Planing the mermaid quilt I thought, hey wouldn’t it look really cool to have some loopy free motion quilting on the border? I knew it wouldn’t be easy after reading about it and watching some videos, but I just wanted some loops and not the fancy complicated stuff, so how hard can it be?  I ordered the foot, it came and I stuffed it away. 

Yesterday I tried my first sandwich and let me tell you: everybody who is capable of quilting even two loops that look the same is my new hero. Boy that was a classic case of overestimating myself. Maybe I should learn to walk and not to run first,  I mean I only started sewing 4 month ago for heavens sake, what was I thinking?

It’s impossible to hold the fabric straight and to move steady. I’m not even sure I can do it even if I would practice everyday, but I’m gonna try it anyway. I’ll definitely try to wear some rubber gloves the next time *sexy* and see how that goes.  So if any of you have some tips I would truly appreciate it.

In other news, look what Tony gave me for our anniversary, yeah!

Now I only have to get my sewing machine to his place and start cutting the fabric for my quilt. Because at the moment he is sitting next to me playing Mirrors Edge (the other present he got from me), while all I can think about is sewing, sewing, sewing, sewing, sewing……

I think I mentioned in my other post that I made some kind of quilt. To be exact, I made the Easy Lap Quilt from Amy Karol’s Bend the Rules Sewing, which isn’t a classic quilt in my opinion because you design “on the go”.

To be honest, this is exactly the way I like it best because it’s really hard for me to plan ahead and measure everything I need and then, when I’m half done, I figure out that I forgot something like, let’s say the seam allowance. 

I will be having so much fun with the mermaid quilt I’m planing….or maybe not.

However. The quilt was some kind of “let’s see if I can make this” sort of project, so I bought the cheapest fabric available at Ikea (or in my SO’s word: the fugliest) and a night and a day later I had my first quilt. Woohoo. 

It was a lot of fun even though the binding nearly killed me and one of our cats (read: his) had the mission to ruin my nerves and the fabric. So if the mermaid quilt won’t turn out like planned, I will definitely make and Easy Lap Quilt again - with pretty fabric this time.

Ever since I first saw Heather Ross Mendocino line i knew I had to make a quilt. The only problem is: quilts scare me. I’m bad at math, I’m bad at cutting straight and I have no patience whatsoever. I only made one quilt so far which was the Easy Lap Quilt from Amy Karols “Bend the Rules of Sewing”. Since you design on the go with this quilt, it was a great project for me because it didn’t require planing ahead. 

Anyhow, since I’ll have 3 weeks off over Christmas I thought if I don’t try to make a quilt then, I probably never will. So yesterday I made a “floor plan” for my quilt to figure out how much fabric I need, and since I tend to forget things in my calculations I asked my boyfriend to help. Let me just say this: it can be a blessing and a curse to have  a programmer-math-geek as a boyfriend :) A half hour, a few discussions and many laughs later I knew how much yardage of each fabric I had to buy and went over to fabricworm.com. I ordered 9 yards and on checkout my heart dropped: 72 $ plus 28 $ shipping. Oh boy that’s a lot for a quilt that I’ll probably gonna mess up, but I ordered it anyway. 

But there are good news too:

First, Cynthia from fabricworm mailed me today that she could fit the whole 9 yards (ha!) into a Flate Rate envelope so I only have to pay 12$ shipping to Germany.

Second, I will probably learn a lot until this quilt is finished and third, I’ll keep you posted during the process so maybe you’ll learn something too, even if it’s only some new cuss words.  

So cross your fingers that the package will arrive in time - only 3 1/2 weeks to go.