The Robot Room

Robots from Mimmy

The Ham in his first night in the big boy bed

Done! Well, almost. I want to recover the glider and make a few more throw pillow covers. But close to done and it only took me a year...

I learned a lot about sewing by making things with increasing complexity. I can whip out a log cabin square in no time and I now understand most of the settings on my sewing machine.

Most importantly, the boy loves his room. We practiced going to bed several times throughout the evening. We posed for pictures. But he still wasn't so sure about the big boy bed after he figured out that he was really going to sleep in it. He brought both his doggie and his cat for company. We found him this morning curled up at the end of the bed like a cat.

We Made: A Sweater and a Quilt

On my list of tasks before my next birthday, I'd included knitting Mr. J a sweater and finishing a large quilt. Check and check.

When I got the estimate for the quilting lady to finish the quilting on the Robot quilt, it was over $250. Not really in the budget. So I just did it myself. It was not easy but obviously it was not impossible. The quilt is rather large and the space under the arm of my sewing machine is rather puny. I felt like I was trapped in a prolonged wrestling match with a blanket. But I prevailed with only a few missteps. I haven't gotten any good pictures of the quilt since there is a small boy always laying on it. And it now means that I sewed the whole darn thing myself.

Speaking of darning, I started Mr. J's sweater on the Canada trip. The body went really fast, but I made a bunch of modifications to the yoke to fit my child's big shoulders and giant head. The arms a little snug since my kid is built like a lineman, but I think they'll end up stretching out and being perfect.

Both of these projects were super fun and I'm very happy with how they turned out. I develop music crushes where I listen to an album with great intensity for a short amount of time (sometimes even one song on repeat for hours). As a result, certain albums become associated in my head with a very specific series of events.  So, Blind Pilot 3 Rounds and a Sound will forever equal the finishing of this quilt and the sweater. I'm still in the Blind Pilot obsession so we'll see what else it gets hooked onto.

We Made: A Robot Quilt

I've been working on a robot quilt for Mr. J for roughly a year now. He's obsessed with all things robot or wheels (and lately cats, but that's another story) or gears. It took me 6 months to find all the fabrics I wanted for what I envisioned as an epic quilt. I wanted mainly primary colors with a few odd balls thrown in. I also wanted only non-creepy robots  and not space robots. I had to give in on the space robots. There were too many cute fabric that had a little bit of space stuff. 

I wanted to make it large enough that it would act like a comforter and drape over the edges of a twin bed all the way to the floor so we wouldn't need a dust ruffle. I hate dust ruffles. They seems to trap dust under the bed which is just gross when you consider the amount of dog hair that comes in and out of our lives. 

Anyway, I was given the book Patchwork Style for Christmas. I had largely finished gathering fabric by that point so I selected and modified a pattern from the book and started in. The fabric is cut in strips of similar sizes and then randomly sewn together in long strips. The strips were then sewn together on the long edge. Mr. J helped me select the order to sew the individual pieces together. It lead to some color pooling, but it is his quilt and someday I'll tell him how we sewed the quilt together.

I know that making the quilt myself was more expensive than buying something, but we have an old red blanket that someone in my family made a long time ago. We've now patched it several times because I love that thing so much. You don't generally save store bought quilts. They don't develop the fabric equivalent of a patina-the super soft cuddly state that fabric gets too when it's really old

The final size is slightly longer than a traditional queen size quilt and roughly the width of a full size quilt. For perspective, the top picture has it laying on a full size bed. I've sewed the quilt top together, but I realized halfway through that my machine wasn't big enough to do the final quilting. Luckily, there are several local quilters who have the fancy long arm sewing machines you need to sew a quilt of this size. I'm dropping off the quilt for it's final step this week.   

Hopefully, it should be done by mid-July. I'm so excited to see what it looks like!