Blogger's Quilt Festival: Pal's Bookcase Quilt

Hi!  Welcome to my little corner of the blogosphere.  As part of Amy's Blogger's Quilt Festival this fall, I wanted to show you an older quilt.  Unfortunately, I don't have very many finishes from the past 6 months because I am pregnant with twins and life has been a little crazy.  However, the doctor just put me on modified home bedrest, so I should have 3 to 6 weeks left to finish as many sewing projects as I can before the boys get here!  Yay!

Last year, I made this quilt for my sister.  She has a name, but I just call her Pal.  She LOVES to read and has TONS of books.  I'm kind of jealous of her book collection.  And her bookcase quilt.

My original inspiration for this quilt came from here. 

I wanted to make the books nice and thick, partly to make my job easier, and partly because my sister has so many THICK books!  I'm sometimes amazed at how fast she can read through them all.

Did you notice my little mistake?  Yep.  There are two floating books on the top shelf.  My bad.  

I tried my hand at straight line quilting (okay - wonky straight line quilting - but I think I like it) for the background.  I couldn't decide what to do with the rest, so I just meandered.  Quilting with different color thread in the bobbin is too scary for me, so the quilting shows up really well on the back!

I'm not sure what I intended Pal to use this quilt for, since she is so tall and the quilt isn't quite long enough to fit over her feet (sorry pal).  But it turns out that she decided to hang it on the wall in her apartment!  It looks AWESOME there.  Someday I want to make one of these for myself.

Now, if you haven't heard of Amy's Quilt Festival, and you have a LOT of time on your hands, go check out the rest of the entries!  (The link is at the top of my sidebar.)  There are some pretty awesome ones.  And at the time of my writing this, there are only 472 quilts.  Isn't the quilt blog world amazing?

Birthday Stuff

I have sort of been sewing up a storm recently.
I made my first big quilt top, and this is the best picture I have of it.  All the other ones are pretty bad.  It isn't finished yet because I have to quilt it and I'm a little nervous about that.

But I HAVE made a few other things.
For Shannan's birthday, Kimberly made this little crosstitch and I turned it into a pillow.  I even designed the hearts all by myself!

Then, for Angie's birthday, I decided at the very last minute that I wanted to make her a bookcase quilt.  When I first saw a picture of something like this I figured it would be PERFECT for my book loving, editing graduate sister.  SO I worked long and hard on it and had it ready... a few weeks after her birthday.  I hope Pal likes it.  There are MANY flaws in it, especially since I am still learning how to quilt.  Hopefully nobody looks too closely at the stitching on the back of the quilt.  And if you notice something odd about the design, I'll just go ahead and point it out to you.  The two slanted books on the top shelf are FLOATING.  I forgot that I needed to have both books touch the bottom of the shelf.  Ah well.  You wouldn't have noticed if I hadn't pointed it out, right?

And there you have it.  Just a few things I have been doing in my spare time.