Sunday, March 30, 2008

Olivia's Quilt...

A couple of weeks ago, I went to my sister Elaine's house to quilt for the weekend. We had such a fun time. She has a new darling sewing room...I really should have taken pictures of it! I will have to take some next time I head over there. She was inspired by her Heather Bailey fabrics and Heather's sewing room (check out Heather's blog at hellomynameisheather.com).

We worked on some quilts, ate, shopped, ate and quilted more. We really had a fun weekend together. We even spent about 2 hours in an antique store buying all of their sewing notions (buttons, threads, & ric rac). She had been complaining about her iron not working well enough for quilting...it kept shutting off automatically and wasn't hot enough half of the time. She saw an old antique iron (barely new enough to have an electric plug) in the shop and bought it! We took it home and it worked perfectly. It looks cute in her room too.

We made some adorable pin cushions out of her Heather Bailey scraps (the pattern is on her blog). We used our antique buttons that we bought that weekend.

While we were there, I made two quilts. One was for my new nephew Thomas (who was blessed today)...I will post pictures later.

The other one was a quilt for Olivia. She is one of my favorite little girls in our neighborhood. She is one of Nathan's friends. I had found some "Olivia" fabric at The Corn Wagon and I couldn't resist. We pieced it together that weekend and even took it to one of Elaine's friends to quilt on her cool machine. We added some of our antique buttons (oh, so many uses for those) and some ribbon to the quilt.



I brought it home and bound it myself. It allowed me to practice binding...I have always dreaded that part of quilting in the past. I would beg my neighbor, sister, mom or mother-in-law to help me. By the end of the Olivia quilt I had it down. However, the beginning is another story. Let's just say that I hope it washes up and doesn't fall apart!


Nathan and I took it to her today for her birthday.
I think she liked it...


4 comments:

Noah And Kai said...

I am so impressed! That makes the quilt we made for Tracey look like a third-grade project. Nice.

Stacy said...

Hello Ellen! I saw your blog address on facebook! You can look at my blog if you would like at nandshansenfamily.blogspot.com. Hope you are doing well!

Stacey said...

Ellen, Your quilt is amazing!

Anonymous said...

Ellen, I still can't believe you made Olivia this incredible heirloom quilt! I am still trying to convince her to let me hang it on her wall. No luck though. Thank you so much. You never stop! You are amazing.
ps: you convinced me that blogging is family history; I'll be calling you to help me get ours going! Your blog is beautiful and it's so fun to see all the great pictures.
Christy