Ready for quilting

I finally sat down and pin basted Justin's king size quilt. I had been avoiding it because I don't have any floor space big enough to lay it all out.

I have a twin size kitchen so I could only lay out 2/3 of the quilt at first. That's my fridge over on the left. I just rolled and smushed the last 2 rows over there. It took me a half hour just to get it all smoothed out and ready to pin. I'm sure it's not perfectly smoothed and pinned but it will work out OK when I get to the quilting part.

I thought I would show you my little pin holder. My son Robbie made this for me at one of those Home Depot workshops. It has hearts around the outside and the lid has a wooden heart on the top. It was a Valentine's Day project. WOrks great for holding my pins plus it reminds me of Robbie each time I use it :)

Holly Jolly Christmas Block Swap

I joined Aunt Pitty Pat's Holly Jolly Christmas Block Swap a couple months ago. I made my 9 patches on Christmas Day since I was looking for something easy to sew.

I'm in the non-traditional color group. When I went shopping for fabric I found these fun fabrics. The pink is nice and bright but not shocking bright. I thought the circles looked a bit like ornaments. Then I saw the black with the same circles and it was a done deal.

For my theme I chose Snowmen. I knew I wanted to do melting Snowmen. I'm doing some hand embroidered buttonhole stitches to outline the pieces. I thought these guys would be appropriate since I live in Florida and most of the ladies in my group are from Australia. I found the pattern over at FatCat. There's lots of fun applique patterns over there. These blocks will be squared up to 12.5" once I finish the embroidery. I like to cut my squares larger in case they shrink a bit when I do the embroidery.

How time flies

This morning I showed you my December Schnibbles top. Now I am showing you the completed quilt. Time sure does fly doesn't it? lol I actually made that post a couple days ago and set it up to post today. Since I finished hand sewing  the binding this morning, I thought I would go ahead and get the quilt posted.

Just in case you just popped in and missed the story behind the quilt...I decided that since I do not use pincushions, I would go ahead and use the blocks to make a quilt. I just super sized it a bit. The quilt measures 36" square. I made the blocks 18.5" unfinished.

How did you Schnibblers do this month? Did you get your tuffets done in time? Looking forward to next months pattern :)

December Schnibble top

I finished my December Schnibble top on Christmas Day. While the kids where playing with there new gadgets, I played with my old sewing machine. A perfect way to spend the afternoon. Instead of making the pin cushion tuffets, I decided to just go ahead and make a baby quilt with the squares that were used in the tuffet pattern. After I had half of them done I realized I could have made potholders! These squares would have made nice holiday potholders.

It's been a bit windy here and it took two kids to hold this top so I could get a picture. Robbie is standing on the bench holding the top and you can just see Mandy in the bottom right corner holding it steady.