Labor Day Weekend

I have finished quilting! Now all I need to do is add the binding onto this quilt. Guess what I'll be doing for the next week or so? 

I also finally finished a batik project that was sitting on my sewing table for weeks. It's a baby counting book that is for sale at my Etsy shop. 

I have a couple other projects I would like to get started on: a knit sweater, a couple fabric landscapes, and the quilt I started a while back, but just got put on the back burner. We'll see how soon I can get started on those...

Batiked Baby Counting Book

I have been very busy this past weekend. I kept working on the custom scrap quilt and completed a unique batik project. 


Here is one of the new quilt blocks:

My new batik project was inspired by the counting book that I had made previously. 

Here is the cover. I just wrote it in my own handwriting.

What makes this book extra cool is that all the pictures are dyed into the fabric! (The sun is my favorite page!)

When dying the pages I decided to leave the leaves without veins so I could sew the veins on later. Super cool! 

This project was VERY time consuming, but WOW! The results were totally worth all the work. I know what you're thinking, "That's so cool! I want one for my child/friend's child/niece/nephew, etc." Well guess what!? You're in luck! It is for sale at my Etsy shop! You can find my shop HERE or on the right side of my blog. I'm also totally open to doing custom orders because I had so much fun doing this book. 

I also learned a ton about batiking and painting dye onto the fabric when making this book. Two words: sodium alginate. This is a dye thickener which means the painted dye doesn't run all over your project. The only drawback with using it is that it takes a couple hours for the dye to thicken. So you can't just wake up and say "I'm going to start painting dye right now." Nope. You have to have some patience (which is quite a challenge for me), but thick dye makes your life easy and the results are worth it.

Off to JoAnn Fabrics to buy quilt fabric and various doodads for projects I have running around in my head. 

Fabric baby books

Right now I had several friends with babies on the way. Naturally I am making baby gifts for them and I am addicted to making fabric baby books. It started with this cute book panel I found at JoAnn Fabrics.

After making this book I decided to move on and try my hand at making a baby counting book. I found an easy tutorial here.  These are all the pages that I decided to make. All the pictures were made with scrap fabric that I had laying around, except for page 10. I sewed on snowflake buttons instead. Quite frankly I didn't want to sew 10 anythings onto a page. 

One big difference between my project and the tutorial was that I lined each of the pages with left-over flannel I had. 

This page is my favorite! 

Unfortunately, because I lined the pages with flannel, they were REALLY thick and I couldn't get the book through my sewing machine. From the picture you can see that I had to hand stitch the binding on. I think it turned out okay despite my okay hand sewing skills.