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.

All the blocks of B's yellow brick road quilt are done! They are so fun, so cool, and oh so yellow.

click for the BIG picture of some sample blocks

There are actually only three different types of blocks: some with 3 fabrics, some with 4 fabrics, and some with 5 fabrics. They were extremely simple to put together with easy strip piecing instructions. The only real difficulty now is going to be arranging them. This is where the patterns always leave you with the inadequate instruction to "arrange in a pleasing manner". Harumpf, fat lot of help you people are! I've got 54 blocks, each with a variety of 18 different yellow prints. It's total yellow chaos here!

But I think B's going to love it. Go, yellow!

After washing and pressing almost 60 fat quarters, I have cut the first strips for B's yellow brick road quilt and my 40 fat quarters quilt.

Six strips from each of the 40 fat quarters - that's 240 strips of fabric! Then four strips from each of B's 20 fat quarters - 80 strips that I've already started to piece together into subunits for the blocks.

B says he likes them so far! And I'm spending the day in quilt class with mine... yum!

My quilting's been on hiatus for a while since I finished the neutral quilt and the purple quilt. No idea why. I just found myself doing more knitting, that's all. But the itch has resurfaced and it's time to get quilting again. I've still got five finished quilt tops ready for quilting (including son S's rocket quilt from last year) and, coming up, two exciting new projects.

First, a yellow quilt for B, who loves everything yellow, including, it turns out, yellow fabrics. He was recently subjected to a full hour of shopping in the fabric store with me and managed to overcome his near-fatal boredom the minute I told him I would make him a quilt if he'd help me pick out fabrics. We put together this lovely collection of yellow prints - his favorites are the coins and the flags - and I've chosen the perfectly named Yellow Brick Road pattern for his quilt. The pattern has a fun scrappy look that I hope will work well with the mix of prints we've chosen.

The poor boy was trapped in the quilt shop for so long with me because I was searching for 40 fat quarters to make the so-called 40 fat quarter quilt, a class offered by my local quilt shop (you can see a sample of the quilt in the background of this shop photo).

And these are my 40 fat quarters: the full set of Anna Maria Horner's Good Folks collection, a dozen or so fabrics from her Garden Party collection, and some Kaffe Fassetts thrown in for good measure. I love Anna Maria Horner's fabrics and am so excited to have found a project in which I can use ALL of them! And I'm definitely keeping this quilt for myself. As long as hubby approves, it'll be going in our room on the bed.

Quilting on!

This was how S described the quilt he wanted me to make for him.

Yes, he suddenly asked if I would make him a quilt. I suspect that by now he knows that the answer to this sort of question will always be an enthusiastic YES! And not only did I say yes, but, since I'm constantly trolling the internet for fun and fabulous fabrics, I'd already bookmarked some awesome rocket fabric.

He liked it and we got to work on designing the quilt. He would have had me just sew three strips of fabric together - stripes on the bottom, rockets in the middle and blue sky on top - and wrap his favorite color red all around it, but I wanted something a little more interesting. I flipped through the few quilt books and magazines I have and found this design, Just Sweet Enough, from Last-Minute Patchwork + Quilted Gifts. (Love that book!)

Joelle Hoverson does such a good job in this book coming up with clean, simple designs that are striking but not overly complicated. In this design, she's essentially got horizontal stripes of several different solids, but since they're broken up into columns and separated again with the background fabric, the result is really neat. This was going to be perfect for S's rocket quilt!

I sketched out what the quilt would look like for final approval from S before I bought the fabric. I've learned from previous design collaborations with the boys that they are completely incapable of imagining the design in the book in any other color or print. Nope, the picture's got to be exactly right or they'll keep insisting that they didn't want pink and yellow. So I even made a little mock-up in Photoshop so he could really see it.

The design approved, I bought the fabric (I got most of the fabrics from this awesome etsy seller) and once I had it, I got to work washing and cutting it all. There's a lot to be done before you can get sewing! But once that was finished, sewing it up was a snap. (Seriously, I thought "last minute patchwork" would have to be a joke, but this one went FAST people!)

click for the BIG version

We like it! I love those zoom-y stripes on the bottom. And he's sure got plenty of blue sky for the rockets to fly up to.

There's still the actual quilting to be done (that's sewing the quilt top here together with the batting and backing) and I'm planning on trying something a little fancier with that, so this is still a ways from being done, but so far, so good. It's so satisfying to be able to bring something to life that one of the boys has kind of dreamed up in his head!