Picture taken from Modernquiltguild.com

I blogged about the quilt here and shared the process. It really is an inspiring quilt!

Tomorrow I will draw a winner from the comments on this post, so if you haven’t had time to enter……this is your last chance.

Happy Quilting!

Since we were going to have a houseful of rowdy boys, I set up two tables.

I set each setting with a lego bingo sheet, a goody bag that they could color on, and a lego nametag.

As the kids arrived, I had them color their goody bag with some lego crayons I had made using a lego mold that I had purchased.
A hysterical side note, my husband told his little brother that the lego crayons were chocolate so he popped one in his mouth and chewed it up…..eeeww! You never can trust those big brothers!

After the kids arrived, we began the lego bingo game, which was a huge success! My son decorated the table with legos so the kids used those to mark the spaces. Each kid that got a BINGO! won a lego birthday minifigure that I had got with the birthday party pack that I purchased through Lego.

Since I had a few girls at the party, I wanted to make sure that I had fun stuff for them to do as well! They got to make lego rings.

I purchased a cheap set of play rings from the dollar store and hot glued small lego blocks to them. I put them in the center of a snack tray and added in a whole bunch of different small legos. The girls were able to build up their rings and show them off proudly.

While the girls did this, the boys played at a small lego table we had borrowed for the party.

Once the boys started getting restless (I realized quickly that I had to keep them entertained or chaos would ensue!), we sang happy birthday and let them get treats from the dessert table. My beautifully arranged dessert table was demolished with minutes! I took that as a good thing, the boys loved picking out their treats!

After they ate a bunch of sugary treats, we fed them even more sugar…..cotton candy!

We had a cotton candy machine at the house and the kids loved watching as my husband made them each their own cotton candy. I am fairly certain that if we had just an empty basement and a cotton candy machine, they would have been just as happy!

After the sugar high of the cotton candy wore off, we brought out the pinata.

Have you ever looked for a lego pinata?? They aren’t easy to find, so I had to make on myself! Using a box, tissue paper, empty applesauce cups and blue spray paint, I made a pinata that I thought looked pretty good!

Giving a bunch of boys a stick to whack a pinata didn’t sound particularly fun so I made it a pull string pinata. I cut a flap in the bottom of the box and poked holes in the flap. I used some thin nylon rope (although any kind of string or twine would work) and fed a string through each of the holes. I chose one of the pieces and tied a knot on the end that was going to be inside the box. The rest the pieces were left untied. I loosely taped the flap closed so that when the string with the knot was pulled it would pull the whole flap down. When the rest of the pieces were pulled they simply came out. It was so fun! The boys tried so hard to pick which one was the right one and it ended up getting pulled almost last. The pinata was filled with candy and random legos!

Then Drake got to open his presents and the party wrapped up!

Whew! Makes me tired just thinking about it all! My other daughter just informed me that she wants to have her birthday party at Build-A-Bear and after all the planning for this party, I am totally fine with that!

Picture by: Alex Ledgerwood

The magazine looks bright and cheery! I can’t wait to get my hands on a copy. Congrats Alex!

I also want to thank everyone that took the time to comment on my post about quilting quilts for books. Based on the multitude of responses, it seems that most people like the eye-candy quilting, but would also appreciate some more “do-able” designs. The giveaway is still open, so if you haven’t left a commented, better get a move on!

Happy Quilting!

Since there is so much to talk about, I am going to break it up into 2 separate blog posts. This first one will discuss the dessert table and the second one will discuss the rest of the party.

Decorations:

Happy Birthday Banner

Thanks to a downloadable Lego font, I was able to make the “Happy Birthday” banner. I printed out each letter on red paper and sewed the paper onto blue bias binding. It couldn’t have been easier and I couldn’t have been happier with the turnout!

To decorate the table, I picked different size boxes and wrapped them with solid wrapping paper. I used this printable to print lego bumps in different colors to coordinate with the boxes. I also used the lego bumps to wrap around the juice boxes.

I purchased picture frames and a generic lego set from the dollar store and glued blocks around the edges. I sure didn’t want to use the real, more expensive legos!

I did the same thing with a paper mache letter D to make a centerpiece that my son could put in his room

I used green spray paint paint to paint bubble wrap to look like the lego boards.

Desserts:

Once the table was set up, it was time to add the yummy part, the desserts!

My mother-in-law, Debi, made cupcakes and a little cake for drake. On a total, random side note, go check out her blog. She has lost 80 lbs and is sharing her journey as well as dieting tips that have worked for her.

Using a mold I bought from amazon, I made chocolate legos to add on top. (I purchased Wilton brand candy melts, microwaved them and poured it into the mold.)

I made extra candy legos and laid them on the dessert table as well.

I used the same mold to make gummie legos, which were a huge hit with the kids. These were more labor intensive then the candy gummies so I didn’t make as many!

I love a dessert table with lots of different kinds of goodies, so I used some clear tubs and filled them will different hard candies. Then I used the candies to hold up the mini-figure marshmallow pops. Even if they didn’t look authentic, they were easy to make and gone in a flash!

To make them, I stuck a stick into a marshmallow and rolled it in melted yellow candy melts, making sure to cover the top of the marshmallow as well. Then I set them upside down on a cookie sheet until they were hardened. To draw the faces, I used a toothpick and black icing.

In my next blog post, I will share pictures of the rest of the party. After that, I promise to get back to quilted related post!

But soon after I finished quilting those quilts, another Longarm quilter mentioned to me that when she is quilting a quilt for a book she likes to make the designs easy enough that most quilters could recreate the quilt. I had never really thought about it that way. I always assumed that the quilting was meant to compliment the design, but also to provide “eye candy”. Not to intimidate a quilter but to inspire the quilter.

So what do you think? When you are purchasing a book or looking at quilt patterns, do you prefer the quilting to be more on the easier side? Or do you like more intricate quilting? There are definitely no right or wrong answers, I am just curious.

And since I haven’t had a giveaway in ahwile, how about I have one now? If you weigh in with your opinion, you will be entered to win a kona color card and a quilter’s journal. I will randomly select a winner next tuesday!

Here are a few of the questions I received:

Just curious, why didn’t you quilt the words first to insure spacing and blending into the circular pattern?

Since I quilt on a longarm, the way that I go about quilting a quilt is different then if I was doing it on my home sewing machine. I load the quilt, and work from top to bottom, instead of from center out. It is easier for me to quilt the top, along each of the sides and then the bottom leaving the center unquilted. If you were doing this on your sewing machine, it would be much easier to do the center words first and then fill in around them.

After I quilted the verse, I filled in around it with the circular quilting design to make sure that there were no blank spaces.

Why didn’t you just load the quilt upside down and quilt it all from the back?

When using a quilting machine, the back of the quilt must be bigger than the top. This allows room to pin the backing onto the machine. Since neither Shea nor myself knew that we were going to be doing it this way, the pieced portion of the quilt (the top) was smaller than the back.

How long does it take to load a quilt?

There are so many products available to help load a quilt quickly, however, I just use pins. Since I have had just a little practice loading quilts, I am pretty quick at it. Of course it depends on the size of the quilt, but this seeing squares quilt only took about 10 minutes to load.

Did you mark the words before you quilted them?

I wanted to make sure that the verse was centered on the quilt as much as possible so I wrote out the words using a water soluble marking pen.

How did you prevent tucks in backing since you left it unquilted?

If I am leaving a large space unquilted, I always baste it with lots of pins. I pin it with the pins parallel to the bar on my quilting machine so that they can be rolled up with the rest of the quilt.

I think that about covers it! I love talking about quilting so if you ever have any questions about anything that I discuss, please feel free to comment!

Check out Heather’s post about her Ohio Star quilt.

Or you can read about all about Katy’s Hexy MF quilt, or as I like to call it, “100 ways to quilt a hexagon”.

And if you aren’t a subscriber to my blog, you may want to consider signing up. (To sign up, click here and enter your email addree in the “Follow Me” box on the right side of the page) To celebrate my 2 year blog-aversary, I am going to have a random giveway just for subscribers!

If I am coming to your area, I would love for you to stop in and visit. I will update it as I schedule new events.

And because every blog post should have a picture:

Here is little miss Cloe quilting on my machine last year, I imagine that I have the same expression on my face when I am quilting!

Happy Quilting!

It’s my Project Modern quilt which I have blogged about here. I was excited when Gammill offered me the opportunity to submit some of my quilts, and even more excited to see the finished ad. Talk about happy mail!

Happy Quilting!

In 2002, Ali Kemp a 19 year old college student was murdered in a Kansas City suburb. In the aftermath of the tragedy, her parents formed The Ali Kemp Education foundation as a way to teach women self-defense.

Since then T.A.K.E. has hosted numerous self-dense classes showing thousands of women how to defend themselves from an attacker.

Using fabric donated by Kathy (owner of The Quilt Shoppe in Stewartsville), Tula Pink designed and pieced this quilt to give to the T.A.K.E. foundation. I was so honored to have a part in quilting this quilt.

When quilting this quilt, I knew that I wanted to emphasize the meaning behind the letters T.A.K.E. so I quilted the meaning in each letter.

I quilted all the stars the same, except for one. One star in the middle was quilted to represent Ali.

Although it is hard to see in my picture, I quilted her name in the middle and made it look like a shooting star to represent her brief, but bright life here on earth.

I am not affiliated with the foundation at all, but I would encourage you to follow their facebook page or their website to view a calendar of their upcoming classes.

Happy Quilting!