Beautiful Girly Dresdens

Hey! How have you been? Things have been crazy around here. As it turns out, one night in the emergency room has the power to throw off your entire week. So I am a bit slower than usual right now and have less time/energy for sewing, not to mention blogging. I am on the mend though, so hopefully I will be able to get back to working on more things soon. In the mean time I am just trying to keep it low key and manageable.

I did have one great and necessary finish though! I finally finished up the toddler dresden quilt I have been working on and gave it to the birthday girl yesterday :) I think it was a hit and she just got her toddler bed for her birthday as well so she is all set for big girl world.

It is a fairly simple design. I just made dresden plates of different sizes and angles until I had a layout I was happy with. I think the biggest are about 17" across and the smallest are about 7" with a couple sizes in between. I started out with the template from the Fat Quarterly Shape Workshop For Quilters book which has 16 points. I made it with both the size in the book and enlarged to 200%. For the others I made a 30 degree angle template myself in different sizes. The fabric is a collection from Connecting Threads....Antoinette I believe, that I got last winter on clearance. I actually bought it with this particular little girl in mind and it took me this long to make a quilt out of it.

For the background I used a nice soft flat sheet from Target. I was excited I was actually able to buy just the flat sheet actually and it worked great. I appliqued the flowers on to the background first and then sandwiched it and quilted around each flower, then I put the centers on and quilted them on. To fill in the blank space I did a nice little loopy all around. It gave me a world of trouble, but it looks nice. Naturally I used pink thread :) The back is a pottery barn sheet I got a while back, leftover from making curtains. I just love the floral pattern. I forget what the binding is at the moment, but it is the perfect border.

It ended up a bit smaller than I intended at 41x59, but it should work on a crib mattress in a toddler bed. I really hope she likes it and it provides her many snuggley nights. My next quilting project will be to finish up the toddler swoon, hopefully sometime soon. But my little girl need a birthday dress first and I do owe my sister a few promised things...Also, I really must finish up my skill builder blocks. This list just keeps on going! Enjoy your holiday week!

Skill Builder Sampler: Month 7

Well, I thought about doing WIP Wednesday yesterday, but honestly I was so focused on getting my skill builder blocks done that I didn't even want to think about my list of other things to do until I did. So I did. And I am all caught up, just in time for the next block :) And next week I will get myself together and start keeping track of everything again.

This month was all about applique. I was pretty excited because it is something I was always too scared to try aside from some basic raw edge appliques. But as it turned out, more than learning how to applique, I learned that I pretty much hate it. The first block went off without a hitch, but then came the second. You know, the one where we actually learned to applique. And I did not enjoy it much. I am fairly happy with the end result, and I'm glad I tried all those different methods, but I have already taken the applique book off my wishlist haha. Consequently, the third block was whatever method you prefer so I did another raw edge applique block. Here they are!

Block #19 - Orange Windows
I kind of love this block. It's like cathedral windows without all the trouble. I chose to shift the pattern a bit because I liked it better that way since I see more circles than X's. I decided to mix up all the fabrics instead of grouping them by color and I'm glad, I love the way it looks. To place the pieces since I shifted it and couldn't use the diagonals, I used my cutting mat and folded to mark the center and then 3" on either side to make a grid to fit the pieces in. It seemed to work really well.

Block #20 - Circles
I was so excited about this one. I have been wanting to try circles for a long time. I wanted the block to be pretty filled, so I did 12 circles, one in each of my fabrics and did 3 of each of the methods. I started out trying to figure out circle sizes, but in the end I went into the kitchen and picked 6 circular things of varying sizes and started tracing. It made my life much easier. The circles that I used the cheater method for, I sewed down by machine so I could try out my blanket stitches and see which I liked; the rest were hand sewn. I guess needle turn was my favorite, but as I said, I really didn't like any of it much. I thought since I love to hand sew my binding, I would like this too, but apparently not. Ah well, I still like my finished block.

Block #21 - Applique pattern of choice
Sadly, I don't even remember where I saved the image for this from. But I cropped it into quarters and traced it....which didn't work great since the angles ended up all over the place and it didn't come together quite right, but I covered it up nicely and I think it looks pretty good in the end. The colors were chosen based on which fabrics I had big enough scraps from. I am really happy with how this turned out. Since my circle of diamonds didn't form correctly, I had to fuse them all down to make sure they would come together and then zig zag them like that, which I guess saved me time in the end instead of doing each individually.

And that's that. I am glad that I did it and I am also glad that it is done. And I can't wait to learn curves this month. There are a lot of curved blocks calling my name :) All in due time. For now, I have many other things to go work on. Now that I am not allowing myself to start another quilt until I have my list done, I am feeling pretty motivated. And of course all I can think about is quilts I want to make :) And by next week hopefully things will be feeling more back to normal around here as we settle into the new year.