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{Win a Paper Box Quilt Co. baby quilt at Lay Baby Lay!}

If you are following my Instagram stream, then you have probably seen this quilt.  Well, today is your lucky day, because Joni is GIVING IT AWAY on her blog LayBabyLay.  I have been a fan of her blog since she started it.  She always has such fabulous design boards for decorating your little ones rooms.  If you haven't been reading it, please do head over and check out her ideas.  Just beautiful.  She has taken this quilt and designed a whole inspiration board around it for you, and she has paired this quilt with such awesome stuff, that I want to win it!!  So go.  Hurry.  Tell her hi and enter for your chance to win a Paper Box Quilt Co. quilt for your home.

Thanks Joni!

{Sewing Summit, 2013}

Tickets went on sale this week!  Who's going?!?!  I sure am.  I MAY have been stalking the registration page on the Sewing Summit website all morning and my ticket MAY have been purchased at about 11:02am (they went on sale at 11am)  But I'm totally cool about it.  Not overly excited.  (Eeeeeeek!)   I can't wait to meet and sew with so many people in this online sewing community that I've never met in person.  Also, this will be my first time leaving my little boy overnight/for longer than just the day.  Right now, I'm good with it.  I might be a nervous wreck when it's time to leave.

Who else is going??

{I'm Back! And with a How-To}

Oh hi!  So, I may have forgotten how to blog and this post might have taken me about a week to write. No really.  (correction: original post took me a week, then it vanished into thin air so I'm on week 2, writing this post again.  See.  Forgot how to blog) ;)



Things are always busy.  That's just the way it is.  I let my blog get away from me, BUT the good news is that I've done a lot of cool stuff lately, so I'll have plenty to share soon.  First up is a little how-to for sewing together triangles.  I've seen some really cute triangle quilts lately so I decided I needed to make one myself.  I was so annoyed at how much trouble I was having sewing these together.  I mean, I was sewing triangles, not parallelograms or trapezoids.  Triangles.  So I asked my stitchy friends on Instagram for a little help and I'm going to share what I discovered worked best for me.  There's really no trick or shortcut to it, just patience.

First things, first, I used the ruler below to cut my triangles.  You get 4.5" equilateral triangles.  I tried using the 60 degree lines on my straight cutting ruler, but this worked better for me and I found it at my local quilt shop.  The directions say to cut 4.5" x WOF strips, then line up your fabric strips on the triangle portion of the ruler.  You can cut 5 triangles at a time, more if you layer your fabric.  If you're using this ruler, you'll get triangles with 2 sharp points and one flat point.  That will be important when you're matching up your pieces.  Once you have all of your triangles cut, lay them out just how you want to sew them together.  For mine, I just went with a random layout.

Stack up your first row IN ORDER that you will be sewing it.  I actually laid them out again right next to my machine just so there would be no placement issues while I was sewing.

Let's sew the first two triangles together.  Stack them right sides together making sure to match your sharp points and flat points like below and sew them together using a 1/4" seam.

"Tip" #1: Press your seams OPEN AS YOU GO trying not to stretch those bias edges.  You want to sew, press, sew, press, sew, press and so on.  I'm a big fan of chain piecing then pressing like a million pieces at once (or recruiting my mom to press a million pieces for me) ;)  "Tip" #2: Don't try to chain piece these.  I started off chain piecing and it just didn't work.  I also almost always press seams to the side, but for this, definitely press open!  If you're a strict to-the-side presser, try doing these open, you'll find that you will get much nicer points and your pieces will be easier to match up.  So, press seams open, don't chain piece.

Move on to your next triangle, sewing and pressing the same as the first set, making sure to line up your flat and sharp points and pressing your seams open again.  Continue sewing all your triangles into rows.

"Tip" #3: Trim your points.  Once I had all my rows sewn together, I went through and trimmed the little points off from the "intersections".  I thought it would help reduce bulk right where I wanted my fabric to lay flat and my points to be pointy.  You can see three little points in the seam below, just chop those off. (but be careful not to chop into the seams of course)

To sew your rows you just want to line up your seams/points really well.  Here's "tip" #4: pin. pin. pin. I am so guilty of never pinning.  Ever.  Don't skip it here!  These triangles really got me out of my comfort zone and had me pinning like crazy.  Line up each point and put a pin right in your seams.  For some of my points I was a bit OCD and spent a little extra time matching the points.  If you take your pin and stick it through the tip of the point on the top and bottom layers, wiggle it together a little then pin it flat you'll have those points matching even if you didn't get a perfect 1/4" seam allowance at every point.  (that's a lot of pinning points right?  Let me know if it doesn't make any sense).  Press seams open.

You can see above how sharp the points turned out and how nicely they matched up.  Like I said, there's really no trick to this (as I discovered the hard way).  You just have to be patient and don't try to find a shortcut.  I took a picture of my sewing area so you could see that I pushed my ironing board as close to my machine as I could get it since I had to press after every piece.   I'm so used to "batch" quilting that this was really strange.  Aaaaand I might be a little bit lazy.

So, if you ever wanted to try piecing triangles, go for it!  Be sure to post pictures or share them on Instagram and let me know how these tips worked for you!  See you soon. (hopefully)

XOXO

{Heart Oven Mitt Tutorial by Dresden}

Today I bring you a sweet Valentiney tutorial from guest blogger Dresden, of www.dresdencarrie.com Enjoy!

This heart oven mitt is so cute! The little half hearts are perfect to slip your hands in and grab anything hot. This would make an adorable Valentine's gift with a bag of chocolate chips or any baking supply.



Materials needed:

-2 fat quarters (or scraps, the heart isn't too large)

-heart pattern (found here)
-batting, Insul-Bright is best and can be found at any sewing store
-trim (if desired, pom pom trim is adorable on these!)
-sewing supplies

Steps:

1. Cut:

    2 large hearts on the fold of fabric

    1 large heart on the fold of batting (I used Insul-Bright because it's heat resistant) 

    2 small heart halves

    3 strips of fabric or bias tape pieces about 10 inches long

2. Attach bias tape & trim to straight edge of the heart halves

3. If using a strip of fabric make a loop for hanging by folding fabric in half twice and stitching along edge length wise

4. Make a sandwich in this order:

    batting

    front large heart face up (green heart in picture)

    half hearts placed like they are shown in the finished mitt face up

    loop for hanging (fold in half and pin near top of heart)

    back large heart face down

5. Sew around edge and leave a gap open for turning

6. Turn right side out through gap

7. Hand stitch closed

Happy Valentine's Day!! Be sure to check out my blog! www.dresdencarrie.com

Thanks for having me Jessie!

Thanks so much Carrie!

If anyone else is interested in doing a guest post on my little blog, please let me know. It's been pretty busy over here preparing to move, so I'd love to have you! (If anyone wants to do a post on meal planning/healthy(easy) eating I need an intervention so please email me!) ;).

xoxo

{Happy New Year}

Wow! Over a month this time?! Well, the holidays kind of turn my brain to mush and lots of things get forgotten. We have been doing lots of cool things over here though! First up, we closed on a house just a couple days before Christmas. It's a dream home! I couldn't be more excited to move in. We have selected some of the paint colors and have already started painting all the inside walls, so we will be moving in slowly, making sure everything is ready and perfect before we have to be out of our apartment in March.

Christmas was wonderful! (And exhausting) we just got back yesterday from a trip to Maryland to visit my husbands family. It was quite a whirlwind. It's still a bit of a blur.

And of course, up until the VERY last minute, I was finishing gifts and projects, packing, painting, moving, mothering, cleaning (not really), baking, wrapping, shipping, shopping, decorating. You know, typical holiday stuff. Now it's time to take it all down, be thankful that Christmas doubles as a deadline so you feel like you got a few things marked off your to-do list, and get back to the normal life pace, whatever that is for you.

I'm going to get working on a couple things that maybe should have hit that Christmas/deadline, do some painting in the new house this weekend, pack a few boxes as I go, get working on a new private swap and also on a pretty awesome giveaway opportunity (more on that one later).

OH and my New Year resolution is to ORGANIZE! There should be a place for everything in the new house and I'm planning to make it so organized you'll hate me when I'm done. I'm talking labels, containers, shelves, closet systems, folders, stickers, racks,.... A. Place. For. Everything. Hold me to it, would ya? What's your resolution?

xoxo

Ps. Is it possible to move your images when blogging from an iPad?? Anyone have tips on that? :-D