Breaks and Babies

Anyone who has continued clicking through my posts through the ups and downs of the last few years will understand why this post resonated with me so much.  Breaks will happen, life does ebb and flow...the secret is to not let breaks become full stops.  That is what I am committing to.  That, and maybe fewer breaks.

Well, here I am in the sewing room continuing to work on baby quilts.  There is a certain challenge in making gifts.  There is this tension between making what I want to make and making what I think the other person will like - looking for that place where the two intersect, if such a place exists.  I have been playing around with different ideas as I suggested a few posts ago, but recently began to get frustrated because nothing I came up with seemed "right" for the friend with the soonest due date, and neither did anything I had on hand already seem appropriate.

I finally decided to revisit the baby registry and after looking at all the yellow and green prints that she'd chosen for the things on the registry I glanced around my space and my eye rested on a yellow and green print that I have been in love with lately (from a dress I bought at a thrift store intending to wear but that turned out to have a small tar stain on it that I had missed).  I decided to pull fabrics that I had on hand that would work with that print, and suddenly I started to see what might be at the intersection between my style and their tastes.  This is what I came up with:

It is simple, but the best baby quilts usually are.  The light fabric is a buttery soft butter yellow flannel.



To me it is sweet, but not saccharin, baby appropriate, but still a tiny bit edgy.



Finally something I'm satisfied with.

Now I just have to quilt it, but that's the relatively easy part.

Just in Time for Sweater Weather

I say all the time that I love living in a place with four seasons.  It's not that this isn't true.  I do like having four distinct seasons, because I appreciate the contrast and think that spring and summer would never be so nice if they didn't come after fall and winter.

That being said, there are few people you hear complaining more at the end of summer than me.  There are lots of wonderful things about fall, certainly.  It's a great season in many ways.  But it can take it's time getting here.  I find it a little hard to let go of the warm, no jacket, no worries weather.

This year, though, I will be ready to go having finally finished this project...



This quilt/coverlet/blanket (no batting...what do you call it?), the early origins of which can be found here, is made from felted fool sweaters that I collected over a few years.  Most of them came to me pre-felted - either because they were mine and I felted them accidentally (oops!) or because I found them at the thrift store or at the shelter I used to work at already felted - no doubt rendered unusable to the original owner due to a mistaken trip through the dryer.

I love that this project enabled me to give new life to these objects that had been rendered unfit for their original purpose (being worn as a sweater of a particular size!) and might have therefore been thought to be useless.  I realize more and more how much we miss when we look at the world that way!



Backed with blue flannel and minimally quilted in the ditch.



It's about 60"x60".