Gifts for friends.

Posted on 29.Apr.13 by kait

My friends Austin and Erin, the people who graciously let me live with them last year after a break up, recently bought a house so I made them this mini quilt.

I pieced the tiny houses from scraps, raw edge appliqued a key in one block, quilted it in a boxy meander with their name in one corner, backed it in a vintage sheet with my label, and bound it in white with a couple scraps.

Congratulations on the new home, dear friends!

My long time friend Tara got married recently so I made her a little wall hanging.

Her bridesmaids dresses were yellow so I pulled a few yellows and greys, drew up the plan, and put this together in a day.

I have been inspired by Megan at Canoe Ridge Creations lately, her simple patchwork, her straight line quilting, her mini quilts. This is the first time I’ve quilted something this heavily and I love it. I can’t imagine quilting a large quilt like this but it was great for this little lady.

I backed it in a yellow floral I’ve had for a long time and bound it in more yellow with a tiny bit of heath in black. I’m really happy with it and hope they are too.

Congratulations Tara and Jeremy!

I made this pillow a while ago but never blogged about it. It is now my friend Lindsay‘s and I made it to thank her for her kindness and friendship.

I used Anna Maria Horner’s feather bed quilt block and her Field Study fabric scraps, surrounded them with FreeSpirit light jade, added an exposed zipper, bound it, and left it behind as a little surprise.

Thanks for being awesome, Lindsay!

AWOL

Posted on 02.Jul.12 by kait

I’m sorry I’ve been so absent recently.

Many things have contributed to it… I no longer have a nice camera and taking pictures with my phone just isn’t the same, my studio has no air conditioning so with the 100 degree weather lately it’s been pretty miserable to work in (especially on quilts!), I have no internet at my new house (a virtual tour will come soon, I just painted my bedroom today and I love it) so the time I have to post here is slim, and to top it off, my lack of deadlines has lead to a lack of motivation. Argh…

June’s Last Minute Patchwork and Quilted Gifts project was due two days ago and I still haven’t finished it. I have sewn most of it, just not the snap tape, so I have yet to photograph it. We have yet another quilt to do this month but it has minimal piecing so hopefully it won’t take too long.

My friend Dan and I are going to the seashore tomorrow and I can’t wait. We are going to Wilmington, NC to see a band play, swim (bought a new bathing suit today that I love!), go on a scouting mission, and maybe get tattooed? It’s going to be so fun.

So, when I get back, I’ll write a real post. For real.

xoxo

LMP+QG April challenge: Peanut the Elephant

Posted on 30.Apr.12 by kait

My friend Cait and I are making a project every month from Last Minute Patchwork and Quilted Gifts. You can see past projects here.

Originally Cait and I were going to make the Summer Breeze picnic quilt but as the days wore on and neither of us had chosen fabric for it, we decided to trade with May and made Peanut the Elephant.

These instructions were especially frustrating and while I felt like I as winging it a lot of the time, she came together in about 3 hours and I love her. As did my friend Rose. She is half of the band Vandaveer who played here on Saturday. She came into town earlier in the day and stopped by the studio while I was working on this little girl and fell in love. So, of course, I had to give it to her. After she left I embroidered Rose’s name on this girl’s haunches and gifted it later that night. I hope she is well loved!

I made her from fabric I’d had in my stash for a very long time and a Denyse Schmidt print. I really like that the trunk is gathered at the end. I don’t like that I used nearly a whole bag of stuffing and she still wasn’t stuffed enough. I only sewed on the dark part of the eyes and gave her some eyelashes. She is awfully cute!

Not only Rose but three other people fell in love and asked if I could make them one. Looks like a have more small stuffed elephants in my future! Be sure to check out Cait’s lovely wee one.

Next month’s project: Summer Breeze picnic quilt. I picked out the patterned fabrics, I just have to decide on the background.

For Silas.

Posted on 27.Apr.12 by kait

I am all about spreading the quilting love. When my friend Ashley mentioned that she had a quilt all cut out but that she didn’t really know what to do next, I really wanted to sew with her and see if I could give her some guidance. That, combined with a mutual friend from church that is having a baby in May, we decided to make a baby quilt together.I was inspired by Handmade by Alissa’s Queen Baby Quilt but we made ours with log cabin blocks. I grabbed my scrap bins of blue, green, brown, and grey/black and we went for it, making two each. We then surrounded it in Kona cotton in slate (love that color!) and I threw together a back and quilted it in straight lines that walk around the blocks.I thought that simple would be easy but as it turns out, all that negative space was hard to deal with! The basting had to be redone a couple of times and shhhh… there’s still a few puckers and shifts in it. But a good run through the washer and dryer does wonders!Erin and her husband Austin are excited to welcome their baby Silas in just a couple weeks. I met them through my friend and coworker Philip, and now we all go to church together (occasionally) and are in a small group. They are so very, very graciously letting me live with them right now in a time of transition.

I don’t always get very personal on my blog but things in my life have changed a lot in the last few months. I ended a long term relationship and am learning a lot about myself. I’ve been surrounded by wonderful friends and I am especially thankful for Austin and Erin’s support, their prayers, and all their encouragement.

So back to the quilt, Ashley and I finally gave it to them at a picnic this week and it was received with many squeals, hugs, and thanks. It was just the reaction we were hoping for.

The front, as I mentioned, is scraps set in Kona cotton in slate. It’s backed with more scraps and a geometric print I bought at JoAnns a couple years ago, which coincidentally, Erin made curtains out of at the house! I quilted each block with a square spiral in different color thread and echo quilted the blocks with walking lines in a pale blue/grey thread, it’s bound in Amy Butler’s oxford stripe from the Belle collection, and simply labeled.

I can’t wait to show off pictures of their little guy bundled up in this quilt!

Recent happenings.

Posted on 12.Apr.12 by kait

I had a really long post written up, catching you up on all the latest happenings.

And then it felt like a chore, getting it done and getting everything in there.

So I deleted everything I wrote and will just say this: Instagram is on Android and I couldn’t be happier (except that it doesn’t upload to Flickr quite yet). So, at least you can see what happened recently. It includes a music festival in town put on by my friend Philip, fabric, beautiful weather, beer, and friends. It was the best weekend ever.

I feel an amazing summer coming on.

Studio space.

Posted on 04.Mar.12 by kait

One of the changes around here is that I’ve moved into a studio space outside where I live. I didn’t think I wanted that for a long time because I figured it would hinder late night productivity sessions and such, but I now have a space in the building where I work and I’m super excited about it.

I work at a coffee shop called Krankies and the building they inhabit, which was originally a meat packing plant, is filled with many other things. There are apartments and a web design company upstairs, a guitar repair place, some practice/teaching studios, and Device, a screen printing business in the basement, the Electric Moustache gallery on the main floor and the studio with spaces for 8 artists (including Laura Lashley, Liz Simmons, and Ian Dennis). I moved in and set up pretty quickly, minus shelving to hold my fabric. I had built in shelves in my last space so now I have to figure something else out, something to put in a concrete wall, no less.

What's on my design wall: The Undertoad

Things show no signs of slowing down. I’m powering through to finish a commission this week, hopefully going up to Roanoke this weekend for some quilting action with Lindsay and to hang out with Catherine, finishing another quilt for a shower on St Patrick’s Day, having another sewing date with Cait for our next LMP+QG project, and then going to DC for a long weekend. Looking farther ahead, my dad is coming in April, I’m going to the beach for my birthday in May, I’m still trying to go to Toronto this spring, and I’m hoping to get four quilts that have been in the works for awhile off the WIP list, and sew a couple more dresses. Let the productivity commence!

Roanoke weekend in pictures.

Posted on 08.Feb.12 by kait

I went up to Roanoke this past weekend for my best friend’s birthday. Her apartment is one of my favorites. She and her boyfriend went out one night and I stayed in, lit some candles, and read “Wise Blood.” Something about the scene reminded me of Posie Gets Cozy‘s lovely shots so I took a few photos. (Please ignore the blurriness due to low lighting.) The ever lovely Sarah also took a few photos at the party.

Previously Unbloggable #3

Posted on 28.Dec.11 by kait

When Taylor’s dad asked me to make her a quilt and I had in fact just finished one for her, he asked me to make one for his younger son Casey, and of course I said yes! Casey was a good friend of my brother’s growing up but I haven’t known him for quite a few years so I had to ask Dan what might suit him. He said, “earthtone plaid mismatched” and this is what I came up with.

I found it hard to get plaid quilting fabrics so I decided to use thrifted plaid shirts. I bought 12 or so large shirts and cut them apart into the largest pieces I could and then cut out 6½ inch 45° triangles (using Simplicity Studio Simpli-EZ 45° triangle template), saving the shirt backs for the quilt backing. I used almost all of the Essex linen in putty I had left as the solid (I went through 10 yards of that much easier than I thought I would!) and put together the kaleidoscope blocks.The back is the aforementioned shirt backs, some homespun green plaid, and the Essex linen.It’s quilted on Ursula the long arm in a pattern called Calm Water in a tan thread, bound with more shirt scraps,and labeled.

I hope you love it, Casey! May it bring you much warmth on those cold, rainy Humbolt nights.

Previously unbloggable #1.

Posted on 21.Dec.11 by kait

I love making quilts as gifts for people. If only it wasn’t so hard to keep it a secret! (Warning, this is a picture heavy post. I’m in love with this quilt!)

This one was especially hard to not talk about. May I just say this is one of my most favorite quilts of all time. It’s for Taylor, my best childhood friend and I started it, ahem, two years ago. She began hinting pretty hard that she wanted a quilt from me so I asked her if, theoretically, I was to make her one, what her favorite colors were. She responded with “lavender and paisley.” Few things could better describe Amy Butler’s Love collection, which I’d already bought for her quilt!

I based the pattern off of Amy’s Sexy Hexy quilt pattern but I didn’t want the hexagons that big, nor did I want to applique the center hexies. I had the fat quarter stack above to make the quilt out of and some coordinating solids so I figured out how big the hexagons would have to be to make the best use of the fabric.

As you can sort of see from the above picture, I sewed two sets of three strips together

and using a Super 60 ruler, cut the sections out:

3 full and two halves from each set, resulting in the sections for two full hexagons, one with the purple on the outside, one with the light blue on the outside. I sewed three sections together and after laying them out on my design wall,

sewed the hexagon halves into strips and the strips together to make the quilt top.

The half sections were then sewn into full hexagons

and used on the back (that’s a lot of seams meeting in the middle!).The rest of the backing is a couple of the prints from Love in flannel, and small sections of the fat quarters I didn’t use on the quilt front.

Lindsay helped me quilt this beauty on her long arm machine Ursula in a lovely feather pattern with pale blue thread. It’s bound with one of my favorite prints, water bouquet in midnight and labeled.

The day after I finished the quilt, Taylor’s dad asked me to make her one for Christmas. What perfect timing! That left me more time to work on another quilt I will get to show you soon. Taylor received it from her dad the other night with exactly the reaction I could hope for,

I just wish I’d been able to see it first hand.

I hope you get many years of warm comfort from the quilt, Tay! I love you, friend. Hope you don’t mind I put this picture up here :)

Tattooed.

Posted on 24.Nov.11 by kait

I have a pretty good number of tattoos. I started when I was 18 and have gotten a new one every year or two since then, a trend that will probably continue for a long time.

Sunday night I got my most recent piece, a tattoo that will be part of an art project and show in January. I won’t give too many of the details yet but here’s my piece.

It’s on the inside of my right arm and I will say this was without a doubt the most painful tattoo I’ve ever gotten (though I’m working on a theory that the most recent one is always the most painful :). I squirmed so much and Matt, my friend that was doing the work, said he thought I was going to punch him. I would never have done that but my constant squirming did result in one little color outside the line accident. (The border lines don’t look straight but they are, they’re just in that weird dry, cracking, almost peeling phase and my arm isn’t flat, of course.) But no mind, I love it. I can’t wait for the whole piece to come together and be able to show it off!

Many thanks to Evan for putting this together and Liberty Tattoo for making it happen!

kaitcetera

quilting and other sundries.

Tag Archives: friends