Gabe's Log Cabins

Do you make quilts as baby gifts? I do! I seem to be making a whole lot more of them these days and anticipate making even more of them now that I have made friends with girls who have babies Daniel's age and who plan to have more babies in the next few years. 

This quilt you see here is for my littlest nephew, Gabe. Gabe was born in March 2012, just 3(ish) months after Daniel. Gabe has an older brother, Logan, who is now about 2 and a 1/2. I made a quilt for Logan that you can read about here if you like. 

I started this quilt for Gabe a long time ago. I had thought I would do a tutorial on it, but never finished it. I cut the strips the same size as what the original quilt was. When I started to sew this together though, I just put what I thought looked best next to each other. Some blocks are bigger than others because of this. I like the way the two quilts started out the same, but look so completely different in the end. Logan's quilt was a straight up, traditional log cabin with rigid sashing. It was fun and fresh because of the colors and fabrics I used, but it was really quite modern. Because I took a break on this one for Gabe, I reconsidered a lot of the things I had done the first time and really like the final product. 

I do get bored doing the same thing over and over, but this was a fun way to re-invent what I had already done.

Have I mentioned that I really like to quilt? I love super dense quilting on things.  I love the texture it provides. I decided when it came time to quilt this one that I was not going to rip out any of the quilting, but I was also going to try as many different patterns as I could. When I was ready to start the quilting on this, I went to my friend Angela's book "Free Motion Quilting with Angela Walters" to become inspired. If you don't already own Angela's book, you should. It's fantastic.

And in case you are curious, I quilt on my domestic machine. It's not huge and isn't anything super outrageously fancy, but it does the job. I do have a grace quilting frame in my basement waiting to be used, but all the machines I own are too small for it. I put my biggest throated machine on it and it still only gave me about 2" worth of quilting space to begin with and the presser foot bouncing up and down against the rolled quilt made a hole in my quilt top. So (at least for now) I happily quilt on a plain old domestic machine.

-Jessica

Tiger Stripes Quilts

Aren't twins fun? Some friends of ours have boy/girl twins that are 3 1/2 months younger than my little guy. Their parents are big Mizzou fans, so my husband and I decided that black and gold quilts were the way to go. 

I was inspired by this pin on pinterest. Chevrons are so popular right now, but I really liked the rhythm this had. It didn't hurt that I thought it looked a bit like tiger stripes! (Missouri's mascot is the Tigers).

When I had Daniel, we were given so many awesome quilts and blankets. I wanted to do something special for the twins that not everybody would think of. I came across this quilt on pinterest that is sized to fit on a car seat. It has little ties to attach it to the handle so baby stays cozy warm underneath. I liked the idea and thought it would be something not everyone would give and also something I would have used with my little guy. I followed the tutorial of that car seat quilt to make everything but the quilt top. 

The quilt above I made with Maggie in mind. It's has a lot of the gold fabric and is quilted with a gold thread. 

It looks good on the car seat, too, don't ya think? My little Daniel was such a trooper. It was a warm day and he let me take photographs of him and his giraffe, Sophie without much complaint.

A.J.'s quilt (shown above) has more black in it than Maggie's. It is quilted with black thread, too. 

I like the idea of labels on quilts, but I don't love the plain old "Made by Jessica Toye in Kansas City, MO on January 2013." That's so boring to me. If that's all I can come up with for a label, unfortunately I tend to leave them off the quilt all together. For this pair of quilts, I printed off the Mizzou Tiger head and used my light box to trace the image onto white fabric and wrote the babies a little message. I thought it was a fun little way to spice up the label and throw in just a tad more tiger pride for the Mizzou fans.

The quilting on these is just straight lines. I love the look of straight lines, but every time I do it, there seems to be at least one spot where I get off by a noticeable amount and end up wishing I had done another method. Oh well! Maybe someday I'll remember these things before I do the same thing over again.

I love the way these turned out. I showed my husband the inspiration pin I had in mind and just cut strips and whacked things to get them to the right size. It's a lot of fun to work without a super strict end goal in mind.

I mention pinterest a lot in this post. If you'd like to follow me, you can find me here. I tend to pin a lot of quilting, sewing, baby, and projects for around the house.

-Jessica 

Connections Quilt

I mentioned in our first post that I sometimes do design work for Fabri-Quilt. This quilt is one such example. They asked for a quilt that showed off some of their flannel line. This is what I came up with.

I often use EQ7 to design my patterns. Sometimes I will start with a sketch or an inspiration from somewhere else, but I use the quilt design program to test out my ideas and draft my designs. The image you see above is the image I sent to the people at Fabri-Quilt to show them my idea for the quilt. I use this sort of image to establish a design, determine fabric placement, create an arrangement of blocks, and figure yardage. 

I don't always design so precisely. If I'm doing a design as a commission, this is the easiest way I have found to give the person an idea of what I have in mind. They can visualize what I see in my head a whole lot better when I hand them an image than if I try to explain what I see in my mind. 

If I am designing something that doesn't need to conserve fabric and nobody is relying on me to do it right the first time, I do like to chop into fabric. I like to chop, sew, repeat quite a bit. I have a post in the works about a pair of quilts I made for friends of ours with twins that was a much more freestyle approach to quilting.  

This quilt went together pretty quickly. Basically, it's a simple log cabin quilt with one ring of pieced "logs". The quilting on this quilt was rather simple, too. You can see in the photo above I echo-quilted the red pieces 1/4" from the outside of them. The blue part is probably my favorite, though. I used my walking foot to create an "x" in each of the legs of the cross. I think it came out looking like a star. It is definitely a quilting method I will use again. 

And is my baby adorable or what? Quilts are cool and all, but they are 400 times better with a cute baby sitting on them.  

-Jessica