One might assume that my lack of blog posts means that I'm not up to much on these cold winter evenings.

But I've actually been a sewing fiend over these last number of weeks. I just haven't had much to show for it.

First things first: I am still working on my quilt. Correction - I am thinking about my quilt, working on my quilt, and even waking up in the middle of the night, tormented by the unfinished quilt. I'm hoping to wrap it up in the next few weeks, but I've been saying that for a lot of weeks. It's killing me to see it unfinished when I'm so close to the end of the project.

But in the meantime, I had another baby gift to work on!

I found another great pattern on the Moda website - this one is for a baby car seat quilt. Though the pattern is billed as "easy", there were a few challenging spots on this l'il project.

But choosing the fabric was no problem. As soon as I saw the "oh deer" fabric from Moda, I knew I had to have it. Over a number of visits to Periwinkle Quilting, I ended up buying out all of their Oh Deer charm packs and layer cakes.


I knew that this would be great fabric for my good friend Kate's baby, as this fabric reminded me a lot of Kate's great style. Once we got the news that the baby was a boy, I started to work on the car seat quilt.

Here's some pictures along the way.

Putting the top together

A little later - both borders and the backing on

Hello little monkeys!

Finished product with ties to attach it to the car seat handle

The binding was a labour of love, but I'm so glad I did it!

 After a wash and a dry, it had a nice, "broken in" look. I hope Henry loves it!

March 18 Update:

After a failed attempt in February to go down and meet the baby,  I FINALLY got to meet Henry this past weekend and give him his gift. He's pretty sweet at just over two months old.

Here's Hank!

Or was it?

Last fall, I took a printmaking class through CCDE at my very own university and became intrigued by the art of screen printing. Soon after, I picked up an amazing book called Printing by Hand by Lena Corwin from the public library and after renewing it a number of times, finally decided to spring for the $25 to own the thing.

I've tried the stencil method of screen printing (which you can read about in my post here), but am still a bit daunted by the prospect of photo emulsion screen printing. A happy medium (no pun intended!) is the screen filler method, which I decided to try out recently.

The project: Printed tea towels
Supplies: Purchased tea towels from IKEA, screen drawing fluid, screen filler, fabric screen printing ink, a silk screening frame, plus all the basic supplies for screen printing (squeegee, scraper, plastic spoons, patience, and time!)

My idea was to make a tea towel set; one with an imprint of "easy as pie" and the other with an imprint saying "piece of cake". I didn't draw the images myself, rather I just found images I liked online and picked a font that I thought would look good on tea towels. I printed them out and taped the first pattern to the back of the screen to trace.


Once traced onto the screen, I used a fine paintbrush and screen drawing fluid to paint the image onto the back of the screen.


Once the screen drawing fluid was dry, I went over the entire image with screen filler. Then I let that dry overnight.

Once the screen filler is completely dry, I ran the screen underwater and watched the drawing fluid dissolve and voila! You have your image prepared.


Then the fun part begins: mixing your ink, doing the final prep on the screen, setting up your workspace and doing a few test prints. The "easy as pie" towels turned out great.


A few days later, I started working on the cake towels. I must have had beginners' luck on the first batch, because the second set turned out to be a lot more difficult and after a number of test prints, the image wasn't coming out clearly. I decided to wash the screen after attempt number one and try again later.


Unfortunately, the second attempt was no "piece of cake" either, and I ended up having to scrap the idea of a producing set of tea towels.

But I love the ink colour!

Luckily, I'm left with enough good pie towels to give one to each of my faithful blog readers (you know who you are!)

Merry Christmas!

Did you love the movie "How to Make an American Quilt"?

I sure did. I loved the way that the construction of a wedding quilt for the reluctant Wynona Ryder revealed the life stories of her grandmother's quilting circle. You just think they're a bunch of old ladies who like quilts, but you find out that some of them were pretty wild in their heydey.

Making a quilt seems painstaking, but the results are beautiful. I've had it on my bucket list for some time. I figure if I want to be good at it by the time I'm an old lady, I had better start now!

To be clear, it's not an "old lady hobby" anymore. The quilting class instructor tells me that it's usually half younger and half older women these days (but no men, I gather). And fabric choice (of course) can influence the style of a quilt, making it "act its age."

I love the fabrics I chose:

Bicycles, polka dots and flowers - love, love love them!

I'm heading into my fifth week of beginner quilting, and things are really starting to come together. We're almost done making our squares and supposedly by next week, we'll be putting the top together. I say "supposedly" because I'm always skeptical about beginner classes actually delivering on what they promise.

Here's a recap.

Week Two:

Rail fence block

Nine patch block

 Week Three:

Friendship star block

Eccentric star block

Double X block

Shoo fly block

Aren't these names great?

Week Four:

Jacob's ladder block

Double nine patch variation (so fun!)

I've got a wee bit of homework to do, finishing up a last block before we sew the final two in class. This will be called a sampler quilt because we sample a number of different styles.

I will call it my living room quilt for snuggling and watching movies during Christmas holidays!