Christmas Present number one

Long time no blog.....It has been a while!! I have had a house full of sickie's including myself :(

Well, anyway I wanted to share my mother-in-laws christmas present. It is a quilt with the hand prints of the kids stippled into it!! It was a lot of fun and I hope that she likes it!!!

My fault

Well I have been working on Heather Bailey's happy stacker (http://www.heatherbaileystore.com/product-p/sp003-hs.htm) for my son for Christmas...not so easy!! I got the first ring done and then the post...YEAH!! Then I did the big ring...TOTALLY messed up!! I had to run to the nearest quilt store and YEAH they had the cogsmo crickets line and I was able to redeam myself with a new piece of fabric. Why are new patterns so hard??? I think I have it now...just three more rings to go!!! But I had to share my fuff-up!!

Scrappy Letter

Hello world of Crafters-

This is my first tutorial and I am very excited!! I will give you a bit of warning...photography is not one of my talents...so bare with me please!!

Today I am going to show you how to make this wall hanging!! Great for a child's room!!

List of Supplies:
A pile of scraps
a piece of batting (16 inches or so)
fabric for backing and strap (these could be solid pieces or you can piece them with scraps also...your choice)
A piece of paper for graphing (don't worry it is not that difficult)
And of course thread, sewing machine and an iron!!


And away we go.....

First we need to start by graphing the letter. I know you never thought you would have to use math, but don't be alarmed it is super easy!!

I did a 12 x 12 inch square and broke that down into 2 inch squares! Then I drew out the letter in a blocky format!

Then I filled out the letter into the surrounding blocks!

Then a little bit more thinking comes into play. I need to figure out how many squares of background and how many squares of color! For this letter 'c' I need 26 2x2 background squares (and for this letter it is the patterned fabrics) and 4 traingles. So I need to cut 30 squares. I happen to have 5 different fabrics making that 6 of each fabric.

For the letter that gets a little different. You can make longer rectangles. But I will tell you that you need to look at the square in the terms of long strips (that could be horizonal or vertical)! I choose horizonal because that gave me two long piece of solid versus one! So in the solid color I need 2 2x4 inch strips 2 2x2 inch squares and 4 triangles! So that means that I need 4 2x2 squares to start with!

Get your scraps together and lets have some fun!!

Cut each scrappy piece into 2 1/2 inch squares (remembering the seam allowance)!

Okay I will wait a minute while you get that done.........

Now get the solid color and cut those into the recangles and squares that you need!

Okay great. Here are my scrappy peices!!

Now take those peices that you have and make the squares into triangles!

Now you get to lay out the pieces into you letter. Moving pieces around until you get the look you want.....yeah...fun.!!

Now time to sew.....ohhh yeah the fun part!! Make sure that you have good even seam allowances!!
Start with one of the strips and go across row by row. Making sure that you iron your strips when you are done really well. (Make sure that you iron your seams in the same direction for each strip)

These are my strips!! (They are not ironed yet)

Now we iron your (ironed) strips together. Did I mention the need to iron?!?!? I pin this part to make sure that the small squares line up!

Now your letter is finished!! yeah....pretty easy so far right?? So now we make the quilt 'sandwich.' This is also a great way to use the left over portions of the batting from your last quilt!!! I use a spray glue to keep the 'sandwich' together!!
Cut the batting and backing a little larger it just makes it a little bit easier!

I used my walking foot and outlined the letter for my quilting. You can go crazy different ways in this step! You can stipple the whole thing, everything but the letter. You can do as your heart would like!!

Now you trim your batting and backing to the same size as the letter!

Making the binding!! I cut a 2 1/2 inch strip(s) and sewed them together (in order to make the sew part of the strip you need to put the piece in an 'L' shaped and sew from the lower left to the upper front right corner. I am so sorry that I didn't get a picture of this....bad Bethany)! You can do the strip in two ways....fold as I have shown and sew onto the letter and I will show later or you can do it any way that you have done it in the past!!

I folded the binding on the letter as shown (due to lack of time for this present I didn't have time to hand sew...again Bad Bethany)! I used my walking foot again to sew it on as seen!

Yeah the letter is done...so close...you can do it!!

Now it is time for the strap!! Yeah. There is a number of ways that you can do this too!! You can make it with a number of scraps or one long one like I have done!! I took a 4 inch strip. I folded the ends up (about a 1/4 perfection not need here) on both sides!! Iron into place!!

The I folded both sides into the middle as seen!!

I sewn the strap down the side with the two folded sections!! Now your strap is (almost) done!!

I picked out two small buttons and hand stitched them to the back of the letter about 2-3 inches from the top (again perfectionism is not needed here)!!

I took the strap and did two button holes on each side of the strap (that way you have some chooses as to how long you want it to be!!)


Now take a step back and look at your master pieces!! Great job!! Not to hard, right?!?

Here is the master piece hanging on the wall!! YEAH!!

I hope that was fun and easy! But mostly I hope that I was easy to understand! If you have questions please comment and I will get back to you!! Thanks for looking!! I would LOVE to see your handiwork for let me see um'!!