February's Project

Little bow with the button tie.
Finished quilt with a couple of my hedge hogs on it for interest. :-)

Well, I bought this Valentine/animal print fabric with Danielle in mind, as she is my child that loves zebra print, and can carry off 'wild'. I looked all over for some 'zebra' fabric for the back, but finally found this silky leopard???cheetah, well, anyway, cat print. I actually wanted some flannel, or fleece, but couldn't find any. Now it is finished, and as warm as it is in Phoenix, I think the silky fabric will be nice to cuddle up under without causing Danielle to seek out a fan....set on high.

I'm going to count this as a partial 'UFO', as I used some hot pink ribbon and also some little brown buttons that were lying around for who knows how long, or what never started project....and now they are part of this one! It is a very simple blanket. I can call it a quilt, as it has batting in it, and it has the ribbon 'ties'. If something is too complicated, I just don't get it finished, so I find that if I keep my projects simple, they actually might stand a chance at getting started/finished.I sewed the two pieces of fabric together, by putting the batting down, then the silky fabric with the wrong side on the batting, then the heart fabric face down, right sides together with the silky stuff. I pinned it all around, left an opening and sewed all around it. I clipped the corners and trimmed the seams, then turned it right side out, and pinned the edges, then sewed around the entire blanket with a serpentine stitch. This picture shows the ribbon, the buttons and both fabrics. :-)

I used 18 nine-inch pieces of the hot pink ribbon and 18 buttons on top of the ribbon. I didn't tie the ribbon in bows, I just folded it like a bow shape, then used a piece of thread wrapped around the center of the bow and pulled it tight, as didn't want the bulk of an actual 'tied' ribbon. Also, I wasn't certain how much ribbon it would take and I certain did not want to run out. I had a spool of five-eighth's inch wide hot pink ribbon with 18 feet of ribbon on the roll. I used four and a half yards or around 13 and a half feet, just for my own information, in case I ever want to put bows all over a blanket again. It did take me an hour and a half and five pricked fingers to get all of the ribbons/buttons sewn on the blanket. I just placed them where I liked them, and about every six inches or so. It probably could have used a few more ribbons, but at least there are a few of them tacking the two fabrics together.

I was going to make a lap sized blanket, and planned to get a yard and a half of the fabric, but they sold me an extra half yard for a remnant. The silky fabric was on sale for just $3 a yard, so picked up two yards of it. Of course, they did not have batting by the yard on sale when I needed it for this project and didn't have any twin bats, as package batting was on sale, so I ended up with a full sized bat. The quilt/blanket ended up around two yards long and around forty and a half inches wide. It will be a nice TV snuggle blanket. I had to kick Breezy's little Chihuahua and also Steph's cat off of it already, so think it looks like a comfortable blanket.

Hopefully, my next project is a 'fish' rag blanket I have planned for my brother in-law, who has the cancer. Well, one of them, as now, we have two of them with the dreaded disease. If by some miracle I can make it like the one I have pictured in my mind, it will be really neat. Time will tell. :-)