Time flies when you're missing deadlines.

My quilt was almost completely done by March 31st, and then I procrastinated for 11 days putting the binding on. Lots of reasons...we're expecting a new hostile youth in my household, so I've been milking that first trimester exhaustion for all its worth. Also, my sewing room is a great big mess that just closes in on me whenever I go in there.

Like lots of families who have little kids, we love the Cat in the Hat. I even dressed up like him last year for Halloween.

Complete with Thing One and Thing Two.

 

I've been wanting to try wonky piecing, and I figured there was no better medium to try it on than Robert Kaufman's Cat in the Hat fabric line. I originally planned to have this done to go with our Halloween costumes last year. Procrastination, remember?

I like the way piecing turned out, but I got discouraged with the way it finished up. It's much puffier than I care for, when I'm used to a much flatter work with denser quilting. I tried something new with the quilting and building my quilt sandwich - instead of putting all three layers together, I quilted just the front and the batting with an all-over free-motion pattern.

Then I added a piece of fuzzy black fabric to the back, sewing only around the blocks to attach it. I love fuzzy backs on quilts, so I'll definitely do that again, but next time, I'll create the whole quilt sandwich and quilt it like normal before attaching the backing piece. The quilting really needs that extra piece of backing fabric to stabilize it.

I finished it off with a red and white striped binding. I was originally aiming for a twin-size quilt, but I underestimated how much black fabric I had for the sashing. So instead, it ended up as a generously sized throw.

I listed this quilt here, in my Etsy shop. I've had better luck on eBay, so I might think about listing it there, too.

I'm not the only one expecting a baby. A friend of the family is having a little girl this summer, and my next project will be a quilt for her. But first, I need a few days to whip my poor sewing room back into shape.

That's five projects from stash.

January quilt: zig-zag throw blanket

In February of last year, I posted this picture to my Facebook, proclaiming that it would soon be made into a throw for my couch.

"Soon" wasn't really the best descriptor. After I took that picture, I planned out the quilt and cut out all my squares. In the nearly a year that followed, I moved, got a new couch, sewed a few squares at a time, and made eleven other quilts. But one good thing that's coming out of my no-fabric-buying challenge is that I really get to buckle down and finish projects that I've already started. And luckily, I still have the couch that matches these colors - it's in my den, and I managed to move enough clutter out of the way to get a good picture of the quilt in its intended environment.

And here it is.

The finished product is about 60" X 60", and has blue, green, yellow, and brown zig zags made from 5" half-square triangles. The fabrics were a mish-mash of fabrics that caught my eye at Jo-Ann and Wal-Mart, along with Kona Bone. (The periodic symbol paintings were inspired by this blog post. "Kraus" would be my married name, if my own name weren't already so awesome.)

Forgive the treadmill arm poking into the picture. I used a dark-brown binding, and I quilted along the seam lines using light blue thread. I ended up with a lot more tucks and puckers than I'm comfortable with. I'm still learning the art of straight-line quilting. Plus, I was working with blocks that I made when I was a newbie, but I had to forge ahead even though I could see the rookie mistakes in them. I find that a while after I finish a project, I can usually forgive myself for the mistakes I've made on it. If I were selling it or giving away, I'd feel worse about it, but since I'm keeping this one, I don't need to beat myself up over the oopsies.

This is the pieced back.

If I had known how well this flowered fabric from Moda tied the whole thing together, I would have made the whole back from it. Overall, the quilt is nice. It's a good size, and super soft. Puts me right to sleep, though maybe it's just the winter cold talking.

That's three projects from stash.