new baby quilt top

After finishing Myya's baby blanket, I was still feeling inspired by all the pink and green fabrics, so I started to make a quilt top.Since I had a piece of eleven strips of fabric sewn together leftover, I decided to try some strip-piece quilting. (It was kind of like this only shorter, only 12" high.) I deconstructed this into six pieces of two fabric strips sewn together (I had to add one more strip.) Each piece was about 8" wide (my original fabric strips were 4" wide) and 12" long.I chopped each piece into 3 so they were 4" wide. That left me with 12 sets of 3 rectangles of paired fabrics.I matched them up in 4-patch squares and sewed them into blocks. Then I cut 6 strips of white sashing, 8" long by 3.5" wide, to go in between the blocks in columns. After sewing my 3 columns of blocks, I cut 4 strips of sashing 3.5" wide by 28" long, and then 2 strips for the ends, 3.5" wide by 34" long.

A funny thing, as I sewed the pieces into columns and then the columns into the square quilt top, some of the blocks migrated--they got turned upside down and even moved out of their original place. So in the finished product, the very bright pink squares are not distributed throughout the quilt as much as I would like. It looks very lopsided to me. Ah well.

paper doll magnets

These were a (belated) Christmas present for my niece. She's a bit young for paper dolls, but she loves magnets, so when I saw a tutorial for these on One Pearl Button, I couldn't resist making them.

fo: Myya's baby blanket

I was inspired by artsy-crafty babe to make this little baby blanket, since there's no time for a quilt (the baby arrived in November, and I'm only home with access to my machine for a week!) But I'm not sure I like my finished results as much as I liked hers.I picked eleven colorful fabrics and cut a 4" strip of each, the entire 42" width of the fabric. Then I sewed the strips together, making a piece about 38" long and 42" high. I trimmed about 12" off the top so the height of the piece was 30".
I backed it with a soft pink polka dot flannel and topstitched around the whole thing, and voilà, finished!This blanket is so bright and busy that it hurts my eyes to look at it. Good thing babies like bright colors...