Rainbow quilt

A very good friend of mine is having a baby on late July and I wanted to make something for the baby. I made a quilt for Likka before she was born and in use I noticed that a quilt (or any blanket) is very convenient to have for a baby. You can use it in between the baby and a hard floor at home, friends' places, at hobbies. And so I made a quilt for my friend's soon to come baby.

My friend is a railway engineer and so I was tempted to use pieces of the train sheet I still have left. Then I used various other fabrics I already had at home. I did not bother to make all the pieces the same width, it is much easier to sew them together if the pieces do not need to align. I was not going to place the pieces as I did, I actually cannot even remember how I was planning to arrange them at first but once I laid them on the floor this rainbow arrangement looked the best.

At first I was thinking of hand stitching the front to the back, because the last time I made a quilt I really disliked machine stitching it together. But it seems the hand stitching is even more annoying. I gave it a shot first but it was slow and boring and I soon lost my interest in it. In order to get the quilt done I went with the machine stitching, still I did not like that either but it was done faster.

On the backside of the quilt I draw washing instructions for the quilt with a fabric pen. Since the quilt is for a baby to lay on the quilt might need to be washed quite frequently. Hope my friend's soon to come baby enjoys the quilt.

Soft book from scraps

As an attempt to one day use up my scrap fabric supply I made a soft book for Likka. I must emphasize the word attempt, because soft book clearly isn't one of the most efficient or a fast way to use the scraps, especially if each of the pages on the soft book contains some hand embroidered details. But the idea is what matters, right?

I have still some of the train fabric left and decided to use the locomotive image of the fabric on one of the pages. I wanted the book to have somesort of theme and because of the locomotive I chose a motor vehicle theme. Between the cover pages is felt from a wool blanket, the middle pages have this thick and hard fabric, so the pages feel a bit different. Also one of the pages has some cellophane in between them so it crinkles.

 

On the corners I sewed triangles to avoid the filling getting off from its position. The spine has some car ribbon which you can see best on the last picture. I really like the book, although on some pages I did a bit of sloppy work and some of the machine embroidery looks a bit bad, but I kind of like those self made looking details here.

Personalizing a diaper bag

From the hospital where we gave birth we received a diaper bag with free goodies inside. It's a good bag. It's good size and from a material that can be wiped clean. The problem is that everyone has the same bag and so those can be easily mixed up. Also it has a logo of a disposable diaper manufacturer. There is nothing particularly bad about this manufacturer, it's as good as any, but I just do not want to advertise them.

That is why I embroidered an image on a fabric and attached that on the bag. The image I chose refers to Likka's real name. I used stain stitch on the edges of the image and loosely filled the areas with cross stitches in different shades. I attached the fabric to the bag with buttonhole stitch. And that's it, now it cannot be mixed up with all other diaper bags.

Bear skin quilt

Since forever I've had an idea of making a funky quilt shaped like a bear skin. I have no idea how long I've had this idea on the back of my head, but I have always thought that it is too childish thing to make just for me. But now since we are having a kid I finally had the perfect excuse to make the quilted bear skin. I'm sure this is not my original idea. I must have seen this somewhere, but because it was so long ago I do not know where I got the inspiration originally.

I searched an image of a real bear skin and decided on the size of the quilt. Then I just randomly chose to use squares of size 8 x 8 cm (3.1" x 3.1"). I have never made a quilt before so I chose to use a simple square shape, I did not want to stress myself with some elaborate pattern, and I'm really glad I did decide on a simple style. I estimated the amount of squares I needed and draw a bear skin shape on a big piece of paper. 

I cut the squares over some period of time. I just took random fabric left overs I happened to have and cut them up. Most likely I did against all rules of quilting and chose fabrics with varying materials, textures and thickness. First of all I did not have enough of similar fabrics and secondly I want the quilt to have different textures so that the kid is able to touch and get different feels from the quilt. 

For me the cutting of the squares was one of the most annoying things to do. I needed to be so precise and I don't do precise. Well finally I had enough of the squares and some extra ones and laid them on top of my paper pattern. I tried to lay them so that dark square would be next to light one and no colour was too close to similar colour. I even took pictures of the unfinished layout, somehow I see better from a picture if there is something wrong with the layout. I think I did miss some but that is fine.

Once I had the layout done I sewed the squares together. I was surprised how easy that was, I just had to be very consistent so I did not mess up the layout. Then when I had all the squares combined together I laid them on top of a white sheet and an old blanket. The white sheet is the backing of the quilt and the old blanket is the batting. I attached all three layers with safety pins and then machine quilted them together. I'm glad I again chose a very simple quilting style because I hated that job. Really, it was horrible. Even though the quilt I made is quite small it was really difficult to roll it into the sewing machine and the back thread had to be spooled so many times. I think I would have been happier choosing hand quilting although it would have taken longer. But really the machine quilting was not for me.

Once the actual quilting was done I cut the excess material off according to my paper pattern. I made a bias tape from the carrot under sheet we had and attached that on the edge. Then I just had to attach the ears and embroider eyes of the bear. I'm not too sure I'm that happy about the eyes, but I don't know how I should have done them to make the bear look more bear like. Or maybe it should have a nose embroidered. Hmm... any ideas?

But besides the eyes I think the bear skin quilt is really cool. And I think the size is just perfect. It's not too large so that it's easy to take along if needed but large enough for the kid to lie on it and turn once s/he is able to do that.

Decorating the cubicle

It is not completely rare for people to decorate their work place, even if they work outside of home. I work as  a mechanical designer and most of my colleques are men and even they decorate their work places to please their eye. I know many who have taken souvenirs to work or have posters and funny quotes on the walls.

I know that making a cross stitch to decorate the cubicle is maybe a bit more than the standard. But that is what I did. I read a craft blog Hupsistarallaa over the weekend, like I already told in the previous post, and since she had done a funny cross stitch I got the urge of making one myself too. I thought of those traditional cross stitch pictures with pretty quotes like for example "home sweet home". Then it hit me that I want a "cubicle sweet cubicle" cross stitch. I thought my idea was some what genuine but according to google there are plenty of cross stitches with that quote. Well anyway it does not matter if it's old or new thing, at least it's new to me.

I made a pattern using some old cross stitch alphabets I've copied from some book long ago. I tried to find the middle of both words and started to stitch. If you look closely you'll notice that I made a mistake with the word sweet and it actually did not end up in the middle, but it does not matter.

Cross stitching is so simple that I'm not going to write it out here, plenty of informatition has been written to other web sites all ready, like to this. I used Aida fabric (fabric weaved so it has distinctive squares and holes) and some embroidery yarn I had at home.I was first planning to use blue and green, but ended up using only blue.

When I was done I cut the fabric to the size of the frame I found from home and placed the cross stitch inside the frame.

I like it a lot, it's so much fun and I liked making it, it was fairly quick, it took me to make only two nights in front of the television.

Here is the cross stitch in it's proper environment. You can also see here a glimpse of my work space also known as the cubicle. I did clean most of the folders and books away for taking this picture. I keep my table quite neat most of the time, but not this neat.