More Mario…

I thought that I should post a few last pictures of Mario with the Binding on and it having been washed and dried. It has been heavily used this week! Yay!

Sorry for the crappy inside pictures. It was raining most of the weekend and I never got a chance to take it outside.

Coin: (The blue in this picture is WAY off)

Goomba:

Turtle:

Pipe:

Mario:

You can see all of the free motion quilting really well in these pictures. I love the way it got all crinkled after washing and drying.

Started working on the wildlife quilt this weekend. Got everything cut up and now am in the process of sewing it all back together. Its going to be really big, but I think that it will be awesome. (At least in my mind, thats how I am picturing it!)

🙂

Mario Quilt Finished!!

Well, 99% finished. I said that I wanted my Mario quilt completely quilted by Sunday night and I got the quilting done on Saturday!!  Whoo-Hooo!!!! (I thought it would take me all weekend)

Binding was made on Sat evening and sewn on Sun morning. I will be working on tacking down the binding over the next few evenings and than into the wash it goes. I imagine it will crinkle up very nicely becuase of all of the quilting.  Can’t wait to see it when it comes out of the dryer.

Husband is completely stoked and cannot wait to start using it!!

It took me about 4.5 hours to quilt this. So much faster than straight line quilting.

In work:

I just LOVE my new dining room table. I don’t know that I could have quilted this the way I wanted to on my old table. With this type of quilting (stippling) you just need so much room to maneuver the quilt. Having this big table was awesome. Also, my new quilting gloves are heaven. (Its the little things in life that make me happy….lol) and yes, I free-motion quilt with my machine turned sideways. Its so much easier to move everything around and too see where you have been and where you need to go next.

Well, here it is. In all is greatness. This picture is before I trimmed up the edges and sewed the binding on. I will show a complete photo once the binding is done. It started out at 64″ x64″ but I do believe it has shrunk some from all the quilting. I’ll have to measure it again once it comes out of the dryer.

The backing is just a solid red. The front of the quilt is the star of the show and I didn’t want a back that would take away from that.

Wanna see a little bit of the stippling type quilting? (you should be able to click on any image to view it larger) See all those thread swirly’s…that’s the quilting. You can see them best on the pipe that Mario is standing on. I used a light blue thread to blend in with the sky. I like it on all of the quilt except for the cloud above Mario. I think the blue is too prominent against the white but that’s the perfectionist in me. I will definitely be leaving it the way it is.

I was soo nervous to quilt this thing that I was ready for a glass of wine or something to calm the self-imposed nerves. Yeah, it was like 10am. Needless to say, instead, I just took a deep breath and dove in. I figured since it was staying at our house that it didn’t really matter if it wasn’t perfect.  I am a true perfectionist and its hard to swallow that understanding sometimes.

And, because I have promised to show a picture of the mushroom pillow for weeks now, here you go:

This pillow has a green twin. I keep forgetting to photgraph them together so you will just have to imagine them sitting beside each other on the couch.

Thats all folks! After working on binding for a a few hours yesterday, I started cutting up a wildlife/outdoors quilt. Its a commissioned quilt for a co-worker and while there is no due date, I would like to get it finished soon so I can keep moving down my list of quilting/sewing to-do’s.

🙂

Holiday Weekend Accomplishments…

What a great weekend!! After getting my dog home from the Vet on Friday, it was time to start having fun. My idea of fun is finishing up works-in-progress and starting/finishing new things.

One of the finishing things was the basting of Mario. Yes, I only finished basting it, not quilting it. Slowly but surely this week, I am going to get that danged thing quilted. Its a little intimidating because of the way that I want to quilt it but that’s my goal. By next Sunday night I want to have that quilt finished.

I also got the green mushroom pillow done to go with Mario. Forgot to take a picture of it, but as soon as I do, I will post it with its red mushroom twin.

The last finish was the one I had the most fun with. I bought a book on Amazon a while back, Toppers for Every Table, and I LOVE it! Since we got our new dining room table, I have been searching for ways to liven it up. This book was perfect for that. I picked out one of the patterns on Sun afternoon  and made a table topper for Halloween.

I used a pack of fat quarters that I found at JoAnns a couple of weeks ago:

The backing is some fabric that I got from an Estate sale a while back:

Close-up of the front…the center orange square of spiderwebs is a sparkly/glittery print:

Close-up of the orange quilting…practicing my stippling for Mario:

There are 8 triangles in this table runner and they were the first REAL triangles that I have ever done…I have done the cheater ones on a past quilt, but this was the first time that I had actually cut out a triangle and sewn it to something else.  Bias edges are not as bad as I thought they would be!

OK, t minus 4 hours and I will be starting on my goal for the week ahead.

I’ll see all of you next Monday!

🙂