Tuesday, August 19, 2008

Mind boggling

It is absolutely blowing my mind that my husband and I have started to discuss Emerson's first birthday party! What?!?! How the heck did that happen? Wasn't she just born?

If this is the way time passes as a parent, she will be starting kindergarten tomorrow and graduating high school in about a week. Awesome.

Photobucket

2 comments:

Erin said...

yes, that is exactly how it happens...Hunter starts Kindergarten on Monday and out of pure coincidence we've been watching lots of home moveis lately of him as a baby...I swear he was nine months old just yesterday. tear

Lauren said...

Hi there!
Yes, making a quilt was E A S Y. Basic info:
- a quilt is just three pieces: a top, batting (a layer of cotton or acrylic which goes in the middle), and the backing. The top is what can get so fancy, with people sewing all kinds of complicated patterns and stuff. But it can be just as simple as one big piece of fabric, which is what I did.
- from what I gleaned from the internet and from marthastewart.com :), there are basically two ways to construct a quilt. One (which I did) is to sew it inside out, like a pillow, leaving a section unsewn so you can turn it inside out. Then you stuff it with the batting, tuck the unsewn edge inside, and sew around all four edges. The other method is to lay all three pieces out like it will look (backing face down, then the batting, then the top face up), pin the edges in, pin the edging in there, and sew around the edges. Or something close to that.
- Lastly, a quilt has all three layers sewn together throughout, so I just did vertical lines 3" apart. You can get really fancy with it.
- tools: rotary cutter and mat :), walking foot for your machine, and safety pins for basting (basting = pinning all 3 layers together in random spots on the blanket so that as you sew the middle layer doesn't move around). A walking foot has feed dogs on top, too, so that all layers of fabric move through the machine at the same pace. My machine also came with this nifty little hook looking thing that you can stick in the side of the walking foot. You can adjust it so that it sticks out at the distance you want, and the hook part rests on the fabric. The idea is that as you're sewing parallel lines, you can line it up with the last line you sewed and therefore keep your lines all evenly spaced. I thought it was really helpful.

I think that's about it!