Elation

Posted on August 11, 2011 by therealnanann

I jumped right back onto the quilting train, and this time met success! SO HAPPY!

Our new craft, shown in its natural habitat: surrounded by other crafts! We just received the bookshelf on the right and it has become our kids’ craft shelf and resides in the kitchen, as you can see. It was filled within 2.67 seconds of being named Craft Shelf.

This is a little project that my girls and I made for my husband’s birthday. I totally stole the idea from here. (I originally found it on Pinterest through a friend but thought I’d source the original location.) The girls chose the fabric for their handprints — they both chose blues since that is Daddy’s favorite color.

We gave it a little late to my husband because I was, once again, avoiding the quilting part of the project. (Do we see a theme here???)

But I needed to do it, and this time I went with a bit of a plan. I decided to…PRACTICE. Sounds so simple, doesn’t it?

I started with deciding how to quilt it. I wanted the same echoing around the hands as the original, but I wanted to do something else in the remaining space. I did practice free-motion quilting around the hands on some scraps, but that ended up too inconsistent for my liking still. Echoing takes a lot of precision! and skill! and even more practice than I was willing to do! So I simply sewed it normally, which was really easy, even with lots of curves, on this little piece.

As for the remaining space, I poked around a website that has some good tips and designs for free motion quilting, A Few Scraps, and found a cute little heart idea. Perfect. I practiced drawing it on paper first, and then practiced sewing it on scraps. And then it really was just perfect when I quilted it on my little piece.

I’m swooning over my hearts! Even up close they look Fab!

Thank goodness this isn’t a real quilt though and instead framed up — the back of the piece is a bit, um, knotty.

The girls were thrilled with the final product, and their Daddy liked it too. As he told Julia, “now you really will be 3 forever!” (He often asks the girls to not grow up and stay 3 or 5 or whatever age they are forever. Julia insists that she *has* to grow up!)