are only one or two tricky ones to be made. The others are all straight forward. I have no clue how it is going to look like as my son got a design wall in his room now where he can arrange the blocks. He is excited and I love his smile when I add an other block.

The main color of the quilt will be black and withe. We designed it all on squares. To give it a good size there should be 25 2'' squares in the width and 36 in the length at the end. No, I did not calculate the total number of cuts I have to make. Some blocks will contain orange or aqua. The background is made out of low volume but some will be negative blocks (low volume on black background). So back to sewing! 18 more days until I want to be finished and there are 14 more blocks to be made.

22 days to go

I really was surprised when my son wrote on this wish list for his eleventh birthday: quilt from my mom! Isn't this cute? He got the stained quilt I made following Sarahs QAL feeling ages ago. He loves this quilt but it just to small.

So I sat down some days ago and started to draw a quilt for him. It is going to be very special but I will show you some pictures from work in progress. Today I made the first block. It is done and he loves it.

I  hope to get the first row done tomorrow. The countdown started and there are not many more days. Fingers crossed I have a finished boy quilt in three weeks!

Bee part 1

It is stormy, I am leaking of motivation and so I just sat behind the sewing machine today to make two bee blocks. I did already all the cutting yesterday and of course mad a mistake. Not dramatic but annoying. When I started to cut the fabrics from my stash for Cindy I accidentally cut the wrong block size. She gave three sizes to chose from so this would not have been a problem as I cut Large instead of Medium BUT I did not have enough white to make 3 large blocks. So this is what I made out of it ...

Three large spools. Cindy was so nice and sent out the red fabric to make them real Aurifil looking spools. Two blocks are finished and one block is missing the white border. She also wanted to have some small ones and these are really small!

You can see them combined with the large spool but they will be fun filling the gaps between the large and medium spools. If you want to make some yourself here you can find the tutorial.
The other block I made today with the same problem - running out of white - were hearts for Bee Blessed. One stripe is missing but Sarah generously will add the missing part. Thank you so much! As promised they are green :)

That`s it for today! The other block I am working on needs advise from my son so waiting until he comes from school and helps me out!

Blogmotivation

I can not believe it is already 2 weeks that I wrote my last blog post. I really have to kick myself more and as I read this week: it is not always about showing finished projects - the progress can be shown as well. As the last two weeks have been full with dancing. No! I did not start Irish Dancing but some might know that one of my girl is dancing. So last Saturday, when Rugby was cancelled, we drove to Claregalway and spent the morning in a sticky hall watching her and a friend dancing. I had my sewing with me but only did some stitches.

This one is slowly growing. Very slowly! I do not know what this is going to be but there is still lots of fabric left from the Nordica bundle so I keep going. On Saturday I took this with me again but this time I did not even touch it. I was neatly buried in my bag but I was not happy with my girls dancing bag the last week so I tried to make her a new one.

I chose to make her the the bag I found in the Modern Quilting Magazin. I am so  happy that Sara has the tutorial on her blog as there was a terrible cutting mistake in the magazin. With her instructions on the blog it was easy to follow the steps. When I did the trial run for Katy on her "Whole Lotta bag" (did you see the sew along?) I learned a lot about bag making. The best part this week was, I had all the supplies now at home and could make some changes to the bag.

The only thing I did not have was the handles and to be honest, I did not want to spent so much money to order them (Ireland is terrible in supplies). So I chose to make them out of linen but it is filled with bag webbing. This gives it a nice stiffness and hopefully it makes it stronger.

I also love pockets. The pattern did not have enough for me and I like to put things fast in a side pocket. So I had to add an other one on each the side. This is one "work in progress" as you can see the button is still missing.

The pocket on the other side can not be closed. To make it a little bit bigger it is filled with a rubber band. It holds my sunglasses quite tight. The last change I made is a grid in the bottom and bag feet. Hope this keeps the water away a little more.
I might use this pattern for my London bag as well but I need to make more changes.

The fabrics are mostly the ones my girl chose when we were in town shopping or on a market. Some of them are from the Japanese Charm Swap and the rest I got in a rainbow charm swap. Now I need an other one of these to get the missing colors again.


Linking up with Monday Morning Star Count 2014/.