I Made a Little Quilt That Is a Ghost for The Little Ghost Who Was a Quilt

The best thing, for me, about having a small niece, is that I can still make all the cute children's things that I want to make, because I still have someone to give them to!

Honestly, I might actually make more things for my niece than I did for my own kids, if you don't count things like clothes or homeschool materials or collaborative crafts, because when my own kids were this little kid's age, I was too busy parenting little kids to get enough crafty time to actually make them cute things! My younger kid was four years old by the time I made her first quilt, oops!

So when I saw The Little Ghost Who Was a Quilt in a local bookstore a few weeks ago, and I was immediately charmed by it, and then immediately after that I wanted to make a little ghost quilt--I did!

Happily, the book's endpapers feature the quilt design of the titular little ghost, making it super easy to see what similar fabrics would look like. And even more happily, I did not have to buy a single thing to make this quilt! To be fair, a couple of the fabrics that I used are remnants that I'd previously bought with no purpose in mind, but everything else was honest-to-goodness scraps and stash, from the fabric for the top to the cotton batting to the cotton sheet I used as the backing.

All of the pieces are 5" squares. I wanted my quilt to be 10 blocks by 12 blocks, so I needed 120 blocks total. I sort of tried to keep the colors even between purple, aqua, and white, but it's a little blue-heavy. There are just a few grey blocks scattered in, because it turns out that I don't actually own very much grey fabric. The little ghost quilt in the book also has tan blocks, but for some reason I don't have ANY tan fabric, and anyway, I wasn't really feeling the tan colorway... which is perhaps one reason for why I don't own any tan fabric, lol!

To make the quilt, you lay out your pieces and rearrange them until you like the way they look as a whole, then stack them by rows, piece each row, then piece the rows themselves together, being quite fussy about lining up the corners:

Then you take up your entire family room floor making your quilt sandwich!

This is why I can never say that my creations come from a pet-free home, ahem. I would NEVER want my creations to come from a pet-free home!

I pinned my quilt quite well to the batting/backing, trimmed it out roughly, then quilted it via stitch in the ditch, earning myself yet another day of having a wonky back in the process. Why must quilting be so ergonomically incorrect?!?

Here's how it looks all nicely quilted and ready to be properly trimmed:

I got through trimming the batting before my supervisor came to check up on me:

I trimmed the backing to 1" wider than the quilt on all sides, then folded it in half twice, clipped it in place using every plastic sewing clip I own, and stitched it down:

Proper quilters use a blind stitch or another invisible stitch, but I'm happy with a plain old zig-zag.

And there's my little ghost quilt!

The lighting was soooo perfect right when I finished, but in the hour it took me to run out and do early voting, it got completely overcast. But I had to take my photos anyway, because Halloween presents are more fun if you can get them in the mail in time for the recipient to receive them before, you know, Halloween!

...and that's a bunch of cat hairs there on the purple block, sigh. I did wash it and dry it, and then go over it with the lint roller, before I put it in the mail.

Because you don't have to follow a pattern, just make sure that the pieces look cute together as a whole, this is actually one of the quickest quilts I've ever sewn:

I'm always especially pleased when I can work any of my favorite meaningful fabrics into a piece. Below, the smocked blue fabric used to be part of the only skirt that my older kid ever willingly wore. The silky white fabric to its right is actually from my wedding dress!

My favorite part, though, is that I used variegated thread to quilt it, and it looks so nice from the back!

Isn't it crazy that you can make something so substantial, and so pretty and perfect, entirely from materials you already have on hand? Historically, that's exactly what quilting should be, including reusing those bits of old clothes, and I LOVE that there's a children's book that encourages children to notice and care for the simple, unassuming gift of a patchwork quilt:

I didn't have any ghosts on hand to put into it, though, so that part's going to have to figure itself out later. 

P.S. Want to follow along with my craft projects, books I'm reading, road trips to random little towns, looming mid-life crisis, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!

The Bookshelf Quilt is Finished

The glorious day has finally come that the bookshelf quilt is finished!

Its finished size is approximately 65"x95", so more or less within the standard sizing for a twin-sized quilt. I'd made the older kid's dorm room quilt more of a full size, thinking it would serve her better over the years, but with the bed lofted that extra quilt width is really in the way, so it turns out that a twin-sized quilt really IS the best size for a twin-sized bed, ahem.

The grey background fabric is a really nice piece of cotton yardage that I found at Goodwill--our local Goodwills have raised the prices on most items to a shocking degree, but you can still find great deals on fabric cuts.. probably because the staff don't know what they even are.

Most of the books are stash/scrap fabric from my own collection, but about halfway through piecing the blocks I realized that picking through my fabric to dig out the right scraps, then painstakingly cutting around all the other random cut-out bits and old seams and crap to make them the right sizes was taking WAY longer than it did to just sew my jellyroll pieces into books... so I hopped over to Joann's and had the kid pick out a couple more jellyroll sets. I do really like the scraps that I used, though, especially the red/green batik canvas that used to be bedroom curtains in the house before this one, and the Pegasus prints that I sewed a ton of stuff for my horse-loving older kid with, and all the various other bits and pieces of kid clothes and home projects and pretty things long past:

Here's my view from the ladder I'm perched on. My partner is rightfully refusing to help me because I rightfully got mad at him after I'd asked him to help me and then caught him PUTTING DUCT TAPE ON MY QUILT. He thought it would look better if it was photographed hanging, and apparently duct tape is the best way to hang a handmade, heirloom quilt that his wife is barely 12 hours from having completed:

Kind of reminds me of the time that our newborn first-born daughter would not stop screaming so he jokingly screamed back at her, and I flatly informed him that if he EVER screamed at my child again I would divorce him.

And he never screamed at the kids again! Ahem.

I'm the proudest of those blocks with the leaning books. I got the idea from this tutorial, but I think I ended up doing mine a little differently:

The couple of empty blocks were my partner's idea, and it was BRILLIANT. I felt like I could only get away with putting a couple in there, but OMG what a time-saver, and obviously a bookshelf has to have some room for more books!

I still don't love the look of the stacked book blocks, but I do like how they break up the space. They've grown on the kid, too, mostly because she likes to do the same thing on her own bookshelves:

I'm so happy to have this quilt finished, and I'm so pleased that my kid is pleased with it--

--but dang does it make her imminent departure real. I spent most of the summer feeling a lot of anticipatory grief about both kids going away--and pretty far away, too!--but now that we're just about in the moment I'm sort of... I don't know. Kind of in a state of just pushing through and getting stuff done and being sad about it later? I am firmly reminding myself not to get all wrapped up in my own feelings so I can keep the focus on the kids and their experience, but I did also mention to my kid that although I was super happy and excited for her I would probably cry, and when I cried it didn't mean I wasn't happy and excited for her. She was all, "Yeah, I HAVE met you before. Remember that time that you randomly burst into tears, oh, let's see... THREE HOURS AGO?" And my other kid accused me of not letting her out of my sight, which is completely untrue, but yes, I likely have been staring creepily at her because I want to memorize her face before she sails literally halfway across the world.

So, I dunno, you guys. I am freaking out but also feeling like I'm too busy to freak out and if I just hold off on freaking out now I'll have plenty of time to freak out later. But my kids are going to very exciting places to do very exciting things, and they both have handmade quilts to accompany them.

P.S. Want to follow along with my craft projects, books I'm reading, road trips to random little towns, looming mid-life crisis, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!