Hello again!

I'm sorry to be less than regular in my blogging of late.  No worries - my sewing machine has been humming along at an impressive (for me) clip for the past few months.  But, if you might recall, last spring I finished a quilt for my niece.  It still makes me happy.  Well, there is supposed to be a matching quilt for my other niece, and in between some machine difficulties and general lack of enthusiasm for tackling what I now know from experience will be a long and tedious process, that quilt got put at the bottom of my sewing to-do list.  For an embarrassingly long time. 

So every project I've worked on since finishing that first quilt last year has felt like I've been two-timing that second quilt.  And since somehow not blogging about the other projects means that the second quilt won't find out about them, not blogging has made me feel better about my cheating.  Crazy, right?  Significant progress has finally been made on the second quilt of late, though, so I feel like I can come out of my sewing closet about my other recent finishes. 

Enough writing.  It's time for some pretty pictures, right?  So my friend AmyLouWho and I have been busy sewing up a storm for some of the many babies that have been popping up around here.  And can I just say, I love collaborative efforts?!?  They are awesome. 

This one was for a friend who was expecting her second, a little boy.  I've had a *major* crush on Nicey Jane since it first came out, and I *might* have stashed/hoarded a small mountain of it.  Seriously.  I finally overcame my fears, though, and made that first cut.  It was so hard!

I used Oh, Fransson's Charm square baby quilt pattern for this one, with a few modifications.  My favorite baby quilt size is 40" x 48", so I increased the square size to 6" unfinished.  The horizontal sashing also grew to 2.5" finished, with the top and bottom coming in at 5" finished. 

Amy did the quilting on this one - some happy loops/figure eights running horizontally.  Great work, Amy!

While I like the look of a pieced back, on a baby quilt, it's just too much work for me.  So a happy panel of the bubbles did the trick.

 With some lovely striped binding to finish it off.

While cutting into Nicey Jane may have initially been painful (and I may have taken advantage of some sales to restock/add to my mountain), in the end, it was worth it.  Seven months after finishing it, this quilt still makes me smile. 

And since Amy and I finished four more quilts in January and February alone, in addition to the one we're currently working on and some solo projects I've had, I've got enough happy quilts to keep this little blog going for awhile now!  Hopefully :)