Ember Costumes and Crafts

Full disclosure, I learned to do this from Youtube:   Learn to make fast and easy pinwheels - Missouri Star Quilt Company Check them out! Or if you just want a quick step by step, keep reading!  Pinwheel Quilt Block Tutorial  Start with 2 squares the same size. Mine are 9.5" x 9.5" Pin them right sides together Sew 1/4" around all four sides Sewn around all four sides! Cut corner to corner across the diagonal Cut corner to corner across the OTHER diagonal You should have 4 little pieces that look like this.  These are called "half square triangles." Iron them open. "Square them up" aka cut them all so that they are exactly the same size. Mine are 6'' x 6'' It can help to line up the diagonal with diagonal line on a big square ruler like this.  Turn them the other way and square up that side.  Arrange all 4 half square triangle into a pinwheel--or whatever shape you w...

Here is what 415 basted English paper pieced hexagons look like! The stack of cut fabric in the back right is what I have left to baste. I hope to have around 1300 hexes when they are all basted! I started this project back in July and haven't made as much progress on it as I had hoped with the pregnancy and the holidays slowing me down quite a bit, but it is a sizeable stack of hexes nonetheless. I've gotten much faster at making them and can pretty easily baste 12 hexes during a 1 hour t.v. episode. I have also started sewing them together into bigger groups. I hate how uneven the flowers are to arrange, so I've decided to sew them into blocks of 48 in a rectangularish shape. I really need to do more planning, since I still haven't decided how I want to place the land/oceans and how if I want a border and how big exactly is this going to be??? According to CD Designs Website's Hexagon Quilt Calculator, I'll need 1077 hexagons for a queen sized quilt,...

 Another baby quilt under my belt, this time for a friend of my mom's who just had a baby girl! Her nursery was "coral" color themed, so I ordered two jolly bars that were on sale from Fat Quarter Shop called "Sweet Marion" from Moda Fabrics by April Rosenthal. I didn't use all of the patterns in the pack, opting to leave out most of the really dark blue and really light pink ones, and I still had plenty for the quilt. The pattern is a familiar one, I again used Lori Holt's Half-Hexie large template. I was sorta crunched for time so I did a pattern I knew I could handle and do well quickly. I added a white border, backed it in teal minky, and bound it with satin blanket binding.  The quilting is simple--I stitched in the ditch around each hexagon and then measured an inch in from each line, marked them with a water soluble marker, and then quilted the smaller hexagons inside the big ones. Very geometric, but I like how it turned out!  ...

This was a really fun one. I got this  beautiful layer cake from fatquartershop.com called "Grendale." These 10x10 precuts were perfect for the large half-hex templates from Lori Holt, but instead of using them as hexagons, I turned them outwards to make what I thought looked like butterflies!  First I stitched in the ditch around all the trapezoids, then I got really ambitious and cut out a "wings" template, traced it onto my quilt sandwich, and used my walking foot on my home sewing machine to quilt 27 beautiful butterflies! It was actually pretty quick and fun, even though it looks crazy complicated!  The back is teal minky fabric, and I bound it with pink satin blanket binding.  I was excited and happy to gift this to my dear friend for her baby Charlotte who was born just a week before Christmas! 

I've been doing some major scrap busting to clear out space in my closet between bigger costume projects, and this past week I finished up two doll quilts using scraps leftover from Rosemary's Make a Wish baby quilt. I was originally going to make a scrappy binding for the baby quilt, but decided against it, so I ended up with a bunch of small strips. The backing for each doll quilt is a fat quarter that came in the pack that I decided not to use in the quilt top, ditto the binding on the strips quilt. This one was bound in plain white, and is made up of leftover quarter-square triangle pieces. I bound it in white quilter's cotton and quilted it in diamonds. No way was I going to stitch in the ditch again, after breaking 5 needles on that previous quilt!  I gave this one away as a birthday gift for my friend's little girl Marigold. I'll definitely be making a ton more of these to give away! The strips one I am keeping for Rosemary, so when ...

A few weeks ago a friend of mine showed me a project she was working on--a hexagon quilt made from a bunch (thousands) of quarter-sized hexagons. She had a little plastic craft box that she kept in her purse for when she had some down-time she would work on English paper piecing hexagons and stitching them into little seven-hex flowers. She made three or so flowers a month and planned to just collect them for years until she had enough to make a king-sized quilt. It was super cool-and she agreed to teach me English paper piecing so that I could make my own hexagon quilt:  The Catan Quilt!  I've wanted to make a Catan-themed quilt for a very long time. The game Settlers of Catan holds a very special place in my heart and means a lot to my family and my group of friends. It was one of the first "euro" board games that we got into, so much so that my best friends Tiffany and Tom have matching Settlers of Catan tattoos and a collection of over 200 board games...

I know, I know, I've been posting a ton of baby quilts lately, but they are so fun! This one is for my cousin's new baby due in May. I've gotten pretty good at quilting, and these only take me a few weeks now. (It would only take me a few days if I wasn't full time momming!). The fabric is a fat quarter bundle of  Evening Stroll Hello Jane from the Fat Quarter Shop online. Teal and purple is my absolute favorite color combination and I've been dying to make a quilt out of it. Honestly it was really hard to give this one away. I hope my cousin loves it as much as I do! I made the chevron blocks by following this tutorial  from Missouri Star Quilt Company's youtube channel and arranged them in pairs of chevrons. I tried out a few different combinations of chevrons, but this one worked out the best. I used a light greenish teal minky for the backing, which I quilted into a sort of plaid square pattern by sewing 1/4 in from all of vertical and horizontal se...

I bought too many jelly rolls from The Fat Quarter Shop on black Friday one year so when my sister-in-law was pregnant, I presented them to her and let her pick which one she wanted for my niece's baby quilt. She chose a beautiful Downton Abbey roll (I think this one is Lady Rose?) so I set to work! I'd saved this tutorial from Sew Very Easy a long time ago with the hopes of using it for a baby quilt, and the fabric Diana picked went perfect with it! It was difficult, I'm not going to lie. And the quilting I chose to do, zig-zagging along each row, was also time consuming and difficult. I did a border of white and a border of scraps from the jelly roll, then backed it in purple minky and added a coral satin blanky binding.