I Sewed a Quilt for a Foster Kid. I Hope They Like Flannel!

Y'all might remember when oh, so long ago, I discovered that the kid that I never could keep pants on really liked the feel of flannel, so I bought allllllll the flannel on clearance at Joann's and sewed her soooooooo many pairs of flannel pants. 

Girl wore those flannel jammies in every wild print and pattern for YEARS, and honestly I don't remember if she, herself, eventually got tired of them or if it was me that eventually got tired enough of them to sneak them out of her wardrobe. But to this day, my fabric stash contains the odd bits and bobs of that long-ago flannel: there's a horse print in there somewhere, a dinosaur print (of course!), and, until very recently, a cute print of cars and trucks on a white background. 

But no more do I have any cute--but babyish!--cars and trucks flannel in my stash, for now every single scrap exists in this equally cute--and appropriately babyish!--flannel quilt that I'm donating to Comfort Cases through sewist Stacey Lee's 2025 Quilt Donation Drive.

I wanted a simple pattern, so I decided to make it all 6" triangles. I cut every triangle I could out of the cars and trucks flannel, and then went looking for any other flannel I had that would match it, and I cut all that up, too.

I almost made it!

I'd already planned to buy new flannel for the back of the quilt, so I cut the final six triangles from that, and one of the better things about having a graphic designer in the family is that I could give him all my triangles and the dimensions I wanted, and he was the one who fussed them all around until he achieved a pleasingly symmetrical design:

Without the kids at home I've gotten into the habit of using the family room floorspace to lay out my quilts. But of course, it was never the kids who messed up my quilts when I was laying them out. Look, for instance, at this charming gentleman:

Such a sweet and innocent little guy. Clearly butter would not melt in his mouth. And yet how, then, do you suppose that this--

--becomes this?

And it's a mystery how this, left safely there on the floor overnight when I decided I was too tired to finish pinning it--

--by the next morning had become this?

We must have ghosts!

Binding is usually my least favorite part of the process, but one of my Facebook quilting groups has turned me onto the technique of glue basting. You literally get out your Elmer's school glue--make sure it says that it's washable!!!--and glue your binding exactly the way you want it, then iron it to set it:

Doesn't the binding look perfect? It's literally just glued! 

The glue basting is so sturdy that I was able to fold this quilt up, glued binding and all, and stuff it into my backpack to take to my mending group's monthly Mending Day at the public library. In between trimming the raveled edge of a vintage counterpane and then rehemming it, helping a novice quilter sandwich her very first quilt, and altering a pair of capris, I finished machine stitching the binding. 

And then I climbed on top of a rickety chair while menders and guests alike watched nervously to take my very first photo of my finished quilt:

And then I went home and took a slightly nicer photo:

I don't normally like a lot of quilting on my quilts, and I get paid back for that when my kids' quilts, which they use constantly, also constantly threaten to fall apart. So there I am during every college break, mending quilts until they have as much quilting on them as they would if I'd quilted them properly the first time.

I obviously can't have a stranger's quilt falling apart on them without me there to constantly mend it, so I had to quilt this one properly the first time. And ugh, fine, the quilting looked nice and added to the overall pattern in a lovely way:

I could have quilted a LOT straighter, but oh, well. That's how you know it was made by a human!

Fortunately, I did have some help with the photography, so that's why these photos turned out as cute as they did. Behold my helper:

Is there anyone who loves the first truly sunny and mild Spring day more than a housecat?

The last step before packing it up to send off was washing and drying it a couple of times to wash out the glue and get the quilting nice and scrunchy. It came out of the dryer scrunchy and adorable, and I hope whoever receives it SUPER loves it.

I want to use up every last bit of horsey flannel and dino flannel in baby quilts of their own, but making and donating those will have to wait until the 2026 Quilt Drive, because I am already in high gear making the puff quilt that my younger kid said she wanted. I want to surprise her with it for her birthday, but I'm still at the stage of cutting out 4" squares for the back of each puff and 4.5" squares for the front, stopping occasionally to re-work my math because SURELY this quilt cannot require 616 of EACH of those?!? Surely I have instead forgotten how to multiply?

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If You Stand Still Long Enough, I Will Sew You (and Your Roommates) Easter Baskets

One of my kids doesn't like chocolate, so I've gotten into the habit of doing my Easter prep super early, before the stores get picked over, always in search of that singular non-chocolate (and also non-white chocolate, because in the kid's mind, the only acceptable cocoa is hot cocoa, and even then only sometimes) Easter bunny. 

This year, the sole non-chocolate alternative within driving distance was a blue raspberry gummy astronaut, of all things, from Wal-mart, which I'm officially avoiding during Trump's presidency, but it's better than Amazon and I gave up Target for Lent, so whatever, Wal-mart. Take my four dollars, I guess. 

The past couple of years I've happily tossed the older kid's Easter treats willy-nilly into a box to mail to her, but that was when I still had a daughter at home to do the whole Easter basket ceremony with. This year it'll be just me and my partner eating bunny ear cinnamon rolls and drinking mimosas, sob, so I don't know, I guess I felt like making a fuss. 

I also felt like making a fuss over the younger kid's dorm roommates, whom I have been steadily wooing into bonus daughter-hood all year. I've made so much progress that one or the other tends to pop into our weekly family Zoom calls, so obviously they need Easter baskets, too!

And all the more excuse to set the Cricut up at the kitchen table for the day!

The younger kid and her roommates are probably tired of getting all things baby blue, but that's their class color and I think it's adorable. They also might be tired of getting everything matching and monogrammed with their initials, but how else would I get to live out my dream of having triplets?

Behold the Easter triplets!

The roommates' baskets have bubbles, chalk, glow sticks, and candy. My own kid's baskets are overstuffed, as usual. Candy Easter is our third favorite holiday!

I used the pattern from the We All Sew Easter basket tutorial, but I went my own way with the construction. I also used the Pellon 809 interfacing that I have on hand, not the Pellon Shape-Flex that the tutorial calls for, so you can see that my baskets have less structure that the ones in that tutorial. They stand up well, though, and they weren't a bitch to sew like they would have been with a stiffer interfacing, so I'm pleased with how they turned out.

My older kid doesn't have to abide by baby blue, and she's in a single so she doesn't have to have her name on everything, either:

Now that the kids' Easter stuff is all prepped and ready to mail, I should probably decorate for Easter this week. A big part of me doesn't really feel like putting forth the effort when the kids aren't here to celebrate with, but I'm at the point where I really need to cut the constant moping shit out and, like, find myself again or something. I really like Easter eggs and candy and festive holiday coasters, so maybe I'll just lock in on that.

Oh, I also like buntings! I bet I could do one with appliqued bunny Peeps and it would be really cute.

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

Check out My DIY Flyers Logo Hoodie

 IT IS SO GREAT, RIGHT?!?

Remember a couple of months ago when I went to a Philadelphia Flyers game and sulked because the merch was too expensive and vowed to violate their intellectual property rights and make my OWN Flyers merch for myself, thank you very much?

Well, I achieved my dream, and it turned out awesome!

The key to the entire enterprise is the Cricut that my partner surprised me with on Christmas. I still need his help with the graphic design, because it works best if you do your templates in another (*cough, cough* better *cough*) graphic design program and save them as svg files to just export into the Cricut Design Space program, but once you've got that, everything else is a dream:

Honestly, my partner's inspiration for this gift was probably watching me, starting this time last year, hand cut a billion applique pieces for the eclipse buntings that I sold the snot out of last year (I miss you, total solar eclipse!). Because the Cricut cuts fabric, even fiddly little shapes, and it cuts it perfectly, just as smooth as butter:

There were a couple of bits in those tight turns where it didn't quite get the full curve, but it was easy to snip:

After that, I just had to baste everything down with fusible webbing and applique it on!

I appliqued it to a Goodwill hoodie, and it's my newest favorite thing:

I keep waiting for strangers to admire it, but 1) I don't go anywhere, 2) I try not to talk to people when I DO go places, and 3) you probably can't actually figure out that it's homemade unless I tell you, which I won't because see 2).

It was such a success, however, that even though I don't yet have another Goodwill hoodie to place it on, I'm already working on version #2, the Flyers Pride logo:

And then I might see which of my favorite teams end up in the Stanley Cup playoffs and make them my next DIY logo. The Stars are playing so well this season, so fingers crossed!

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

I Sewed a Christmas Tree Skirt, as Requested

How did we ever get by without a Christmas tree skirt?!?

It looks so pretty, and now I think the tree would look naked without it, but until my older kid suggested one last year, it had never occurred to me.

Although my kid has a sort of contentious relationship with her memory, so by "suggested," what I actually mean is that when we were decorating the tree, she dug through a couple of bins and then said, "Where's the tree skirt?"

I said, "We don't have a tree skirt."

She said, "What about the tree skirt we used last year?"

I said, "We didn't have a tree skirt last year."

She said, "Yes, we did."

I said, "No, we didn't."

She said, "Yes, we did."

No, we didn't:

Merry Christmas 2023 from Spots and Jones!

Nor did we in 2022:

How about way back in 2016, maybe?

Merry Christmas 2016 from Gracie, the best of cats

Nope! Although that was the year that I ran Pappa's train around the tree and it was ADORABLE.

Just between us, I think she's misremembering the red and white quilt I have on my bed, since I generally just pull it out as an extra warm layer in the winter. 

Anyway, to mollify her I told her that a tree skirt was a wonderful idea, even though I secretly didn't think so, and that I'd definitely make one for the tree this year, even though I secretly didn't want to.

My kids are right and I am wrong so often that it's kind of starting to get on my nerves...

I did dutifully spend most of the year low-key checking out tree skirt ideas. This one from Gathered is really pretty--

Christmas tree skirt image via Gathered

So is this one from Sewing with Scraps:

Starburst tree skirt image via Sewing with Scraps

I also really like this Dresden skirt pattern from Carrieactually on etsy:

Dresden tree skirt image via Carrieactually

At the very last minute, I happened upon this Nutcracker tree skirt pattern from The Weekend Quilter--

Nutcracker tree skirt image via The Weekend Quilter

--and I almost went for that one because you KNOW how we feel about The Nutcracker over here, but I still haven't taught myself FPP, shame on me. I've looked at a lot of YouTube tutorials, but honestly I think I may need to just get a book on how to do it.

But then in one of my quilting Facebook groups, a group member posted a photo of the tree skirt that she'd made by altering the Chroma Quilt pattern from Taralee Quiltery, and I was sold.

To alter the pattern from a traditional quilt to a tree skirt, you pretty much just have to omit the center octagon from the pattern and then cut through one side of the finished quilt. Sewing the first set of triangles is a little fiddly without that octagon to anchor them--

--but after that you can continue the piecing exactly as the pattern indicates:

I did not do my neatest job on the piecing--tbh, I was basically just throwing this quilt together since I'd promised I'd make it AND I had to get it finished before I could start putting presents under the tree--and to me, the misaligned points and general messiness are very evident, ahem. But everyone else swears that they cannot see a thing wrong, even when I make them look at the very worst bits, so although I may not have perfect quilting as my legacy, I do have a perfect family.

The quilt is entirely sewn from stash, although that's a bit of a cheat because I generally always buy 100% cotton solids and abstract prints when I see them in the remnant bins at Joann, so a lot of the fabric comes from that--I dithered about buying those three different shades of green when I found them in the same remnants bin, but I don't regret it now!

The holly fabric is a true scrap, though, as I have NO idea where it came from, and the quilt back is a white sheet that somebody gave me at some point and has been just kicking around my fabric bin for years:

Pause for a festive shot of the Christmas tree in the background!

That giant back deck grill eyesore was my Christmas present to Matt in... 2020, maybe? So it's thematically relevant!

I pieced together a couple of cuts of batting to get the correct dimensions. The next time I make a quilt, I'm going to have to splurge on new batting, grr!

So festive! Especially because in this shot you can barely see the giant back deck barbecue grill! My favorite part of our Christmas tree is that a good 98% of the ornaments are handmade, and another 1.5% are vintage ornaments from childhood family trees:

After that, all I had to do was bravely cut straight through the quilt I had just painstakingly pieced and sewn and backed and quilted--

--and then bind it with some stash binding, sandwiching three sets of ties in between the binding and the quilt:

And here's this year's Christmas tree, exactly the way that my older kid dreamed it should be:

It's kind of a nightmare with the robot vacuum, but it looks so pretty with the presents.

Now I want to make a proper Chroma quilt, lining up all my points and everything!

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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. 

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