I never really thought the kids would get excited about quilts, but they were positively giddy when I pulled out each of their finished quilt tops last night.

I took out B's "yellow brick road" top first since I just finished piecing it together. He literally giggled with anticipation as I was unfolding it and laying it out on his bed to check the size. He jumped right on and declared it to be "awesome"!

click for bigness!

He insisted that his brother come upstairs to admire it. Then, he and S announced that they wanted to see S's rocket quilt top (pieced long ago, but still not yet quilted) too. B immediately announced that it was "cooool!" and S proudly stretched himself out on top of it for a picture.

click for the big picture!

And in the other room, wee one was rolling around on her funky sock monkey quilt top (also awaiting quilting). As soon as she saw it, she dashed off to find her sock monkey toy so he could monkey around with her on her monkey quilt.

click!

Now there just remains the little matter of quilting these babies before they can finally be given to my babies. In the meantime, each of the kids is keeping a copy of the picture to enjoy until they can have the real thing.

Yes, I'm a maverick. I didn't spend the weekend at Rhinebeck, like the rest of my party. Instead, I spent the weekend palling around with a known sewist.

I thought I was going to go to Rhinebeck. For real. Hubby had been making plans for how to entertain the kiddos for the day and a half I would be gone. It was all set. Then Rhinebeck snuck up on me. Suddenly it was "this coming Saturday" and I was in the middle of sewing Halloween costumes and fall outfits for wee one. Out of nowhere this image popped into my head: the possibility of spending my free weekend at home, sewing. My knitting and sewing buddy, Rhinebeck ride, and now fellow maverick, Johanna, had the exact same idea. So we did it. Our husbands took the kids out and away and we sewed and sewed and sewed and ate and sewed and sewed some more. It was awesome! I felt like a kid again, with no place to be and no responsibilities. I felt like Ron Livingston in Office Space when he decides not to care about work anymore. I felt like the maverick John McCain imagines himself to be. I'm not saying that having a family, being a knitter, or going to Rhinebeck are burdens I needed to be liberated from. It's just that it was so ridiculously fun to throw all my plans aside and do something totally different.

So here's what I sewed:

click for the big picture!

I finished the quilt top of my 2007 block of the month quilt. Twelve blocks, sashing and a pretty, pretty Kaffe Fassett border.

click for the big picture!

And I pieced together the big blocks for the sock monkey quilt. Wee one can tell that it'll be all hers once I get the border and backing fabric. For now, she'll have to be content with her new ruffly corduroy pants.

look they're the same color as Elmo!

These are from another Pink Fig pattern, the Bella Pants. They were so fun to make and I totally adore them! Wee one likes to shuffle around in them, watching the ruffles flop around and listening to them swish up against each other.

I also made progress on wee one's black dress and the boys' Halloween costumes. I'll show you more of those this week.

So I may have been a maverick this weekend, but I'm not switching parties just yet. I missed all of you whom I usually see at Rhinebeck! I've shown you what I did this weekend. Now you tell me a little about what you did and what I missed!

I've been playing with little monkeys on the bed all weekend! I waited until I had a whole evening to dedicate to sewing, arranged all the pieces of my funky monkey quilt on the bed and sewed them up into 16" blocks.

I love this part of the process. All those little bits come together to make big bits and then the big bits come together to make even bigger bits and so on and so on. It's so satisfying. Way more so than, say, sewing up the pieces of a knitted sweater. Sorry, I love to seam up sweaters, but it's just not as neat and geometric in its progression as this is. Plus, it would be way hard to knit a little monkey butt as cute as this into a sweater!

Yes, today is in fact national quilting day. I'll be celebrating by working on my funky monkey quilt. I've missed those little monkeys!

I've cut and organized all the center and corner blocks.

(oh, here's the pattern I'm using)

And last night I started sewing all the strips together for the four-patches.

Many quilts made up of squares can be pieced together from strips of fabric. Yes, if crocheters are hookers, quilters are strippers! Like converting a knitting pattern to be worked in the round, sewing together strips and then cutting them into smaller units just goes much faster than the traditional method of working with a bazillion tiny pieces. Well, a bazillion may be exaggerating a bit. Let's do the math together, shall we? There are 27 strip sets in the picture above (that was 54 strips, sewn together in pairs). After pressing the seams, I spent about three hours cutting them into square pairs, getting about 8 from each strip set. Soooo, that's a grand total of 216 square pair units, which will make 108 four-patch units.

All told, that's over 300 cuts, but only 27 seams so far. Once I sew together the four-patch units, I'll have sewn 135 seams. If I'd done everything the traditional way, I'd have cut 432 individual squares, which would mean almost 500 cuts and over 300 seams.

Doesn't this sound like fun? Did I mention there were monkeys?

Thanks to Sew Mama Sew's quilting month, I've been playing around with different quilt blocks all week!

The double irish chain block.

The shoo fly block.

The ohio star block.

The Dutchman's Puzzle block. (You know the one with the flying geese that wouldn't fly!)

And three more pinwheel stars for wee one's scrappy star quilt.

Someone's gone and declared it to be quilting month, so bear with me if I indulge myself in a little more quilting than usual here. (Update: look for my 9-patch block in the first week round-up of the Sew Mama Sew block-along!)

There are two quilts that I'm just getting started with now, both using the super fun sock monkey fabric from Moda.
The first uses all the cutie patootie monkey prints from that line (you may recall that I'm using this pattern). I've finished cutting out all the little monkey pieces and am ready to start sewing the quilt top together. I just can't get enough of those funny funky monkeys!!

The second quilt is a little more interesting. The latest fabrics in the sock monkey collection contain some of the prints you see above with the monkeys playing jacks or jumping on pogo sticks, but there are also some lovely little pastel stripes, plaids, dots and solids that coordinate with the sock monkey prints. I've taken all those fabrics out and have come up with a plan to make a scrappy star quilt for my little wee monkey with them. I'm using this pattern from the February issue of American Patchwork & Quilting.

I loved the stars as soon as I saw them. They're more delicate and seem to have more movement than the star I made for my block of the month quilt. But they're also a bit more complicated. So I decided to pull out some real scrap fabric (something a friend picked up in a yard sale) and sew up a sample star.

Each star (and there will be 18 of them in the final quilt) consists of 16 pieces, all but 4 of which are pieced together from half-square triangles (remember our math lesson on half-square triangles?!).

Whew, I can do it. Now to try it on the real fabric.

Piecing a star together is taking me about an hour (did I mention that there are 18 stars in the quilt? oh, and 17 other blocks only slightly less complicated?). Here's why...

Look at all those seams! But I love it, I love it, I love it.

We all know I love those sock monkeys on the funky monkey fabrics by Moda. Did you know that in addition to having prints with those funny little monkeys, prints that look like knitted socks (see my post yesterday), and even prints with bandages (for when the monkeys bump their heads!), there is also a panel with the whole "5 little monkeys jumping on the bed" story? Knitbuddy Johanna got the panel for wee one for Christmas and last week I sewed it up into a book for her.

Five funky monkeys jumping on the bed.... momma called the doctor.....

Like the "Little Engine that Could" panel that I used to make a fabric book for Shannon's baby, this one wasn't set up to be made into a book. It required a little extra cutting and rearranging (but only a little as the story is MUCH shorter!). Since I was already doing the extra couple of steps, I decided to make a fun binding for the book's pages with the dotted fabric surrounding the story squares.

This last little monkey on the bed is my favorite, along with the dizzy one on the back cover. Will those funny funky monkeys never learn from their mistakes?

Now wee one has her sock monkey book, but is that enough for me? Oh no. Two weeks ago when I went to NYC and visited Purl Patchwork, the woman working in the store as we came in just happened to be cutting up fat quarters of all their funky monkey fabric to sell as fabric bundles. I didn't need any more encouragement than that! I got a funky monkey fat quarter bundle and have also picked up some fat quarters of the follow-up line called Monkey n' Around, where the sock monkeys return to bounce on pogo sticks and play jacks.

I've already started cutting pieces to make this quilt because it just looks like so much fun. Man I love those sock monkeys!

PS - Attention all sock junkies: a little bird told me that Sunshine Yarns has started a new website and Dani is kicking things off with a ton of new Harry Potter colorways like Gillyweed and my favorite, Weasleys Wizard Wheezes! They look so great! All this fabulous sock yarn and all these cute sock monkeys are making me want to knit socks again....(yes, yes, more on that to come later this week!)