Blogaversary and Basting

Can you believe it!!!  It's my blog's two year anniversary!  Back when I started this blog, I didn't really know anything about blogging or if it was for me.  Two years later I'm just so thrilled and thankful for all the people that I have met while blogging and all the lessons that I have learned through the enormously generous blogging community.  Thank you to all those who read and follow my blog.  Let's have a cupcake to celebrate!

I'm also making a lot of progress on the baby quilt for my sister's new little girl due in February.  I've got the front and back completely pieced.

I'm really pleased with the fabric combinations especially because everything for this quilt came out of my stash.  Nope, I didn't buy one new piece of fabric!  I'm not against buying new fabric when I need it, but since I have to order fabric online or drive almost an hour to the nearest quilt shop, I'm trying to use what I have first.  Even that crazy pink stripe that had to be starched stiff before it would stop stretching!!!! 

If you read my last post, you'll know that I started with the red, cream, and black Olivia the pig fabric.  I then had to dig deep in the stash to find enough pink, cream, and black to balance it all out.  My favorite fabric is the little pink, red, and black floral fabric and the black with red and white dot fabric.  I really wanted to use that black red and white dot fabric in this quilt, but I didn't quite have enough so I had to get creative and used some cherry fabric in one block and some floral fabric in another to finish the chevron .  I actually like that rogue block a lot.  It's the rebel in me :)

I'm also trying something totally new to me.  I've spray basted this quilt.  Normally I baste by hand using a herringbone stitch, but I'm trying this method to see how I like it.  So far I'm not too sure.  It was a bit messy, but that may be my inexperience, and it really smells bad (like burnt plastic).  But, it's sticking really well and it flattened out nicely.  

I'm going to start quilting this on my machine by tomorrow so I'll let you all know if the spray effects the stitching at all.  I'm still not totally sure how I want to quilt this either.  I'm torn between doing something that follows the chevrons or FMQ an all over floral pattern.  I have some nice King Tut variegated pink thread that I'll be using for the quilting.

I'm also trying to think of a good name for this quilt and so far I've come up with nothing.  I could use some help.  Suggestions anyone?  

Blogaversary and Buttons

I can't believe that it's already been a year since I started posting on this blog. Wow, the time has flow by and I'm proud to say that I had a few good posts and lots of fun with the many people that I've met in the blogging community. Thank you all for making this experience fun and rewarding.  Let's have a birthday donut to celebrate!

Lately, I've been making a ton of hats and leggings for my local people. Many of these hats feature button accents using the vintage buttons that I have in my stash. Lots of these buttons have great shapes, but the color is not right for my project or the white makes them look cheap. The solution, dye. Yep, you can dye many plastic buttons with plain ol' Rit dye. They have instructions on their web site on how to do it.

I love these buttons because they look like smarties candies, but the white doesn't do anything for me.  I followed the Rit dye instructions, but I wanted a much deeper color so I ended up leaving mine in the dye bath for about 1hr along with this next set of buttons that I also just love because of there unusual texture.  Don't they look much more elegant and expensive in the brown.

I think that they really turned out great and for those of you who have wanted to try button dying, it really does work. The only thing I might warn you about is to test your color combinations out before committing special buttons to the dye bath.  I wanted a brown with a hint of green so I used dye combination brown #3 using 1tsp of Coco brown and 1tsp of dark green in the powder.

You can also use the dye bath to tint colored buttons.  I have a set of pink buttons that are super cute, and I wanted to use them on a pink and mauve hat that I made.  The problem was that they were just too bright, so I brought them down a notch in the same dye bath that I used on the other buttons.  The only difference is that I only left them in for about 1.5 minutes so that they were only tinted and didn't completely loose their pink coloring.


























The brown buttons go much better with this green hat than they would have if they were left white.  While this is not really economical to do for just a small amount of buttons (since dye costs about $2 a box), it would be worth it for a larger batch of buttons or for coloring special buttons that you want to use on a specific project.  I defiantly will be doing this again in the future.

Small Blog Meet

Hello to everyone visiting here from Lily's.  As you can see, I am a new "baby" blogger with only one real post to my name, but I have some great quilts and crafts planned for this year and I can't wait to start sharing them on this blog.  I also have really enjoyed looking at some of the other small blogs that I've visited today.  Let me just give a shout out to Michelle at semi-organized Chaos who say's that one of her goals this year is to learn curved piecing.  My current project is noting but curves so maybe I'll try to do a post more about how I do curved blocks.  I also visited The Elven Garden where Jess from Australia has an impressive number of beautiful projects displayed from 2011, and I perused the Addicted to fabric blog where Mary longarms from Tehachapi California, which just happens to be a great little town where my family and I would go to every apple season to pick apples.  I hope to visit several more sites so that I can get to know my fellow bloggers better this year.