Spring Top, more animals, more roses

I whipped this sucker out in 2 hours tonight. LOVE IT. I used the pattern from the new issue of STITCH magazine (though I tweaked it a bit)... the turquoise is a rayon/spandex tissue jersey remnant from Joanns, and the eyelet is an AMAZING silk cotton from Mood. (I treated myself to a stop there today, since I drove past it TWICE to have lunch with the kiddos and C's dad)...

I have a whole day left to photograph it for real and enter it in the contest!

of course, it needed a rose to really make it awesome... luckily for me, I have plenty of fabric roses!

fabric and felt! (and a kitty, hiding in there, see him?)

now do you see him? this is the felt version of Kieran, the darkest kitty ever. I'd photograph him more, but he's very very dark, and always very sleepy, so all you'd see is a dark blob... (the brown bits lower left are going to be Guinness (our dog, not the beer), hopefully tomorrow night...)

and here's Babe, the Gallant Pig. We just finished reading it (D and I both LOVED it, he wants to start it again RIGHT NOW), so he needed his own Babe...

I've been doing 1 toy per night, and then having me time for the rest of the night... tonight was the pig and top, last night was the roses and kieran... and tomorrow afternoon, my husbie comes home!

he's been gone for most of the month, so we're pretty excited to see him... i just have to figure out how to keep sane in the am... we can't leave for the airport till at least 1:45, and D is DYING to see his papa....

a good night's work...

I'm soooo excited about getting to use fancy fabrics... I usually just buy remnants for myself, or regular old quilting cotton, but for this wedding quilt, I bought some Folksy Flannel, and some Little Folks Voile, and some Far Far Away double gauze... and then, because I liked the corderoy I used on my quilt, I got some for this one... the center of each block is a dark blue (not quite navy) thin waled corderoy... (Yale colors, since it's going to fellow Eli's for their wedding (thank goodness they don't read this!)). I'm also using various scraps that coordinate, just because.

The groom informed me that he likes green best, and she likes blue best, so I'm doing MOSTLY those colors, with pops of other colors...

I really really like it so far... I'm trying to find a balance between wonky and not wonky, so a few wonky scraps are in the mix, but the new ones are cut stright... I think the occasional wonky piece makes it more interesting...

just playing with the layout... I've never seen a string quilt with this sort of layout.....
maybe I should just make a big "Y" (KIDDING).
I think I might need a string quilt of my own...
(oh, I'm following the tute from here, and I'm using phone book pages cut to 8" square)

I also decided that for mother's day, I want roses... so I started making them tonight... I'm making a mixed baker's dozen for myself, 7 crimson, 7 butter yellow... we'll see if I go back for more lining fabric after I finish this... (I self-limited my color choices to the cheapest of the lining fabrics, but there are some really pretty pinks that I might go back for!). I used this tute, and I LOVE the result! I haven't actually sewn this one together yet, just gathered and wrapped, but so far I'm really happy with the result. This is totally next on my list!

links...

I saw 2 really awesome tutorials in my google reader today, and while I don't usually link to other people's stuff here, I am going to today. Purely selfishly, since I want to be able to find these again!

first, I saw these awesome flowers:

tutorial here

then I saw this awesome tute on how to do Flying Geese blocks quickly and easily. LOVE.

P.S., if anyone out there feels like making something for D, he really wants one of these, and I don't have any socks like that...(nor do I want to go out and buy socks just to cut up)