Wednesday, January 06, 2010

Another Finished Project


Patrick's niece, Katy, and her husband Quinton had an adorably cute baby just before Christmas. When I found out she was pregnant, I want right to work thinking about the great baby blankets I could make. I bought the fabric and fell in love with what I had found.

When I went to Boise for Thanksgiving, I used my mom's big cutting table and fantastic sewing machine to do part of the work. I even got a little help from Annzy on the star blocks for the rag quilt. Then I brought everything home where it sat until after Christmas.

Once Christmas was done, I finally hunkered down and finished everything.

It took me about 2.5 hours of TV watching to crochet around the monkey receiving blanket. I watch way too much TV, so you would have thought I could have finished this by the end of November, but I procrastinated. Bad, me. I love the red and yellow together and it's double flannel, so it should be nice and warm for the winter baby in the foothills of the Sierras.

The rag quilt was fun to sew. I only had to rip out one seam along one square. For me, that's an AMAZING sewing experience. Only one seam to rip! WOOHOO! Mom, aren't you proud? The funny part is that I set all of the squares out in a way that would make it easy for me to pick the right block at the right time to keep the pattern going the way I wanted it to. For some reason, I just picked up a random square and sewed it to the row. Then I looked at it and realized it was all wrong. I'm still not sure what gap in my thought process allowed that to happen, but I got it taken care of before sewing another square to that one.

After sewing everything together, I had to snip the exposed seams at quarter-inch intervals. The seams have four layers of fabric at this point and it seems like an easy task for about the first row. Then the scissors start jabbing into your hand and by about half-way through, you think this was a really bad idea. I thought I had it beat. The DH was going to do the snipping. However, once he realized how careful you have to be, so as not to snip the actual seam, he declined. The blanket is still a small receiving size, I hunkered down with an episode of CSI and powered through the pain.

It was great to finish these two items up and the DH sent them off to the cute new baby, so they should have them this week.

3 comments:

annzy said...

They are so cute ~you did a fabulous job ~you are currently ahead of me on projects this year ~i need to get crackin.

boisegrammy said...

So glad to see some finished projects. Wish I had some around here. Wait - THE QUILT only needs washing.

Orange said...

Very cute- love how they turned out! And I hear you on the snipping- I have been sore for up to a week after clipping quilts before.