Latest Quilt: Bright Triangles

The quilt I finished this week is for my cousin who is due with her first later this month. (The baby shower was several weeks ago. I had the quilt pieced and the triangles sewn to the back but it wasn't quilted yet. Sorry it's late!)

This is the first time I used my triangle tool. My goal was to create a quilt that was 40 x 40 inches so I figured I would do ten 4 inch triangles across the bottom. That didn't work out how I had planned. The 4 1/2 inch line on the tool is 4 1/2 inches in height (my quilt would have been the correct 40 inches tall but that didn't work our either - more on that later) but the triangles were almost a full 5 inches wide at the bottom. The quilt did end up being about 40 inches wide but that was only because I cut off some extra width because the quilt back was already cut to the right size.

So, now I know the triangle's height is not equal to its base's width.

If you look really closely, you can see that my pieced triangles are blunted at the top, squared instead of pointed. The goal was to have the triangles come to a point. This didn't work because I didn't piece the triangles quite right. In the picture below you can see two of my triangles pieced together - a blue and white one and a multi-color one with hexagons and diamonds. You can see that the point of the blue triangle is far outside the seem allowance for the multi-color triangle. When I pieced the next row of triangles, this not only made my triangle tips blunted but also made the quilt a little shorter than I had planned.

So, now I know to piece my triangles so they line up properly.

It took me a long time to decide how to do the quilting for this one. I still wasn't sure when I first basted it. I ended up quilting around the solid orange, solid blue, brown, and diamond green triangles with the same color thread as the fabric. Unfortunately this wasn't as easy as I had hoped it would be because it required almost constant rotating of the fabric as I quilted. I thought about doing it free-hand with the embroidery needle in the machine but decided against that because I didn't think my lines would end up very straight.

Because of the colors, you can't see the quilting very well on the pieced side and it is also pretty subtle on the back - and I like that. I like that the back ended up with subtle, random triangles quilted into it.

Overall, I really like this quilt. The colors were fun to work with and I learned a good deal about working with triangles.

Latest Quilt - Blue Corners

This quilt was made for J2.0, who was born just a few days ago.

The piecing on this one was really easy, just a bunch of long, thick rectangles. The quilting was pretty easy too. Other than the dark blue stripes, every stripe just got a straight line near the seam. The dark blue areas are quilted with circles, which were easy enough to do but I will probably never do anything like that again because cutting all the strings between on the circles took forever and nearly gave me blisters.

I learned that all the little quilting can pull the fabric. After the quilting was done, but before I did the binding, you could see that the blue stripes were a little shorter than the other stripes. Not a big deal but good to know for the future.

Activity Days: Journal Writing With M&Ms

We had an activity on the importance of writing in journals. We talked about how it can help us remember things, help our ancestors understand how we lived, and how it can help us think through what is going on in our lives.

Writing in a journal can be difficult to do so I wanted to help give the girls some motivation for what to write about. I found something similar on Pinterest and adapted it for my group. The one I saw only had about six colors of M&Ms; each color represented something you could write about in a journal. I didn't think that was enough. I came up with 11 general things that 8 year old girls could write about in their journals.

To get a total of 11 different colors of plain M&Ms, I bought a pack at Costco with the usuals then went to Zurchers and got some individual colors (which, by the way, are a lot more expensive than I thought they'd be).

Here's the list of things I thought the girls could write about.

1. Something interesting that happened today (or since the last entry).
2. Something you do well or did well today.
3. Something interesting or fun you remembered today and what made you think of it.
4. Something about school.
5. Something you learned today/recently.
6. Something you are grateful for.
7. Something you did for someone else or something nice someone did for you.
8. Something you have a question about or want to understand better or an answer you received.
9. Something you want for the future.
10. Something about your family/friends.

For the activity, I gave each girl a small pad of paper, a colored pen (they thought colored pens were the greatest), and a bag full of M&Ms. I had the girls choose an M&M, use their guide to figure out what they were supposed to write about for that color, then gave them some time to write (which was pretty difficult for some of them). Then they ate their M&M and chose another one.

Recipe: Shredded Meatballs

Meatball sandwiches are amazing. CJ and I have them semi-regularly for dinner. The biggest problem is keeping the meatballs on the sandwich. I devised a remedy for this: Shredded Meatballs.

The inspiration for this recipe came from a slow cooker chicken Parmesan sandwich recipe that we tried but weren't impressed with (found it on Pinterest but apparently I didn't keep the pin - that's how uninterested I was in it after trying it). My first thought upon eating the sandwich was - this would be better with beef. So I tried my own version with beef.

Ingredients
1 beef roast - about 3 pounds
1 can/jar spaghetti sauce
1/2 cup water
Italian Seasoning

Put everything in the crockpot and cook on low for 8 hours or high for 4 hours. Using two forks, shred the meat as soon as you can to help get the flavors on ever possible beefy surface.

Serve on buns with mozzarella and/or Parmesan or add to spaghetti or put on pizza or put in a casserole. Anywhere you can use meatballs, you can use shredded meatballs.

Enjoy!

Activity Days: String Art Temple

A while ago we had an activity on temples. Since 8 year old girls don't sit still or listen for very long, I decided to do a craft along with the lesson. I had seen string art all over Pinterest and thought it could work for a temple.

One of the issues, however, was that the tutorials I saw all involved nails on wood boards. I was very much uninterested it handing nails and a hammer to the girls and I was also uninterested in doing all the hammering before the activity since I was never sure how many girls were going to show up (I think 2 showed up for this activity).

While walking around Jo-Ann for ideas, I came across these small, square cork boards and figured they, with push pins, would be perfect for 8 year olds. (I bought the clear push pins at Walmart because they were significantly cheaper there than Jo-Ann.)

Unfortunately the push pins didn't fit really well, they were longer than the cork board was thick. This means that the pointy end of the push pins would hang out the back or we had to be careful not to push the pins all the way through.

For the shape of the temple I drew out a few different designs on paper. The girls chose their design and cut it out. Then we placed the design on the cork board and put the push pins in around the edges of the design. Taking the paper out afterword was not as easy as I thought it would be so we ended up leaving a few scraps in there figuring the string would hide it. I had pre-cut long pieces of string and let the girls go to town filling in the shape.

Overall, it was an ok activity. I probably wouldn't do it again with this age group - maybe 11 year old girls - and I would definitely make sure the cork board was thick enough for the pins.

Halloween Cake

I made a cake for a Halloween party I went to. The host was going to make all the desserts herself and wanted to do a black and white cake that was a couple of layers and fancy with a spider web decoration but didn't have time and asked the rest of us to bring dessert instead.  I decided to stick with her black and white cake theme but didn't have the time and/or energy to try to make the fancy cake she wanted so I winged it ("winged", get it? 'cause it is a bat cake?) by using a bat cookie cutter and bat sprinkles to make a black and white bat cake. After frosting the cake with white frosting, I simply put the cookie cutter in the middle of the cake, put sprinkles inside the cookie cutter, and gently pressed the sprinkles into the frosting to keep the bat shape.

Latest Quilt

Here is my latest quilt made for a nephew, M, who was due in late September but decided to come a little early.  One of the bonuses of coming early was I knew what his name was before I was done with the quilt and could applique his name on the quilt.

For this quilt I wanted to do an argyle pattern but I didn't want to figure out how to deal with non-right angle diamonds so I went with a modified argyle where I just used rotated squares quilted through the middle.

Putting the squares on their sides made figuring out the size the squares needed to be difficult. I got out some graph paper and mapped out the quilt and tried to figure out my measurements there but, apparently, that didn't work out very well because all my squares are smaller than they should have been. The original plan was to only have the argyle pattern with the orange border but, since my squares were too small, I ended up having to add the blue border (good thing I accidentally bought too much fabric). However, the blue border came in handy when trying to figure out how to do the quilting around the name applique - so I guess it all worked out in the end.


With this quilt I also did triangles for the first time.  I didn't have a triangle tool and I didn't want to pull trigonometry out of my head so I kind of winged the first few by taking cut squares and trimming them into a triangle where I thought they needed to be trimmed. That actually worked beautifully. Some of the triangles were a little big (maybe 1/8 - 1/4 of an inch too long) but that was fine because the excess was just cut off or sewn into the seam.

Another first with this quilt was having a border on both the front and the back - having both orange borders was planned from the beginning.  This made lining up the two sides and the batting a little more time consuming because I wanted to make sure the borders were nearly perfectly lined up so that the quilting would look good. It took extra time but it wasn't difficult (because everything was measured carefully) and I probably wouldn't hesitate too much to do something like that again.

Overall, I think the quilt turned out really cute. I like the orange, blue, and brown color combination.  I figured that since the colors were so bright I should use a more muted color for the quilting.  I went with a gray and triple stitched the quilting to make sure it showed up well.

I hope M likes it.