Finished Quilts!

So, I haven't really been posting all of the sewing and crafting I've been doing lately. And that's pretty much all I've been doing at home lately, plus a little reading. Such that it is good that I'm not wearing my contacts when I shower so I can't see how much I need to scrub the bathtub. I haven't cooked anything in forever - I've been eating a lot of "assembled" meals, or as mom would say, grazing.

A month or so ago I had created quite a pile of completed quilt tops, some even with the quilt back and binding ready to go. I wish I had a picture of that towering pile! They were all ready for basting, just waiting for me to go buy batting. Then once I bought batting there was the problem of how to spread them out for basting. I moved all my furniture to one side of the living room and was able to baste two baby quilts - Micah's bull's eye quilt and Gabe's houndstooth quilt.
Here they are hanging out on the couch. Bullseye is all done and Houndstooth is getting its binding sewn down. It was almost a week of evening sessions, me, a quilt, and the TV, just sewing the binding.

Here's the Bull's Eye quilt. I followed a tutorial I found on Cluck Cluck Sew here, and the fabric is Arcadia (a honey bun) and Kona Snow. I cut out the pieces last year, I think while Ami and Zeek were on a cruise and I had a sewing marathon. I've been trying to go back and finish some of these half-completed projects. As I put the blocks together, it occurred to me that they really reminded me of Marisa, and when I got a peek of Micah's nursery and realized the colors would coordinate, I knew this quilt was meant for Micah. The backing and binding is Kona cotton, I think leaf or spring green, a very bright lime/chartreuse sort of green, the sort of thing that only Marisa would appreciate. I realized as I was piecing the blocks that I had used Kona snow, which is a white, and the Arcadia used cream. It's not super-noticable, but if I had to do it again I would have used a cream rather than white for the solid. I was definitely not worried enough to go buy cream and re-cut all those pieces!

Kinda blurry picture.

Close up!
Gabe's quilt is the Houndstooth quilt by V & Co. It's all Bella solids, I think, black and bleached white, and the backing is country red, which was the closest I found to Alabama red. I actually emailed the store and had them compare reds for me. As soon as this quilt pattern was published I knew I had to make it for Gabe, since houndstooth is so emblematic of Alabama football, and Chris is a huge Alabama fan (and graduate).

This might be the most complicated quilt I've made (second to yours, which is still only partly finished). I had the quilt top finished by Gabe's first birthday on July 2, but I was worried about how to quilt it without disrupting the pattern. I would have liked to free motion quilt it, but I don't know how. In the end, once it was basted, I didn't think long before deciding to just do diagonal lines through the solid squares and it worked out fine. Maybe it would have been fun to quilt it in red, but I think the white is ok.

I finished them in time to present them to the boys on the day of our pool trip a few weeks ago. Two down and plenty more to go! I really need to find a spot where I can spread these things out. This past week I found myself eyeing the floor in our church hall. Plenty of room to spread out!

Next up: all the dress sewing I've been doing, plus Jane's quilt