Posts Tagged ‘applique’

Activity Blanket

Thursday, July 16th, 2009

quilt

I have such a hard time taking pictures of quilts around here. It would be nice if I had a lovely blank wall to tack them up against, but usually the best I can do is spreading it on the floor, and climbing up on something precarious to shoot a picture straight down. But I’m not really up for that right now! Not that this is even very recent, I made it, oh heavens, two months ago now! It’s been sitting in my to-blog-about pile for quite a while I guess! Must have been a lazy day. Really, looking at the colors on this now makes me a bit cross-eyed, hopefully the baby likes it.

This was a pretty quick project, I made it in a couple of days I think. The robot has stretchy arms, and felt buttons and a needle felted head. I was going to leave the head as something floppy to play with, but the felt was too heavy, and was always looking at the ground. The felt was great for fast applique because I didn’t need to worry about ironing it, or edging it, and it won’t fray. The arms have elastic in them, they are tubes with the elastic atatched at each end. I think I should have sewn down them too, because the fabric wants to slip down over the hands. Hrm.

DSC_4138

When I first decided I was done with this there was nothing behind the door/windows on the house, they were just floppy shapes to play with. But Rebecca informed me that that was NOT acceptable, and there needed to be something behind the doors. Duh mom. And she’s obviously right, I was just in lazy denial. So I needlefelted some felt shapes into faces with the eye shape mirroring the head shape. And that was much better.

For the third lazy of the day, for the first time I bought quilt binding. I don’t think I’ll do that again, because I didn’t realize it wasn’t cotton. So that’s a bit icky if you ask me. I did add a loop at the ‘top’ so it can be easily hung up or dragged around.

There are probably lots of busy-book sorts of activities that you could turn into a blanket, that would be pretty fun. I think blankets with activities built in would be good for stroller blankets. And park blankets. Quiet time blankets, but not naptime blankets. Which is okay, because they are kind of lumpy anyway.

Appliqued Onesies

Thursday, May 7th, 2009

onesies

I made these a couple weeks ago, for the brand new tiny tiny baby in our house. (Not mine, two families, one happening house.) The onesies are old, but I felt like prettying them up for her when I saw this Quick Gifts for the Small post by Angry Chicken. And the whole messy applique kick. Love those fast pretty projects.

Messy Applique Skirt

Wednesday, April 22nd, 2009

Flat Skirt

I saw some beautiful work on an appliqued table runner by Calamity Kim and while I couldn’t hope to match it without devoting a year of my life to it, I was inspired to make something mushroomy and house-y with raw edged applique and freehand machine embroidery.

Bird & House

This bird is my favorite part of the machine embroidery I think, some of it is really awful. But that’s what I get when I don’t do any planning or sketching, and just stitch – really wonky stitch tension, and a broad spread of accidental awesome to ick.

Dance

When I started out, my goal was a skirt. By the time I was done with the applique, I didn’t think it really looked like a skirt anymore. But I forged ahead anyway, even though I’d put mushroom roots down past the hem line and birds up past the elastic casing fold line. Obviously I should have done a little more planning than “don’t get too close to the edges.” Because that didn’t work so well. But whatever. I used the ribbon hem binding from the oliver+s lazy days skirt pattern. That may have been why I secretly wanted to make a skirt, just so I could try out that ribbon binding, it’s so cool.