Finishes!

Yesterday was a great day for finishes. I'm heading off to my friend's house at the river Monday for a few days of sewing and yakking so I'm using that as incentive to wrap a few things up.

First up is the baby blanket. You know how it is. Once the end is in sight you just have to motor through and finish and that's what I did with this yesterday. The blanket finished to about 36" square.

Here are the details on the blanket for my future reference:

I used the Purple Gingham pattern from Daisy Farm Crafts. It's really well written and they have nice videos to help out. Don't like this one? They have over a dozen gingham blanket variations. I'll be making more for sure.

The yarn is Hobby Lobby I Love This Yarn, 4 weight acrylic. I bought 2 skeins of the peach and 1 each of orange and white. I d love this yarn. It's really easy to work with and is very soft. It makes Red Heart seem like sand paper.

Hook size K for the body and J for the border

This border design is in the pattern. It's 2 rows of SC and a row of shells. Each side was 1 stitch short to make it work out perfect so I just put in a fudge shell (using one less stitch) somewhere along each side. The shorter shells aren't noticeable at all. My first round of SC on the sides is a bit messy but I do have trouble getting the sides to look good. It would have been better if I could have used white for the border but I didn't have enough leftover white yarn. I had to go either orange or peach. I think orange looks best.

This is what's leftover. I have a few small balls of leftover yarn now and it's annoying me so I'm going to start a granny rectangle that I can use up all the scrap yarn on. As I finish each project I can just add the leftover yarn to the "scrapghan" and someday it can be a donation or camping blanket.

But that's not all! I also finished the toy bags for the boys. I found the tutorial online but I've lost the link now. There are dozens of tutorials for bags like this. They are so nice that now I want some for myself.

The bags even have fancy boxy bottoms.

They are lined.

And they have tabs made of faux cork. I bought this bundle of cork fabrics over 2 years ago and this is the first time I've used them. When I showed the dino bags to Chris he immediately noticed that the tab was dino teeth. He wins extra credit points.

I'm also quilting and practicing my feathers. I forgot to take photos but there are a couple of veterans quilts getting a lot of fancy feather quilting!

Thinking toward Monday, I'm packing up projects. I've decided that I can start my SIL's animal print quilt. It's going to be made exactly like my Indonesian Batik quilt, just smaller. She want's a sofa quilt.

I'm also going to attempt this. My friend, Kim, is bringing me some leftover silk fabrics and I'm going to see if I can pull this off. I think the color will be teal or red. 

Later today, though, I'll get back to sewing the big Summer Sunset star and there's lots more practice quilting ahead of me this weekend.