Bee Blocks

Hi again! Just stopping in quickly ... taking a break from letter shirts ... to share my blocks for a virtual quilting bee I am in. These were for Liz, who hosted in October. She sent some fun Christmas-themed fabrics and asked for a wonky log cabin or square-in-a-square. Here are my blocks ...For this bee, we are also sending signature blocks. Never made one of these, so I hope mine will work out ok. I took some leftovers and appliqued a tree on it and then added some wonky-ish borders. Here it is stacked on top of the folded blocks ready to be shipped off.
I have several more bee blocks to share, but will wait until a later post ... back to work! :-)

Thanks for stopping by!

Happy Friday & Another Quilt

Happy Friday, friends! :-) I am so glad its Friday ... been a long week. It is homecoming this week, so all the kids have been dressing crazy for spirit week and we had a pep rally at the end of the day today. All fun, but it made for an extra exhausting week. :-) I plan to stay holed up in my craft room for most of the weekend with some college football in the background. :-)

The quilt I shared yesterday sold today! Woo hoo! So, I thought I'd share another one that I made and we have listed in the shop. This one has got some lovely red, pink, brown and a little yellow in some girly prints - including some lady bugs and butterflies from the Flutterby collection by Tula Pink. A little bit of a modern twist on the pattern I used for this one.

I hope you are all having a great end of the week / start to the weekend! :-) I will share some baby shower decorating and projects for you this weekend. See ya soon!

Thanks for stopping by!

Been awhile ...

Hiya! Been a little bit since my last post ... hosted a baby shower, graded a bagillion papers, been working on the last of the tshirts and finished a few quilts for the shop. Here's one of them ...
Those of you that love paper will recognize the fabric - its from Basic Grey's Sultry line. Love that BG and Moda have teamed up! :-) This quilt is for sale in the Sew Lux Etsy shop along with a few others that I got posted tonight! :-)

Back soon with more of all the projects I've been messing with! Thanks for stopping by!

Lemonade ...

Hey y'all! Hope you've enjoyed the holiday weekend! We've had great weather here and I am going to enjoy the shortened work week! :-)

Not too long ago, I mentioned that there was a new business in my future. About a month ago, my mom was forced to say goodbye to her job of 32 years. We've since decided to try and take those lemons and turn them into lemonade! So, I introduce to you ... drum roll, please ...

Sew Lux Fabric & Gifts

My mom and I have been sewing and quilting folk for quite some time. We've often discussed the dream of having a quilt shop. So, we've been busy sewing and getting our ducks in a row to start one up on the World Wide Web. So far, we've got several quilts ready to go, several on the way, and many more products in the works. We also hope to start our fabric portion of the store sometime in October. For now, we've got some finished goods ready to go. Here's a few peeks at 'em ...

Birdy Baby Quilt

Elephant Baby Quilt

Check out our new Sew Lux Etsy store! :-) I hope you won't mind my sharing here when we have new things ready in the shop :-)

Have a great week, y'all! Thanks for stopping by!

Quilts

Hey there! Enjoyed a day in my craft room after I cleaned it up yesterday. Today, I made a baby quilt start to finish (minus the binding), quilted two other quilts and added some binding to another quilt. Here's the stack of quilts to be finished off with binding ....These will soon all be for sale ... more on my new business venture soon! :-)

Thanks for stopping by!

Winner and Quilt Update

Hey y'all! Random.org picked #4 and #6 ... so Hayden and Nadine please email me (see sidebar) and so I can get your info to send your prize! :-)

Didn't get to make anything new yet this week, but I will leave you with this photo of some of the virtual quilting bee blocks I have gotten back so far ...... I know I am going to LOVE this quilt for a long time once its finished! :-)

See ya later alligators! :-)

Dear Bernina

Hey y'all! Hope you had a lovely weekend! I have *one* day off before its back to work for me. Sad. I was just getting to some fun stuff! :-) I did finish my 70 t-shirts ... I am dragging the 31 pound box to the post office in the morning. Praise the Lord to be finished with those! :-) Which brings me to my letter to my Bernina (my sewing machine) ...

Dear Bernina,
You've been such a hard worker over the past couple of years. We spend most of our time together working on work and today we worked for fun. It was good. We should quilt and create for fun more often ... see you tomorrow! :-)
Chrissy

Ok ... so I think I just showed y'all my corny side. But I see the thing is, I recently decided to call it quits on my t-shirt business to make time for other (and more important) things. And while it was a really tough decision, I finally got over my anxiety about it and am excited. Excited to have time to sew and work on things for fun. For others. For the most important people to me. In all likelihood, I will be back in a slightly different business pretty soon - but this time with my mom. Unfortunately, she now has a lot more time on her hands, but hopefully this will be an opportunity instead of a negative thing. More on that new business later once I know more details and get some plans worked out. :-)

After putting in some long hours on those shirts, I made a couple of fun things today ... This is my first attempt at a tag quilt thing. Y'all mommas know what this is. :-) Sorry for the blurry photo. I will try to get a better one. I got this awesome panel the other day and thought it would be great for one of these. Of course, I have a serious amount of ribbon laying around so I picked some different grosgrains that went along with the color scheme. The back is a tone-on-tone lime green. I have 3 more panels ... thinking of making a few more to maybe throw up in the Etsy shop.

Next up is a peek at a quilt top I made today. I am *almost* finished with the top. I need about 30 more minutes with it. I am loving it so far. It's going to be a baby/kid quilt, but I am not sure if I will be ready to sell or give this one away (more likely sell since all my friends are having boys!) any time soon. May just want to look at it for awhile! I really need to stop hoarding my fabric! It's more fun to use it. :-) Glad that I will *hopefully* be sewing more for fun in the coming months!

Thanks for stopping by! Don't forget to comment for my blog candy (see previous post) ... ends tomorrow! :-)

Everything I love and something new ...

Hey y'all! I don't know about you, but this week has definitely gotten away from me. Geez. And only about 2-1/2 weeks left of freedom before its back to work. But, I am hoping to make some good use of that time ... and today I did something just for fun! (I should try that concept out more often! lol)

I joined a virtual quilting bee the other day and offered to host first - in August. This will be my first bee, but I am stoked. In thinking about what pattern to ask my fellow quilters to use, I wanted to do something I hadn't before ... enter the Spiderweb block. I love the look of these and decided it was just the thing ... but wanted to try a tutorial first before I went asking others to do it too! So, I tried out this awesome tutorial and here's the result ... my first spidey block!This block has a few small errors in that some seams didn't align quite right, but pretty darn good for my first attempt at a new block. And this block has everything I love ... black & whites, dots, more dots, pinks and greens, and a few snipets of some past quilt projects mixed in as well as a the last smidgens of some fabrics that I had shoved in my scrap basket. It was fun to think about the folks I have made quilts for as I put this together and remembered the projects I used the various fabrics for.

Here's a few in-progress shots for you ... the back of the block pieces prior to trimming them down. I was as stingy as I could be with my scrap strips without being too close to call.
Here's the front of them too ... see that little piece of black & white stripe and the Java Blue on those corners ... yeah, that's it for those fabrics! Gone with a capital G.
And ... drumroll please ... the fabric I plan to cut up and send to my bee buddies. Let me say, I know its going to turn out amazing. But I am sort of terrified ... I saw this fabric online before it was available and HAD to have it. And when it came out, I promptly got all these fat quarters ... in the summer of 2009. They've been staring at me from the shelf across from my machine ever since ....
I think its finally time to put them to good use! :-) Be gentle fellow quilters ... I {heart} these :-)

That's all I've got for now ... busy preparing for a bridal shower this weekend and some other projects. See y'all soon!

Thanks for stopping by!

Crazy for Hexagons

I must be crazy ...

The other night while going through some new entries in my Google Reader (which, by the way, if you read blogs and are not using Google Reader, you're probably driving yourself nuts checking them all ... go sign up!) ... I came upon a hexagon project. And that led me to here, to TexasFreckles.com and some great tutorials.

So, I got to cutting scraps and made a few ... we'll see if this hand piecing lasts longer than a few weeks! :-) But I do love how scrappy this might turn out.
Oh yeah ... this will be a little quilt ... not a "go big or go home" type of project. LOL I will keep you updated! :-)

Zoology Baby Quilt

Hello there and happy Friday! This time last week I was deciding to whip out a quilt before lunch with a friend (and new mom!) on Saturday. Anyone else out there procrastinate? I can procrastinate with the best of them. In fact, if I don't have a deadline its hard for me to get things done.

Anywho ... I hemmed and hawed and finally decided to go for it about 3:30 in the afternoon. I cut fabric for three of these and finished an entire one - handstitched binding and all - by about 10:00 PM. Here it is ...
I LOVE, LOVE, LOVE this fabric. Its stinkin' cute. And boy appropriate. Its about 32" x 34". The color is a little better in the photo below ...
I am SO glad I took a chance on that striped binding. I really love how it turned out and am so glad I can cut and press a fold straight or that would have been a BIG disaster. LOL

This photo shows the binding and backing. I used that same focal print on the back and did an all-over stippling to quilt it up. I don't pre-wash anything so when I wash it and everything shrinks a bit it has the best bubbly texture.
Finally, I also made a little burp cloth to match using some leftovers. Note: pre-wash the cloth diapers first next time. (They shrink ALOT more than the fabric.) Despite being a little imperfect in the end, I figured it was still cute enough to get spit up on.
Well there you have it! :-) Hope to make a few more of these to put up in my Etsy shop in the next couple of weeks! I will keep you posted on that!

Thanks for stopping by! :-)

Circus Circus!

Hey everyone! Hope your Saturday is going great. I have enjoyed a fun day with my mom and some sorority sisters and their moms. More about that in a later post. But the weather is gorgeous and I made a visit to Archivers today! :-)

I wanted to stop in and share the quilt I "whipped up" last weekend that I mentioned yesterday. Seeing as how I waited until the last minute ... 6:30 the night before the 1:30 pm shower ... I kept the pattern super simple and quick & easy to piece. Here's the finished quilt ...It's a 30 x 35" quilt ... a great size for a little one. I used some circus prints from Felicity Miller that I got from Fabritopia for an amazing deal last summer. I added some Michael Miller polka dots, which I wasn't sure about at first, but am so glad that I did. I had *just enough* for these strips and the binding. I think I had like 8" of binding to spare. A close call! Here's a closer view of the focus fabric. You can see below that I used the same blue circus fabric on the back. Super fun print. And this was one of my better binding jobs ... the corners turned out great. And fortunately the all-over-stippling was quick to do given my time crunch. :-)
And even though I was down to the wire, it was worth it since it was a hit and I hear the big brother is trying to claim it as his own! :-) I plan to make some more this summer in various fabrics and color schemes to use up some of my enormous inventory of fabrics and make a little money to buy more fabric! :-)

Thanks so much for stopping by! I will be back tomorrow with more of my latest creative adventures!

Cheery Cherries Sneak Peek!

TGIF everyone! I meant to post a card yesterday, but I got home and got to work on this little quilt below. And then I ran out for Bible study and got home too late to post anything.

I adore the Oh Cherry Oh fabric line and I got a couple of charm packs and made 2 baby/wallhanging sized quilt tops last weekend. I must say that I loved this little one before I quilted it and even more after I quilted it! I can't wait to attach the binding and wash it so that it gets all "crinkly" with that great, bubbly texture. (Insert squeal!) Once I get the binding on, I will post some pictures of the full quilt and direct you to my etsy shop if you know some cute little girl who can't live without it! Hope you are having a great Friday! We are off to dinner and a movie tonight! Thanks for stopping by ... :-)

Blooming for a Cure 2009

Hi everyone! Sorry for the lack of posts lately. Been pretty busy here closing out the school year. I only have ONE more day before summer is officially on! I am excited but a little sad to leave my current school for a new one next year. Not to mention moving all my crap is a lot of work! But I am hoping that my new position will be great.

Last weekend, I went to my sorority's national convention. Our philanthropy is the Ovarian Cancer National Alliance and for the second year in a row, my mom and I collaborated on a quilt to help raise money in our philanthropy raffle. The flowers on the quilt are made with the "omega holes" when I cut out the Omega to make t-shirts. This year, I have done a lot of letter shirts with black and white fabrics, so we decided to use those as the jumping off point. The close up shots have much better lighting - sorry about the full quilt photo's terribleness. I am excited to report that this year, we raised over $700 in our raffle - all to support ovarian cancer awareness. I promise to get back to some other fun projects and start posting again this week! Hope you are all enjoying the week!

Add it to the list ...

Hey there folks! I stumbled upon a Sew Along on the Old Red Barn Co blog. Crazy me, I pulled out some fabrics, sliced and diced and am ready to see what to do next in week 3. As if I didn't have anything else to do! :-)

Here's a picture of the fabrics I will be using. I still need to choose 3 more fabrics and chop them up - but I am having trouble deciding at the current moment. :-) Maybe I will have to venture to a local quilt shop ... oh darn! LOL
Anyway, I will post my progress as we go along. I think it's a 6 week program. Seems doable and there's prizes to be won.

Have a great day and happy almost TGIF!

A new creation

Here's a little nursery wall hanging that I made for my friend's nursery. I'll have to admit, that it took me way too long to get to actually finish it. But I finally did and here's how it turned out. This was a custom request - she specifically chose the scripture and color scheme and the insects. I used the pattern from one of the Quilts & More magazines for the actual insects and the rest is all my design and pattern (including the appliqued letters). Here's a close up shot of the butterfly.
Well, that's about it for today. :-) Hope your week is off to a great start!

Pink & Green & Flop Flops ... My Fav Things

It is summertime and I LOVE some flip flops. This is hilarious because (1) I used to NEVER wear flip flops after a really embarassing fall coming down the stairs at my college dorm in front of a bunch of guys playing volleyball and (2) my husband can't stand flip flops. If I could wear flip flops to any event at any time of year I probably would. In fact, I bought flip flops for my wedding reception - white wedges w/ rhinestones. :-) Anyway. My mom and I have these wallhanging "challenges" and we based this one off a flip flop quilt in a quilting magazine (Fons & Porter May/June 2008). This is so cute and so me that I didn't want to trade this time! :-) We'll see when she finishes her version, though. Here's another photo that shows the flops a bit closer.

Basically, I used the outside border fabric as inspiration for the color scheme and went to town! Of course, I had all these bright colors already in my "stash" so it was pretty easy. My husband has caught me staring a few times and he just laughs. What can I say ... I love it!

I have done a few stamping swaps lately on Splitcoasters. One was a Bella swap and the other was for owl images. Well, for the owls I went a little overboard on the pink & green. But these little ladies are so cute w/ their hats and everything. Its perfect for my mom and her two neighbors (whose names all start with an "L")- they meet every week to craft (or lately swim in the pool) or play a game of super scrabble. I may have to make them some cards ... the sentiment is just perfect.

Whitney's Garden

Here it is! The newest flower/omega hole quilt that I made. Some sorority sisters commissioned it for another one of our sisters who worked super hard at our national convention to make everything run smoothly. Whitney wanted the raffle quilt (previous flower quilt post) so badly, but she didn't win it. So, her friends hired me to make her one before she headed to her mission trip to Africa. From what I've heard, she loved it! (And so did I! I especially love the fabric for the sashing between the blocks, which is what all the colors were based on.) What do you think?
The second picture shows the fabric on the back and the label that I made using my mom's machine since it does all this fancy stuff. Now that I am done with this, its back to sewing letter shirts! :-)

I hope everyone had a great 4th yesterday! We enjoyed my folks' pool and had a cookout with some neighbors/family friends. We even busted out the Super Scrabble board for a little friendly competition. And for once, I actually won a game!

Have a great weekend!

Flowahbella & a Flower Quilt

Ahhhhhhhhhhh! These Bella stamps are too dern cute! OMG! I made this little thing for a Bella Swap on SCS. I wish I had more of that flower paper, but I can't remember where I got it from. Oh well. I had fun coloring her with my Copic markers. I also really enjoy reading about how great Copics are on the Copic blog.

Anyway ... I have been sewing up a storm today. I have 4 more orders ready to ship tomorrow and am in the middle of several more that I should be able to finish and ship tomorrow as well. I love moving my order forms from the "In Progress" to the "Completed" section of my notebook. I still have like 27 orders to go ... gasp! At least I am not "working" :-)

Several people have commissioned baby quilts, which I am really excited about. Although, one is for a little girl whose parents aren't into pinking her out! I am going to have to work hard to make a girl's quilt with no pink or purple! My fabric collection is like 50% pink! haha

Speaking of quilts, I don't think I have had the chance to post the Flower quilt that my mom and I made for the philantrophy raffle at convention. Well ... here it is!

It is pretty neat, because it is made of all the "omega holes" from the letter shirts I've made for people. My mom pieced the quilt and I did the free motion quilting and the binding. I know the winner was super excited - I think she put like 20 or 30 tickets in for that thing! :-)

Here's a closer look at the flowers. I think if you click on the pictures you can see the full size image and check them out in more detail. Unfortunately, these photos are a little dark, but you get the general idea!

The quilt's name is "Blooming for a Cure 2008" ... we plan to make another one for next year's convention. Lord knows I still have a million omega holes. I am thinking black & white prints and pink next time!

Happy Tuesday y'all!

Mass Producin' - Thanks & Bday

Hey again... its almost TGIF time! Whoo hooo! I made some really cute "thank you" and "happy birthday" cards tonight. I am really digging the paper that I used for this - its from SEI's Black Orchid 8x8" paper pad. I am going to use it all up in no time!

I used Mish's tips for mass producin' and so these cards came together pretty dern quick - thanks, Mish! :-)

Card Recipe:

Stamps: Stampendous Mini's

Paper: Black Orchid by SEI, GP white cardstock

Ribbon: Michaels

Ink: SU! Basic Black

Also - here's that wallhanging I made awhile back - I'll just call it Spring Fever, since I made it over Spring Break. I just gave it to my mom for her birthday on Tuesday. I will have to make another one for my "office"! (Speaking of offices - its the finale tonight - can't wait to watch The Office!)

Its a Jungle Out There!

I made this quilt a couple of months ago (and finally finished it last week!) for our friend's new baby, Camden. This was a fun little pattern that I saw in the Whistle Stop Quilt Shop in Selma that was pretty quick. It was a bit challenging to settle on a set of fabrics - I naturally gravitate to pink and green fabrics (not so boy quilt friendly). But I like the jungle prints.

If I could only finish my tshirt orders and get back to quilting ... the fun part of sewing! :-)

I hope to update this site w/ links etc. this week and a few more cards and wallhangings I have made recently. But it is a jungle out there sometimes so we'll see if I can sneak in some time to play around on the Internet.

Have a great week everyone!