Moomin

Did you know this is a big year for Moomin? It's the 100th anniversary of Moomin's creator, Tove Jannson. To celebrate, the American Swedish Institute has a Moomin exhibit on display. Isaac was happy to see the exhibit and pose with Moomin!

br />
Sublime Stitching recently released a bunch of Moomin patterns. I ordered one right away. I stitched a Moomin on Isaac's plain Poang IKEA chair. It wasn't too difficult to embroider. I used 4 strands of DMC embroidery floss. It took some practice to get used to not pulling the needle through to the back side of the fabric - I had to take little bites of fabric with the needle, being careful not to catch the foam inside the headrest.

A post shared by Carrie Federer (@carriebee04) on Sep 24, 2014 at 3:13pm PDT

The only trouble I had with this project was transferring the pattern to the chair. The cover is made of 100% cotton - I checked the tag - so I had my iron set to the highest setting. I ironed the transfer for about 7 seconds, and when I pulled the iron away it had scorched the fabric. Ugh! This is the first time I have scorched a project with my iron. Luckily, I was able to use hydrogen peroxide, cold water, and a little bit of soap to remove the scorch marks. No trace of them now!

A post shared by Carrie Federer (@carriebee04) on Sep 24, 2014 at 3:13pm PDT

Teapot mini quilt

Last week I successfully finished a paper piecing project. It's the teapot from Sew Ichigo's Kitchen Classics pattern, and it's a replacement for the failed paper piecing project I posted about last month.



I'm much happier with this finished mini than I was with the last one (before I washed it), so perhaps it's a good thing I ruined the previous one. I used a batik for the background, and assorted scraps from my stash for the teapot. The binding is a Mona Luna print that coordinates nicely with the flower print. I used matchstick quilting for the first time, and I love how it turned out.

MMQG mystery quilt - catching up

Way back in January, the Minneapolis Modern Quilt guild started a mystery quilt-a-long. My talented friend Kristin is designing the mystery quilt and posting instructions each month. I ordered my background fabric, Robert Kaufmann quilter's linen in stone, way back in January but that's as far as I got for a long, long time.

Earlier this summer I pulled fabric from my stash for the quilt - olive greens, pinks, aquas and chartreuse. In June and July I cut all the pieces out for months 1-7. In August I finally started piecing the blocks.

 

I have a LOT of olive and chartreuse scraps in my stash!







For month 4, I didn't have big enough olive scraps, so aqua was the dominant color.



I bought a yard of this pink, olive and chartreuse fabric years ago because it was on sale and I loved it. I used it for a stuffed toy but had trouble incorporating it into quilts... until now.





These little windmill blocks are super cute and not that difficult! I want to make a lot more of these. The most time consuming part is cutting all the pieces (with templates). About halfway through I was ready to research die-cutting options... I've been eyeing the Accuquilts at JoAnn's for a while.

Hot air balloons

This spring I started work on a gender-neutral baby quilt for a friend. I decided on a quilt with a few hot air balloons and a lot of sky. There are not a lot of patterns out there for hot air balloons, and most of them are really intricate paper piecing patterns. I am not that great at paper piecing. so I opted for the simplest paper piecing pattern I could find.

I printed out the pattern and then enlarged it a few times. I have two tiny balloons, two medium balloons and one big balloon. I got to use up some pretty small scraps for these balloons. It's always nice to see the scraps I've been
hoardingcarefully saving be put to use!

 

I quilted this with a serpentine stitch and Aurafil thread.



The quilt went to its new home earlier this summer.

One month

We've spent one month with this little guy already!



Ethan arrived a little early but we are both healthy and doing well now. He's a pretty chill baby, loves to snuggle, and is sleeping through most of the night. We're feeling very fortunate to have an(other) easy baby (so far). I'm taking advantage of this while it lasts - yesterday Ethan accompanied me to a quilt guild meeting with zero fussing.