Happy Fourth and Many Moreth

There's a Gees Bend quilt exhibit coming to the Orlando Museum of Art! We went today to see the Art of the Motorcycle exhibit and the Eric Carle exhibit. Turns out three is still a little too young for the art museum, even when the artwork is colorful picture book illustrations.

I did quite a bit of sewing and organizing the fabric this weekend.

I finished up the pink and purple quilt - and washed it with our regular wash. It turned out to be soft and cozy and nice. I bound it with regular old silky blanket edging (again, the texture thing) and it was much more wrinkly than I wanted it. I let it set for a while and decided that it was OK, and washed it with our regular old laundry and it didn't fall apart. We dropped it off at the Sewing Studio for the Project Linus people to pick up. They were having a crazy 40% off the store sale and it was jam-packed. They had a bunch of gourmet fabric (like Kaffee F., etc.) that I had never seen IRL before. There were lines out the wazoo for cutting tables and to check out. If I hadn't had the whole family in tow, mabye I would have picked up something but (a)I really don't like those kinds of crowds and (b)I had just done a bunch of stash and WIP organising and I think it would have made me nasesous to buy fabric I didn't need. I have a picture of the quilt.

I discovered that I have 5 quilts queued up. That seems excessive, even to me. Here they are:

1. crib sized quilt for my new niece or nephew. I think I'm going to go with a checkerboard pattern of baby-duck-yellow and sagey-green, but with "brick" shaped squares.
2. quilt for Lala. Have a bunch of blues for it, and will probably cut out uniform sized squares and just put it all together.
3. quilt for the monkey. Black, yellow, cream. Not sure on a design, leaning toward "rail fence".
4. Chinese coin quilt. I started this about 5 years ago. I have all of the coins cut out. I sewed together one of the streams of coins this weekend. I don't think it turned out as long as it was supposed to, but maybe some ironing will help me figure it out.
5. New stash quilt thing. OK. When I was expecting LaLa, someone sent me a box jam packed with fat quarters. I cut out squares to make 4 hotpads, but never assembled them. Now, they weren't "squares" - one side should end up a half inch bigger than the other. The front was to be a four square checkerboard. So the difference there was like 1/4 inch. I'm not sure they're assembled correctly. I'm thinking about making a quilt from some of that fabric, but I guess I can let that idea marinate for a while.

In knitting news, I've been making progress on the garter stitch baby sweater. I've finished the back, separated the L and R sides and now and have finished one of the sleeves.

Oh, and other sewing progress, I finished a tote bag, sewed a whole nother (lesson: 36" probably isn't a long enough strap, either to cut in half for handles or to leave whole for a shoulder strap)

I also finished sewing on the patches for the Monkey's Cub Scout brag vest. He's just finished his first year in Boy Scouts. I think the project predates my daughter.

I also finished off these pajama pants for the monkey. The last in the series of 4 (one for DH, me and LaLa already.)

All of the fabric is out of the closet and off of the floor on my side of the room. And in some super great plastic bins - bin one is stash fabric (leftovers and whatnot) bin two is dedicated to specific projects. Sadly, though, the bins are stacked on top of eachother in my living room. So close, and yet so far.