My boys' quilts, and moving forward...

Alright, so I'm feeling a tad bogged down with the thought of "back-blogging" all of my little projects, so I think what I'll do is show my two major finished projects from the past months, and then move forward with fresh stuff - what I'm currently working on, and what's in the works.

I have completed twin sized bed quilts for each of my two boys in the last half year or so. For my oldest son Levi, I made Denyse Schmidt's Drunk Love 2-Tone Quilt (maybe not an appropriate quilt name for a 9 year old, but hey, I just followed the pattern!).



He chose the colours, which oddly enough are pretty much the same as what's shown on her website, though I followed the pattern in her Quilt's book where the quilt is shown in orange. My blocks for this quilt came out slightly small (still working on that 1/4" seam....) so I added a border at the top, which I was frustrated about at the time (it wasn't in the PLAN!), but actually ended up really liking. He chose yellow for the backing, which surprised me but it "goes" and I love it! This was my first time machine quilting a bed sized quilt, and that part proved to be super challenging, especially since I chose sharply contrasting colours in my bobbin and top threads and was having a fair amount of the wrong colours showing on top or bottom, but I like the plain straight line stitching and really, who besides me looks at it that closely?! :) Levi loves it, and that's all that counts, right?

For my son Owen, it was tougher to choose! I was looking at so many patterns, ones that I thought he would like, and none of them suited his taste! Well then I found Malka Dubrawsky's Shoo Fly Quilt, and that was the one! The "O" quilt, for Owen. He was pretty pleased with that whole idea. :)



He told me the colours he wanted, I chose the fabric, and went to work. I made all of the blocks pretty quick, but then I stalled out when it came time to put them into rows. I was struggling with having my points match up precisely (I'm a bit of a perfectionist that way!) and it was making me not want to work on it at all. I honestly left it for a couple of months before coming back to it and realizing that if I waited for it to be perfect, a) I'd never feel like working on it, and b) it would never end up finished, I just pieced them together as carefully as I could, and now that the quilting is done and it's on his bed, I wonder why I ever worried so much about it. It turned out great.



I used a double size bed sheet for the backing, which ended up not quite big enough so I pieced a strip of the left over fabrics to add to the backing and I'm glad that I did, it adds something fun to the back of the quilt as well!