Galentine's Gifts

As fans of Parks and Rec, staunch feminists, supportive friends, and proponents of any excuse for merriment; my girlfriends and I celebrate "Galentine's Day" on a semi-regular basis. Apart from being a lovely occasion to spend time with some of my favourite people, it's also an excellent vaccination against imposter syndrome.

For the latest Galentine's Day I decided to channel my inner Leslie Knope by making some hand crafted gifts for my gals that suit their personal brand of awesomeness. I'll attempt to explain how each gift is customised to their recipient, but in the interest of my friends' privacy I'll refrain from gushing too much. ;)

The first gift I made was a purple quilted cushion featuring a pieced fox for my friend Jessie.

She is sweet, thoughtful, affectionate, and playful; the IRL incarnation of Deanna Troi. She has a plush fox that she loves to cuddle, and purple is one of her (many) favourite colours. I happen to know that this gift has also received many cuddles from it's new owner!

I put together the fox block based on Elizabeth Hartman's Fancy Fox Quilt, and I used some of my favourite Lizzy House fabrics from her 1001 Peeps collection (2011): Purple Pearl Bracelet on the border, Purple Scheherazade for the flap on the back, and Orange Scheherazade for that foxy little face.

The second gift was a rainbow Bloomin’ Quilt-As-You-Go cushion featuring a colourful sugar skull in the centre for my friend Julia.

Julia is smart, bold, fierce, loud, and caring; she has an affinity with Parks and Rec's wonderful Donna Meagle. Her house is full of rainbows (really!) so this one should be right at home.

It was my first time doing any sort of improv piecing; I normally have diagrams sketched on grid paper for each of my pieced projects. I really enjoyed creating from organised chaos!

I can't wait to make more "perfect gifts" for Galentine's Day! :D

++Quilt

The quilt pile increments with my latest finish; a crib sized blue and orange plus quilt! The quilt has been gifted to my friends Jane and Matt, who are expecting their first baby at the end of September.

To be truthful, I started this quilt long before Jane fell pregnant, around two and a half years ago with no specific recipient in mind. I guess I just trusted that the right parents/baby would present themselves in time.

After receiving a package of fabric I'd recently bought from the US, I couldn't wait to cut into this cute foxy fabric, and I'd been wanting to make a plus quilt for a while. I picked out some blues and oranges that matched nicely. The result was foxes and robots, which is conceptually incongruous but... still very cute!

I used some scraps to piece the back, folded my finished quilt top and back, and away they went into a drawer for two spins around the sun.

Earlier this year I found out Jane was pregnant and my immediate (and incredibly selfish) thought was, "Sweet! I get to make another baby quilt!" But when I remembered the foxes and robots waiting for an owner, I resumed the project and got quilting.

Jane studied pure maths at uni, and Matt is a software developer like me, so the pluses felt especially right. Incidentally they are also expecting a boy, although I thought the colours were right because Jane would like them, not because they are "boy" colours. Like me, they're not the kind of people who think colours are gendered.

Since I made the quilt a while ago, most of the fabrics I used are out of print. Nevertheless they are:

• Monaluna Anika by Jennifer Moore (Foxy, Polka)
• Robot Factory by Caleb Gray (Mini Robots Blue, Mini Robots Orange, Gears Earth, Circuits in Navy for the binding)
• 1001 Peeps by Lizzy House (Scheherazade in Orange, Jewels in Basra Blue, Jewels in Jinnee Orange)

Jago's Quilt

My friends James and Sarah, whose beautiful daughter Juliet was the recipient of the first quilt I ever made, had another baby earlier this year. Born back in May they named their little boy Jago (which is the Cornish version of James, and the 'J' is pronounced the same as with James), and it was an irresistible opportunity to make another baby quilt. Can't have siblings fighting over a blankie after all. :3

I really wanted to use my 1001 Peeps from designer Lizzy House in the purple colour-way. Mixed with black sashing I hoped the parents would dig both the palette and the cute little graphics.

I pieced the quilt back with a similar piano key layout used for Juliet's quilt, and made a label with Jago's name and birthday with a grosgrain ribbon. I think some of the black & white scraps from Juliet's quilt went into the pieced back, and if memory serves I even made an effort to have the finished size of both quilts the same (40" x 48"). So, same same but different. :)

Apologies for the worst photos in the world; black quilts are especially hard to photograph well, and I'm working with my phone camera and a desperate lack of skill...

Luckily I've got this great action shot of the gorgeous little guy on his new quilt to make up for it. He looks pretty chuffed about it!

Thanks for the photo, Sarah!

Layouts

This long weekend I'm making a cow-themed quilt for my cow-obsessed husband, after last winter he confessed to being jealous of my lap quilt. :3

So far I've finished the cutting and layout, which is inspired by this brick quilt from Tallgrass Prairie Studio. I spent ages umming and ahhing over the layout, making sure there was a good distribution of colour and pattern. I'm sure I'm not the only one who does this!

Joseph's Quilt

A few months ago we went to the first birthday/baptism for our friends Mark and Michele's little boy Joseph. I rashly decided with less than a week before the party that this would be a really great excuse to make another quilt. With the time restriction in mind, I decided to use some of my favourite large scale prints (Castle Peeps, by Lizzy House) and simply sashing some 8" squares together.

I had a go at diagonal grid quilting, using masking tape to mark my quilt lines as I went. (The other conventional technique is to use a fabric pen/marker with disappearing ink, but I haven't added one of those to my arsenal, yet.)

As usual (three out of three, hah!), I pieced the back as well. For some reason this gives me a 50s bowling shirt vibe, which was completely unintentional, but I dig it.

I've only met Joseph a couple of times, but he is a pretty laid back baby (the word "lazy" has been bandied about by his mum and dad, hehe), so I'm hoping the calm blue, black and white palette is going to be a good match to his personality. :)