Saturday, February 20, 2010

My First Quilt!!!

I finished my first quilt ever today!!!!! The binding looks awesome! I didn't think I would be able to do a very good blind stitch but I think that for my first try it turned out well. The good news is that the whole quilt didn't turn out like crap and I learned a lot from making this one so I am excited to make my next one! Going to pick out the fabrics tomorrow!



I thought that doing the same brown as the boarder for the binding would look to boring and I didn't have enough of just one fabric for the entire thing. So I just used a little bit of each of the fabrics. I think that it's a little much for such a small quilt but it did the job.



The opposite side where I had to do the blind stitch. This was probably the longest part of the quilt but with a coke and some re-runs of Grey's it got done!



The back side of the finished product. You can really see how some of my lines are not straight here but I think I have a good way to solve that next time.



So happy it's done and so happy to start on the next one and many other sewing projects that I have lined up! Enjoy the sunny weekend!

Tuesday, February 16, 2010

Perfect (not!)

I thought I would share some of the step by step pictures from making my first quilt!! I had started it a few weeks ago but then got to the point where I wasn't sure what to do. Yesterday I had the day off because of Presidents Day and decided to tackle it again!

After cutting up all of the squares I laid them out so that none of the rows would repeat any pattern. I didn't think the colors would look good together (they were just scraps) but I think they turned out great! I took a picture of this step just in case they got shuffled while being moved around.



Here it is all sewn together!



It definitely is not perfect! Any novice quilters out there with tips on how to keep this from happening??



This is where I got stuck! I knew I needed to square off the quilt but wasn't exactly sure how to without going out and buying expensive tools. I'm sure that if you measured it still wouldn't be square but I'm ok with it!



This border turned out fantastic! You can't really tell but it has a great light pattern on it that really compliments all the different patterns on the quilt. It's also not perfect.



Time to practice the actual "quilting" part. I am using this as a practice before every step. Practice for a practice quilt!



This is a technique I found somewhere online that is supposed to show you how to pin all three of your layers together without causing any bubbles. Every time I did this my edges were not lining up. I gave up and just laid them all flat and then started pinning from the middle out. It worked just as well for me.



Time to actually quilt it! I have to say that I had nightmares about this part for weeks before I had the guts to actually do it. I was so nervous that this would mess up all of my hard work. The practice eased my nerves and I just went for it!



Once again, my lines are definitely not straight but I was very pleased with how it turned out!! I think that it actually looks like a real quilt! I ran out of thread last night so I wasn't able to do the binding but I am excited to finish that last step this week!



I used different sites from all over the web plus many videos from youtube to try and figure this all out. Anyone who has quilted before and has any tips or tricks I would love to hear them! I promise to post the finished product soon!



P.S. Still house hunting :(

Wednesday, February 10, 2010

Elephants

House hunting is exhausting but this picture made me laugh today :)



Have a happy Thursday and pray that I don't go insane and kill my husband during this process!

Saturday, February 6, 2010

The News

We have decided to buy a house!!! We haven't found the perfect one yet but it has already been a very long two weeks. Two weeks ago we were driving around and decided to walk through an open house (just because it was fun at the time!) While we were there we talked to the lender who was showing the house for a very long time. After talking to him about how the $8,000 tax credit works Andy decided that it would really be crazy for us to pass it up. Our offer has to be accepted by April 30th which kind of puts us on a tough time line.
The first step was meeting with a lender and getting pre-approved for an FHA loan. We thought this would be the easiest part but it turned out to be very stressful. Since my contract list me as a temporary employee the lender told us that they would not accept ANY of my income! That meant that we would not qualify for anything more than a shack :( Needless to say we left her office very disappointed but she said she would make some phone calls in the morning and see what she can do. After talking to her underwriter she found out that my contract is very standard for the school district and we decided to at least put in the application and see what happens. That's the phone call that we had been waiting for all week to see if we were approved and for how much, it was a very long week!!
We found out late yesterday afternoon that we were approved!!! Now we could really go house hunting (We had gone to multiple open houses last weekend just looking around). We met with our Realtor today and found that these are our favorite two so far. They are both really different and we truly can't decide which one we like best. So far we've probably looked at 10 houses and still want to look at more this week before we move any further on either of them.
That's my update!!! It's been a lot of ups and downs and we are just getting started! I wanted to make sure the approval went through before really telling people just in case things didn't go through. Hopefully I will have more to share this week :)




Tuesday, February 2, 2010

Sneak Peak

Wow! Have I been neglecting this blog or what?? I promise that it is for a good reason. I'm not talking about it yet today on the chance that things fall through but good news may come tomorrow. and no, I am not pregnant:) When I can explain it will definitely show what I have been doing for the last two weeks straight. Until then I will leave you with a sneak peak of the beginning of my very first quilt ever! It's a practice before I try and make a beautiful baby quilt for Ashley. This one was made out of scrap fabric I have and I actually think they work well together!