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It has been a long week. Is it really only Tuesday?  I spent most of the past two days in bed with a migraine and it has been miserable.  Migraines always make me feel like I will never have the energy to do anything ever again. So it's a good thing I finished this one last week, though I took the pictures after my headache started and they are not the best (quilt upside down, windows in the background, etc.), but I wanted to take them before the quilt was gifted. This quilt uses a few prints from my favorite collection in a while: Winged by Bonnie Christine.  It has all of the pinks and peaches and teals and greens and purples that I am always looking for.  It is really beautiful.  I mixed it with some other prints in my stash to make it a little scrappy and crazy. The backing is my favorite print from the collection.  I am normally not a fan of green but apparently I like this green.  The binding is a Cotton + Steel print. This quilt is going to a so...

You might remember that a few weeks ago I asked for some advice about teaching a simple quilting class to some ladies at my church.  Teaching this class taught me something that I hadn't really realized and that I am now a little embarrassed to admit: I am very uncomfortable talking about quilting. During the class I was embarrassed when people asked me questions about things that I have made and, since I am self taught, I was self conscious about things that I might be doing the "wrong" way. Most of the people in the class have much more traditional styles than I do and I was very nervous about giving them fabric advice.  Even choosing a pattern and writing out directions was terrifying. I considered all of your comments when I was deciding which quilt pattern to make for the class and I am ashamed to say that I did not take your advice.  I decided that we should do a St. Louis 16 patch quilt with large-ish squares so I set out to make one.  It came together pretty...

A while back I made a table runner using the  adorable Ann Kelle  Confections line.  I seriously love all of the Ann Kelle prints, they are so adorable. photo by Simply M Photography Kelle had photos taken and was kind enough to share them with me so that I could share them with you. photo by  Simply M Photography The table runner is available as a free pattern from Robert Kaufman.   photo by  Simply M Photography You can read more about it (plus see lots of other pretty things) on Kelle's blog .  

The winner of the Shabby Fabrics giveaway for a bundle of Oh Clementine is . . .  Congrats Betsy!  I will be sending you an email shortly.

I have written up a quick tutorial for making this quilt in baby and quilt size, it is available here .  Happy quilting! A friend of mine is expecting her first baby and she was not exactly thrilled when she found out that it was going to be a boy.  Since I find baby boy quilts a little difficult and this friend has a very strong personal style, I was a little worried about making her a quilt. I wanted to make something that would help her be a little more excited about having a boy since baby boys are just the sweetest. Her style is very minimalist and involves a lot of white.  Originally I was planning on doing an entire quilt of half square triangles made with solid fabrics.  Once I started to cut fabrics I thought that I could probably make it a little more minimal, so I threw in a bunch of white and a few simple prints. I was trying for muted blues, grays, and blacks and I wanted to distribute them to look random. But it turns out that creating a "random" look ...

I am excited to welcome Shabby Fabric s  as my newest sponsor.  Let me tell you a few of the awesome things about this shop. Shipping is free over $75 and international shipping is 20% off the published shipping rates. They have some fun new collections in stock including Miss Kate and Oh Clementine . And they have great basics like Pure Elements and Pearl Bracele ts .   They just launched a birthday club.  You can sign up when you create an account and they will email you a 20% off coupon on your birthday! Earn 5% of your purchase back in loyalty points that can be used on your next order.   I was just browsing around and found a couple of Cotton and Steel prints on sale!  Shabby Fabrics is offering a 10% off coupon to all of my readers.  Just enter Kitchentable10 at checkout.  The coupon is good through 10/18/14.   And Shabby Fabrics is offering a very generous giveaway.  One lucky person will win this fat quarter bundle of Oh Cle...

When I was in high school I was on the literary magazine staff.  One exercise that we used to help get us to start writing was to pick a famous poem, write down the first few lines, and then use those lines to jump start our own poem.  You were never stuck trying to come up with the first line because your first few lines were already written. Most of the time the resulting poem bore no resemblance to the original and the first few lines were erased pretty early on, but it was an inspiring way to begin a project.  This is the same way I like to begin a quilt.  I like to take a print or a collection and add, subtract, and edit until I am happy. And with that long intro, welcome to my first Inspiration Mosaics post.  My plan is to make a monthly post where I choose one favorite fabric from each of my sponsor's shops, and then build on that to create a mosaic.  If I had infinite time and money I would love to make all of these into quilts, but since I don't ha...

Now that the kids are back in school I feel like I have a little more time to sew.  Except our air conditioner finally gave up on life last week and I have spent the last several days getting bids for a new AC and boy has that been depressing.  We also entertained 2 separate house guests last week and we will have my sister here for a few days coming up so maybe I haven't really had any more time to sew. In between those endlessly long, boring consultations with the AC people I got some work done on this baby quilt.  It is for a baby shower tomorrow night so I have until tomorrow night to finish the binding.  I will write a little more about this one when it is finished, but my friend is very minimalist and likes muted colors so I am hoping that this works with her style. And number two on my list is the stack that will be for my husband's coworker's new baby.  I have only met him once and I have never met his wife so I am not sure what their tastes are, but he ...

When I pulled out the fabrics for this quilt I was initially thinking how fun it would be to work with colors that are a little out of my comfort zone.  But then it occurred to me that you are much more likely to see me wearing these colors in real life than the bright ones that I normally sew with.  So this quilt is more "me" without being what I usually sew if that makes any sense at all. The colors for the quilt are based on Denyse Schmidt's newest collection Hadley .  These fabrics are just brilliant and working with the Hadley prints in this quilt makes me want the entire collection.  I love the versatility of Denyse's prints. The quilt is made up of two simple blocks: a shoo fly and a 9 patch.  They are set on point and I think that traditional blocks work really well with Denyse Schmidt's prints. The backing is from Chicopee and this is one my favorite prints of all time.  This is actually the FOURTH time I have backed a quilt with this print ( here ...

A couple weeks ago we took a tour of my kids' new school.  We live in Southern California and the schools here are very open air; all of the classrooms open to the outside and the cafeteria is outdoors. They spend a big chunk of their day in the sun and putting sunscreen on them before they leave for school is not enough. One of the first places that we visited was the preschool/kindergarten playground that my son will be using.  There was a large tree shading the play structure and the snack tables had a little roof over them to protect the kids.  This is exactly what my super pale child needs. Then we walked over to the 1st-3rd grade playground and just looking at it hurt my eyes.  So much sun and absolutely no shade.  My other super pale child was going to have a problem. Both of my kids have recently grown out of their bucket hats, so the Oliver + S Bucket Hat  (free!) pattern was just what we needed. I measured their heads and my daughter's was 20.5" w...