Emma's B irthday Present

I decided to make a hand made gift for Emma for her birthday. Here it is all together:

She is in that stage where she loves to carry around containers and put things in and out of them, so I thought one of these tidy totes (free tutorial courtesy of JCasa) would be perfect. I modified the original design because i didn't feel like going out to get interfacing, so I used two of my quilt-as-you-go blocks instead. I felt like I was at a dead end with that quilt and didn't really want to make any more blocks, so this was a perfect solution for me. I used a ribbon for the handle, but next time I think I would make a fabric one or find some heavier twill tape.

This is the little doll I was talking about earlier. This is my third one of these, and the dress is still very much a going concern - I don't mind how this one came out, although it took a lot of messing around to get to it.

This is the doll quilt I made, matching the one I made for the church fund raiser (which sadly didn't raise much money). I used some 3" strips from a jelly roll. It made two doll quilts with a front like this:

and a back like this. I think the grey is really too dark for a little girl doll quilt, but I am short on time and brain power these days, so I just went with it.

Its strange when you move to a new place and your surroundings are so radically different. Your whole colour and design asesthetic undergoes this shift. I feel like I'm in the middle of a colour / pattern shift right now, or maybe just overwhelmed with images and colours and experience, so everything I've tried to make lately seems muddled and unclear to me.

In any case, we also had our first real snow on Saturday. This:

led to this:

The snow man is on scale with the size of our yard.