Happy Birthday Baby Boy!!

We had a great time celebrating Chaos' first birthday today! And, though it took a lot of late nights this week, his quilt was finished in time! Here are the pictures:

Front of the quilt


Peek at the backside

I really enjoyed making this quilt (well, the binding almost did me in, but that's a story for another day). I certainly learned a lot.

Here are a few tips I picked up along the way:

1. Quilting gloves are great! They really helped grip and hold the fabric while quilting. This was especially helpful because I was working at a small table and the fabric was pulling and bunching.
2. A quilt that has nothing but corners of squares to line up might not be the best idea for a first quilt. In hindsight, I should have offset the squares so there were no corners to line up.
3. I had NO idea how to bind a quilt. I had read lots of books and tutorials and just didn't understand them. Until I found this one from Crazy Mom Quilts . Made perfect sense.
4. I also had no idea how to blindstitch the binding on to the back of the quilt. YouTube. Great video demonstration. Almost as good as having a teacher next to you.

On a different note, Pinky and I made a dirt and worm cake for the party. I thought it would be really cute to serve it in a dump truck. Here's a picture of how it turned out (it tasted awesome!!). The smaller truck is his smash cake. While he was eating it he was also "driving" the truck. Too cute!

Okay, one last picture before I go pass out from sheer exhaustion...I have to include the birthday boy, Mr. Chaos himself - checking out the decorations and hoopla for the first time.

Quilt Update

So there is quilt progress. It's slow, but there's progress. Nine days until his birthday. That's plenty of time to finish, right? RIGHT?!?!

Today I worked on the quilt back. I was going to use one solid fabric piece, but then I was reading a great quilting blog (Crazy Mom Quilts) and decided to do a pieced back - just one strip to break up the solid look of the back.

I really don't know why I keep making the quilt MORE difficult, but I have to admit, I do like the look of the back even more now. This isn't the best picture (and I haven't trimmed the back or pressed seams), but you can get an idea of what it will look like. I love, love, love the bright orange fabric.


I've got a lot going on this weekend, but I am still hoping that I can get it quilted before Monday. Then I can spend next week working on the binding.

I have my monthly scrapbooking crop night tonight, so I'm also hoping to make some progress on my albums. They are surprisingly up to date (I'm up to December in both kids' books - woo hoo!!). I will try to share some pictures of the pages I finish when I have time.

Okay, need to get back to my crafty endeavors. Hope to have another update soon!

Quilt top is done!!

The quilt top is done!!! There are certainly a lot of imperfection, er- character, to this quilt. I think I really underestimated how difficult it would be. There are a LOT of corners to align. Needless to say, as my first ever completed quilt top, not all of the corners are perfect. But more than half of them are, I'm proud to say!

This weekend I will buy some batting and backing/binding fabric. Then I just have to wait for my walking foot to be delivered. In the meantime, maybe I can read up on how to quilt and bind. LOL! I've never made it this far on a quilt before!

Without further ado, here is the finished top (click on it to see it larger):


Sorrry for the bad lighting in all of these quilt pictures. I only sew after the kids go to bed so there's no good lighting to take pictures.

Quilt Progress!

I've made a lot of progess on Chaos' Alien quilt.

First, I layed out all of the blocks. I wanted a random pattern, but I also didn't want the same color or pattern right next to each other. I had Pinky help me so I wouldn't get to methodical. Here's the layout (ignore the blue blanket under the squares - I was trying to gauge the size of the quilt).


Last night, I sewed all of the squares into rows. (Again ignore the blanket and the white pieces of paper - they were my row markers).


I really like how it is turning out! Tonight I hope to press seams and finish the quilt top. Then this weekend I need to get some binding and backing fabric and some batting. I really hope to have this done by his birthday!