Sewing: Taggy Blanket

Babies love to find tags on blankets and toys to play with them.  Taggy blankets provide babies with an over abundance of tags to touch and explore.  I made my first taggy blanket for a friend from high school that just had a baby boy.

Again, this project reinforced from me that sewing in squares or rectangles is one of the easiest things to do.  Despite looking at this tutorial, I still almost sewed the tags inside the blanket instead of outside the blanket!  I'm so thankful that in sewing that we can redo mistakes and are not stuck with them!  One side of the blanket was minky material (the bumpy side), which was more difficult to work with than I expected, but it still came together.

Sewing: Duvet Cover

I started this duvet cover project last winter, and I am proud that 8 months later it is finally finished!  I used this tutorial - Design Sponge duvet tutorial,
but simplified it (no French seams for me, and I used 2 panels of fabric on each side instead of 3).  

Duvet covers can be expensive, and I really liked picking out my own material.  (I used Joel Dewberry herringbone "pond")

What held me up for all of those months?  I didn't have a zipper foot, and I was intimidated by installing the zipper.  That sounds like I needed...my mom. And she faithfully came to the rescue.  Especially when her pregnant daughter bemoaned, "I have to get this duvet cover done before the baby comes and it is winter again."  Thanks mom! 

Baby Quilts Part 1

A year after starting to sew I really wanted to make a quilt for each of my girls.  With the theme of keeping it simple, I have started to plunge into a genre of sewing that feels like a rite of passage for me.

Example of an I-Spy Quilt

The "I-Spy Quilt" concept initially inspired me.  The idea of having a quilt where a child finds different items sounds really fun for a toddler.  But I wanted to keep it as simple as possible, so I chose 8 different fabrics and stuck to an animal theme.  These two tutorials from Sew Mamma Sew gave me ideas of how to make a patchwork quilt Link 1 Link 2

5 1/2 inch squares

A rotary fabric cutter really helped to cut out the squares.

Not the final pattern.

I rearranged the squares on the floor to figure out a pattern,


and then sewed the sqaures into strips.

My helper!

 My 1 year old sat in my lap for short periods of time while I pinned the rows together.

Quilt top #1 sewed together. 

She's more interested in the mulch than her quilt progress!

Next up: learning how to attach the front and the back, quilting it all together, and binding it.  Then doing it all over again.

To be continued....