Doll Quilt Swap 7 Progress and Faux-made Girls clothes

Thanks so much for delurking to tell me about knitting, everyone! I know a lady in town who can show me how to knit, and I will definitely check out that wool shop on 8th st next time I'm in Saskatoon, Anna, to pick up some wool and needles.

Well, I have been puttering away at my Doll Quilt for DQS7 for the past two weeks now. It has been slow going becuase a) its warm out, so I feel the need to take the boys outside, b) I'm experimenting with newish techniques, so I wanted to make sure I got them right, c)SOMEONE needed a Batman mask in a hurry,


and d) I changed my mind on the colours and techinques to use for the birds and flowers two or three times


Anyway, this is what I've got so far:

Everything is pieced, the birds are fused on and the quilt is sandwiched together. The flowers are not attached yet, I'll do that after I machine quilt it. I'm going to use three colours of thread to quilt it, and I'm quite impressed with myself because I actually went out and bought some new bobbins so I could do this fairly quickly.

Up until this point in my sewing career (I have had my machine for 15 yrs now) I have been running with 3 bobbins. Yes, you heard right. Three. I usually have one black, one cream and one of whatever colour I happen to be sewing a garment in at the moment. With clothes and other things where all the bobbin threads will be on the inside, I tend to keep running with whatever colour I have in at the moment until I run out of thread, then change it to match the top thread at that point.

I'm finding, however, that I am switching between projects a lot more lately, and I feel bad sending other people quilt blocks with grey thread on the top and purple thread on the bottom, and with quilting you can see the thread on both sides of the quilt. So rather than what I have been doing, which is to unwind the remaining thread off the bobbin, wrap it around a business card and generally leave it somewhere silly so that my two year old or my cat finds it and spreads it all around the basement, I thought it might be time to get more bobbins.

In fact, I was so impressed with the look of my new clear plastic bobbins (my old ones are metal) with the pretty thread in them that I tried to take an artsy photo of them:
I think I need a better camera for that to work, though. Something with a detachable lens and 500 features. Or a non-subterranean sewing room (why is it that I can't spell because correctly on the first try, ever, but I can spell subterranean?).

I had a few extra birds and flowers kicking around the basement that didn't end up co-ordinating with my doll quilt, so I used them to make a birthday present for my 5 year old friend, Bea. I picked up a hat and t-shirt and embellished them for her:



It was kind of funny trying to find a plain hat and t-shirt for these, actually. The town I live in has basically two places you can buy clothes for kids (one for adults). I went to Extra Foods to look for something to applique for Bea, and I found that almost all the girls clothes already had Faux-made embellishments. Like, pretend appliqued t-shirts and sweaters with little felt apples with purposely thick, clunky embroidery stitches around them. Seriously, you know hand made is getting to be cool when chain stores start pretending to make funky hand made clothes.