Pillow talk!

They say that there comes a time in pregnancy when you start making the home more of a home/nest...I think I have just hit this time!

2 new pillowcases!
This one is for Mr Whirlygiggles:

and this one is mine!

I have also spent an hour or so going through my quilts and creating different lists.
My current stats are:

Quilts tops completed and waiting for wadding, backing and binding: 18!!!
Quilts to be completed: 6
Quilts ready for binding: 4
Quilts on the go currently: 3

I would like the quilts finished before the baby arrives...something tells me that when she is here there will be NO time for quilting, especially in the beginning.

Back to the sewing machine to finish a beautiful quilt I am working on which shall remain a mystery for the time being!!!

                                                                                     Amelie x

Amelie's Garden

The time has come to celebrate the completion of this quilt.

The quilt below is a very special quilt to me. I started quilting in May 2009 and this pattern (Leanne's House: Butterfly Garden) was the first quilt I noticed in Carol's shop (Just Between Friends) and I instantly fell in love with it. It was a very large project to tackle as a beginner to sewing (either by hand or by machine) and so this quilt records/tracks my progress block by block.

It is also a quilt that followed the biggest loss in my life. I also wanted to create a 'garden' but for me this garden would belong to the most beautiful little butterfly in my life...this is Amelie's Garden... a labour of all my grief and love...

Here are some pictures of my most favourite blocks:

                                                                           Mummy x

Quilt Police

Some days are just 'bad quilting days'...no matter what I do I cannot get it right. I seem to have had a good quilting day followed by a bad one, followed by another good one...

The good quilting day saw the beiginning of my whirly quilt (yes, another Kaffe Fassett!, not that I am obsessed or anything!) of which the blocks look like this:

I loooooove them!

Then the bad day came and I realised that I had cut up those trapezoid shapes all wrong (did you read the pattern properly I hear you ask? ermmmmm probably not properly properly...)...Ahhh, I should add that this is a kit I treated myself to for Christmas...which means that cutting fabric wrongly results in having NO fabric for the quilt. Obviously my pregnancy took priority over the quilt and tears were not shed!
I then decided to quilt a little person's quilt I have been working on and thought I would be clever and add the binding by machine rather than waste precious time to hand binding....what a disaster...I have never seen a worse binding job since i started quilting....it is all coming off as we speak...awful...
what a day....I should have never got out of bed in the first place...I heard the Quilt Police knocking on my front door all day!

Then today came and this has been a good quilting day!!! First of all, not having the kit fabric meant that I had to pluck the courage to make my own fabric choices from my stack..and I did and they look great!!!! I felt so good! So all blocks of this quilt are finished but need to be squared up and the sewn together. Here is a preview of how the quilt looks halfway through:

It still needs borders and it needs finishing (not my srongest point as you know!)

I also attempted my first pillowcase and I HEART IT LOADS and loads :-) Mr Whirlygiggles was thoroughly impressed!!! I followed a tutorial from the lovely Missouri Star Quilt Company at http://tutorials.missouriquiltco.com/

And finally (I know I should get a life BUT I am on holidays before my maternity leave kicks in and so the whole day is mine) I finished the Safari quilt although I decided not to follow the pattern exactly but to put together something a bit more to my taste:

It is very cute and the elephant in the middle is gorgeous!

Am happy and grateful for the good quilting day (can I please have a few more of these??????)

Amelie x