Another beautiful baby has joined us! Emma Yejin was born on June 4th to my beautiful friend Beth and her husband Sam. Emma has an adorable older sister Anna. I am so thankful I finished this quilt before they return back their home in China next week (because i don’t trust mailing overseas…).
I have to say I am absolutely tickled at how this quilt turned out, and it’s my favorite so far (shhhh, don’t tell Sarah, Samuel or Finn). I got the fabric from the fatquarter shop and was initially super excited. But then I went through a period of time where I wasn’t so sure anymore. Luckily after changing the pattern (and vision) I fell in love again.
The construction of the quilt turned out to be more complicated than I thought- it’s just a bunch of squares, right? I first pieced together the rows (horizontally) with the patterned pieces and white rectangles. Then, between each row there was a white strip- which sounds nice and easy. But all of a sudden you realize that you actually have to mark the strip or else all the patterened pieces won’t line up. I think it actually would have been easier to piece white pieces together (the same size as the patterned pieces and rectangles) so you could just pin and match seams.
I’ve been wanting to finish a quilt with parallel lines and this seemed like the perfect quilt to do that. I marked one line with a red chaco roller and then spent a long time freaking out that the red line wouldn’t wash out (but luckily it did!!). So, for the rest of the quilt, I used a hera marker to mark the lines, and I have to say that it’s a SUPER COOL tool. If you are a quilter and you don’t have one- get one!
It actually took me many hours to sew all the parallel lines- I spent more than one sewing class doing it. During one of the classes, Linda (a fellow classmate), said: “And then there’s erica over there, lawn mowing her material”. Which is kind of what it was like. I loved it. Very zen like, and peaceful.
I find that it’s very hard to take good pictures of my finished quilts- to get them to look as beautiful as they do in real life. Suggestions?
My “lawnmowing”.
Tabacon loved this quilt. She was always running around on it. She might need her own quilt.
So, back to my friend Beth. We met our freshman year in college. We both lived in Territorial Hall at the University of Minnesota. One of my first memories is that she had a little minature fridge stocked with minature Sunkist orange pops (if you’re from the east coast: pop=soda). Our sophmore year we moved into off-campus housing and lived with two other girls: Mindy and Elizabeth. We had some weird quirks- one was taking silly pictures.
This is us raising the lamp in our living room (I think it’s supposed to mimic a famous flag photo?)
Beautiful fall weather in Minnesota- required: Minnesota college gear. (I almost forgot I’m a natural blonde).
This is one of my most memorable halloweens. We were an interactive fall scene: a peasant (me), a hunter (Beth) and a tree (Angie). Hours of entertainment. Unfortunately you can’t see my yellow socks that were my peasant feet.
Minnesota wasn’t so beautiful all year, it got cold.
I’m not sure why we are dressed up like this. I’m acutally a bit embaressed to show my short pixie haircut. Hmmm.
We dubbed our apartment “Coolie 302″. At the end of the year Mindy drew this beautiful whiteboard art that shows the four of us: Liz in her crew sweatshirt talking on the phone (note that this is pre cellphones), Mindy and Beth playing guitar and me sitting at my computer.
Beth and I lived together again our senior year, just the two of us. We continued to drink Sunkist pop and eat lots of Homestyle microwave popcorn.
Beth, I love you! You are such an important person in my life. I wish we didn’t live so far apart and we could actually spend time together. You have two beautiful girls. I send you my blessings.
-erica