Mini Forest Tree Quilt

It's been a loooooong time since I've been on here! But I wanted to hop on and share a quilt that I made that I've been getting lots of questions about on Instagram. That's where you can find me these days (@naturallymeg) but it would be easier to explain the details of this quilt over here.

I love how my Holiday Patchwork Forest quilt turned out! I really wanted it to look like pine trees in a snowy forest, so that is why all the trees are green and the white background. I used this tutorial for the tree blocks from Diary of a Quilter.

I cut my trees down to 3.5" x 5" so they ended up being pretty small blocks. I tried to make the trees as uniform as I could, but that was tricky since it is kind of a free style pattern. And yes, I wasted half of the fabric. The way that the pattern works you would end up with white trees and a green background too, but I just wanted the green trees. The thrifty girl in me died a little by throwing the other block pieces out, but I think it was worth it to get all green trees with a white background.

I picked about 12 different fabrics to make the trees. I think it was key to have a couple solid greens in there too, so there is a solid dark green and a solid lighter green that I had on every row. The rest of the fabrics were mostly dots and stripes that I had stashed away from other projects. For the white I used kona white solid fabric.

I ended up with 107 tree blocks and 75 blank white squares that I randomly placed so that it had a more foresty look. 182 blocks total with 14 blocks across and 13 rows going down. This still ended up being smaller than I wanted for a lap quilt  (48x58 was the finished size with just the trees) so I added a 6 1/2" white border on all sides of it. It ended up being the perfect size to cuddle on the couch with my kids during the winter, just like I envisioned!

I machine quilted it with a matchstick quilting pattern. I just sewed in the ditch straight down and then measured 1 1/2" over which was down the center of the trees starting in the middle of the quilt and going to the end. Once that was done I went back and sewed another line in the middle of those two seams to finish it off. Then I flipped the quilt and did the other side. I hope this makes sense. If not then check out this great tutorial on straight line quilting by Suzy Quilts.

I picked a super soft minky fabric for the back and a striped binding. I'm so happy with how it turned out!

Triangle quilt...

I finished the triangle quilt for our living room a few months ago and am finally getting around to documenting it here. We snapped some family pictures this fall so I brought the quilt along with us to take a few pictures outside.

My goal was to keep it simple and use the colors that I want in my living room in the quilt. I went for brown, teal, green, and white. Honestly... I love it, but it's a bit busy for me. I think I used too many different patterned fabrics and not enough solid colors. Oh well, it's a quilt! I'm sure it will be one of many around here someday. I used a mossy green flannel on the back so that it would be nice and soft. It's been getting a lot of use around here already.

Woodland mobile...

*** So I've lost my camera. I have no clue where it is. I know that it made it here from the move because I took Baby G's 11 month pictures with it here, but now it is gone and I wish I could figure out where I put it! But I really wanted to share the latest project that I've finished, so please excuse the phone pictures that I have. 

Baby G finally has his own room! I've been having fun making plans to decorate his new space. I want to do a woodland animal theme and started on a mobile for it back in the beginning of the year. I put it away for a while but pulled it out again when we moved to finish it up and get it hanging above his bed.

I used wool felt and pretty much fell in love with it. That stuff is so dreamy to sew with! I just worked on one animal at a time until I had enough to hang it up.

I found an old branch in the yard here and tied all the animals to it with some fishing string. 

 I think this colorful fish is my favorite...

I used four eye hooks screwed into the ceiling to suspend the branches. This little moose guy wasn't pictured above, he was the last one I did before hanging it up.

I'm super happy with how it turned out! I think that Gray likes it too. These pictures just don't do it justice... darn it! I'm happy to have something up in his room for him now.

Pumpkins...

About five years ago I saw some cute fabric pumpkins that had real stems on the top, and sort of fell in love with them. So I asked my family members if they would pick pumpkins to decorate that had nice long stems and save the stems for me. They were troopers and saved their old stems... and then life happened and I tucked them away in a bag and haven't even used them all this time.

For craft night with my sister in law's we made this awesome faux mercury glass pumpkin (the silver one below) and I wanted to put together a little pumpkin trio. I had the wooden/ stick one already and decided that it was time to make the fabric pumpkins!

I used this super easy tutorial for them, and hot glued the stem on. Oh man... is it possible to fall in love with a pumpkin? I'm so happy with how it turned out!

I pulled out all the pumpkin-y fabric that I had in my stash and made a few more. I like them best lined up on the window seal from biggest to smallest...

I had some other close up pictures but blogger isn't letting me upload them, so maybe some other time. But they turned out so fun! I have six stems left, and all of these have some sort of polka dot on them (guess I really like polka dots?), so I'm going to get some velvet and other textures for the rest of them. I'm glad that I've held onto these all this time... they were worth the wait.

Yellow daffodils...

 In those many months that I was trying to get pregnant I thought a lot about how I would tell our boy the news when the time came. I wanted to make it really special, since he had been waiting for so long to have a little sibling. I saw the most adorable house bag and little doll family here that I was pretty set on making. Even though he is a boy... and boys don't really play with dolls, I was set on making our little doll family complete with a house bag to break the news to him about our new addition.

Well, the time came and I made a bag that looks like this little pioneer house we live in. But that's as far as I got. During the first 14 weeks of pregnancy I was taking progesterone pills to help reduce the risk of miscarriage and support the pregnancy and they made me super sick. It was awful. Every time I took them I would have to go lay down and they would make my head spin for hours. It was not good. The longer I took them, the worse it got... so I never got around to making our little family of dolls. But in the end being able to keep this baby cooking is way more important than feeling up to sewing dolls right?

And now I have a bag that looks like this house that I have NO CLUE what to do with it!!!

Sorry, it's a bit wrinkled because it's been sitting in my sewing cabinet, and there it is likely to sit. When I made it I sewed a little flower bed of yellow flowers in the front. Now... I had never seen yellow flowers in front of this house before. When we moved here there were red tulips in the bed and when they were done that was it. But I LOVE yellow flowers! They are so bright and beautiful! So I put yellow flowers in there just because I like them. This doesn't look exactly like the house, but it's pretty close, with some of my favorite features.

The back has a garden with the walnut tree that I love so much. I even put our little squirrel friend that lives in the tree on it.

This squirrel doesn't like us very much. Things got a little heated in the fall when Trent was harvesting the walnuts that had fallen on the ground and the squirrel did not like us touching his walnuts! But I guess he was still able to gather enough because he's still back there, and made it through the long hard winter that we had... and he doesn't yell at us so much anymore.

Anyway, the point of this whole story is that I was a little shocked and so happy to see a bed full of yellow daffodils pop up last month!!! They were so beautiful! We even had some red and yellow tulips come up in the last few days! So my little sewn flower garden turned out to be right on!

I'm a little sad to say that in the last day we've had a really bad wind storm up here, and all the flowers are gone now. They didn't make it through the 70+ mph winds. But they were gorgeous while they lasted! Till next spring little yellow flowers...

Quiet book...

Here is another one of those projects that I've been working on for years..... Something you should know about me, I'm really great at starting projects but not so great at finishing them. I usually have about 10 projects in various stages of being done sitting around at all times. It's frustrating. I don't know why I do this to myself! So please don't think that I'm actually super productive and getting all these things done at record speed. I am not. At all. I just gave myself a self imposed deadline so things are magically getting done around here. And I'm about to pull my hair out. Anyway... here is the quiet book.

Now the truth as to why this has taken me so long is that I didn't just make one quiet book... I made two. One for my boy and one for my niece.

You see, my sweet little niece is the big sister to triplet babies. So I felt like it was my responsibility as the "aunt with only one kid" to make her a quiet book too. I'm glad that I did! The joy I felt as I sat and watched her play with it and smile at each page yesterday was worth all the time it took to put this little book together.

I wanted this book to be one that could be added too. For the covers I used duck cloth and used a freezer paper stencil to put the first letter of their names on it. The sides have rings so that pages can be taken out and added whenever it's desired.

All the pages are 10 x 12 thick muslin that are sewn together with the edges fraying. I like the rustic look.

The first page is one that I came up with myself. It's the lets go to bed page.

Little mini quilts with little mini people dressed in jammies, ready to go to bed. I took pictures of the kids and then printed them out onto iron on paper and ironed them onto some muslin. They both have a favorite book and a special blanket that I made little replica's of for this page.

Here is little "a's" page.

Blankets snap on and the pillows are removable with Velcro.

Next page are farm animals with removable heads. FYI this one can be a little bit rowdy in church {oops}.

Again I printed the pictures on iron on transfer paper and ironed them onto the fabric. There is Velcro on the back of the animals. {If anyone would like me to e-mail them my word document for the pictures let me know! All the pictures are from Getty Images}.

Hanging clothes on the line. Little tiny clothes pins and a vinyl laundry basket at the bottom.

Counting the beads.

Weave your own pie crust.

Check out the apples! I was really happy with how those turned out.

Fishing page. This was my most difficult page by far! And the reason why they sat in a drawer for so long...

My husband said that I couldn't put a fishing pole by fish in a bowl because you don't fish for fish out of a bowl. But I had already made the bowl and didn't want to change it so I went with it anyway. The eyes on the fish are stick on magnets and I was planning on just having something metal on the end of the pole to pick up the fish. However, the eye magnets are super weak and I could not get them to attract to anything metal!

I ended up getting a super strong magnet with a hole in it to put on the pole so that they could get the poor fish out of the water. Sounds like a simple solution but it took me about 9 months to come up with it... sheesh.

Build a pizza. Here is the crust with the top not sewn down and a snap holding everything else inside.

Inside we have sauce, pepperoni, pineapple, olives, mushrooms, anchovies (why not), peppers, and cheese (everything is cut out of felt here).

This page is a messy one with lots of little pieces but it is one of the favorites to play with I've noticed... some messes are worth it aren't they?

There is all the I've gotten done. I have great intentions of adding more pages to the book someday, but that is on hold while I find my sanity from this one.

Unfortunately we've also discovered that our IPOD touch is a great quiet book for church, and doesn't take any time to make. But they are not as cute now are they...

Hope Valley...

 There are a few things in life that I really strongly believe in...

I believe one should eat butter instead of margarine.
I believe that hot baths and walks in the mountain are healing for the soul.
I believe the best way to mop a floor is on your hands and knees with a bucket of vinegar water.

I also believe in handmade quilts.

There is nothing else quite like sleeping under a handmade quilt. I've yet to sleep under a store bought one that was nearly as comfortable or satisfying. Maybe it's the love that goes into hours upon hours of quilting it... I'm not sure. But they are wonderful! I've been very spoiled and have benefited from other's quilting skills in the past. My sister in law Nicole made us a quilt for our wedding that we have used to shreds, literally. We had it shipped out to Hawaii when we lived there because we missed it too much. But we have used it and loved it over the past 10 years and it's now falling to pieces so it was time for a new one.

I first blogged about working on this quilt here. That was two years ago! So yes, this has taken me a long time to put together. The fabric and pattern are by Denyse Schmidt, the fabric is from her Hope Valley line. The fabric was inspired by the creative, homey economic era of the Great Depression. There is a very vintage-y feel to it and I loved it the moment I first saw it. I wanted to use fabric that wasn't too feminine and the blue, teal, gray colors were perfect for this. I also loved the name of the line. When I started getting the fabric for this quilt I felt like I was in my own hope valley era just overcoming my 2009 crisis. It felt very fitting, and I love that I now get to slumber with peaceful dreams under my Hope Valley quilt every night.

I've had the top done for about a year but was pretty nervous to quilt it. I tripled the pattern size so that it would fit our California King bed. It's pretty massive, and I wanted to use really thick batting so that it would be nice and warm for the Utah winters.

I didn't want to pay a fortune to have someone machine quilt it on a long arm machine, but there was no way I was just going to tie it. I was so nervous to do it on my own machine!!! I had spent so much time on this I really didn't want to screw it up.

What I ended up doing is machine quilting with my walking foot down each of the rows by stitching in the ditch. Then I started in the top middle and stitched in the ditch down the different pieces. It worked just fine on my machine! I don't know why I was so chicken and waited so long to do it. It's not perfect by a long shot... but it works for me and I'm really happy with how it turned out.

I decided though that binding a quilt is like child birth. You're almost done, you just have to bind (or birth) your quilt. But the only way to really do this so that it looks good is to do it by hand... which takes FOREVER! One centimeter at a time, by hand... until it's done. Then you swear you are never going to make another quilt again because you don't want to go through the pain of binding again. But again like childbirth you forget how awful that was and you start piecing together another quilt ;). My thumb still hurts from hours and hours of binding, so texting has been minimal this week (oh the pains of life huh?).

I'm so happy that it's done though. This is a huge project that I've been working on for so long, it's quite the feeling of accomplishment! And I may not be birthing another quilt anytime soon... but maybe I'll forget about how much I hate binding one day.

Sewing cabinet...

When we were living in Vegas I was a spoiled girl. We were living in our three bedroom condo and I had that lovely third bedroom all to myself as a sewing room. It was nice, I'm not going to lie. Being able to spread out my projects and just shut the door when I needed a break and not have to put anything away. That was so nice! I knew that would not last forever, and it didn't. In our little place up here I've been wanting to get a sewing cabinet that I could put all my stuff in. Well... guess what!!! Christmas in July really came this year! My sister in law's parents were giving away some furniture that they didn't have room for anymore and I became the lucky recipient of this beautiful cabinet...

I love dark, cherry wood! It is so big and deep, and perfect for all of my sewing and crafting stuff. It even has double hinges on the doors so that I can open them all the way.

I've got my ruler and cutting board hung up on one door. I think I'm going to put some cork boards on the other door to pin pictures, to do lists, etc on.

Here she is wide open (yes it's a girl...). Look at all that space!!!

I'm starting to get her filled up a little bit. I have lots of fabric to sort into those drawers. The best part... my husband and father in law cut a hole in the front of the cabinet for a pull out shelf to put my machine on so that it's a little more comfortable and there is somewhere to put my legs instead of up agains that bottom cabinet.

The shelf can hold up to 100 lbs. I can use it to cut fabric on, get and ironing matt to iron on. It is so awesome! They built the shelf and the I stained it to match the rest of the cabinet. It looks so great! The colors matched up perfectly. Can you tell I'm over the moon excited about this!!!

It will be so nice to have my own space again besides the kitchen table to work on my sewing projects. Thank you Sue and Kevin!!! Thank you Craig and Trent for customizing it for my needs! I'm one happy girl with my pretty new cabinet...

Sewing...

My cute friend C took this picture of me the other day without me knowing it. When I saw it I thought, yep... that's me just doing my thing. Wearing yellow (almost always), sitting at my machine, sunlight coming in through the window. This picture makes me happy. This is what I love to do. This is me. Thanks C for the picture!

And I'm working on something super important... a veil for my friends wedding. It's going to be so pretty!

Shop Hop...

My sister in law's are awesome!! I am a lucky girl who gets to have 8 sister in law's on my husband's side and they are so much fun to hang out with.

They like to do this thing every year called the Shop Hop. It's a quilt shop thing where there are 13 shops across the Wasatch front that are involved. There is a theme and each shop gets all decorated and has drawings, free quilt patterns, etc, etc.

So the point of the shop hop is to visit each of the shops and get your paper stamped, and when you get all 13 stamps you get to be in their big drawing. They give you 4 days to visit all the shops.

We did it in one day. Yes, we did.

13 shops from Logan to Springville in one day. It took about 11 hours.

And here are my lovely sister in laws who are always up for a good adventure. Just 4 of us were able to do it plus some of the younger girlies. I'm sure they love that I took a picture of them and am putting it on my blog. Here we are about halfway through the day on our crazy shop hop adventure!

We made it to the last shop about 20 minutes before closing. We totally did it in one day! Crazy! I felt crazy, like the amazing race but quilt shop style. It was a lot of fun. And I got all my stamps...

I wanted to do it so that I could spend some good quality time with my sister in laws. Also, it's nice to see the different quilting stores around and get ideas for projects. Like I mentioned before I'm getting geared up to work on my hexagon quilt and so I looked at all the different yellow fabrics that they had at the different stores and picked up some great pieces.



These fabrics make me happy! They look so fun together. It was a fun day and a long day. I haven't heard if I won anything yet, but it was fun to get out and see all the cute shops!