Runaway October

Did I men­tion that I was par­tic­i­pat­ing in the 2009 Chi­nese Coin Quilt Piece-along? It’s being hosted by two of my favorite blog­gers: Juli­ette of Chick­pea Sewing Stu­dio and Karin of Orange Flower. Basi­cally, the premise is to com­plete a Coin Quilt some­time within the year of 2009. That’s it. No dead­lines, no require­ments or restric­tions, no part­ners, no noth­ing. How much eas­ier can it get?

Here are some of the won­der­ful coin quilts that have already been fin­ished. Aren’t these ladies amaz­ingly cre­ative, and on the ball to boot?

1. coin top, 2. DSC_6007, 3. Elena’s Quilt, 4. Quilt #4 — Stacked Coins, front

The rest of the 2009 Coin Quilt Piece-Along Flickr pool can be found here.

I am to the sand­wich­ing and quilt­ing stage on my coin quilt. I have to clean a spot on the floor long enough to get every­thing pinned together. See why it takes me so long? It’s like some­one some­where is bound and deter­mined to make me do house­work, no mat­ter how much I avoid it. These sites have been the inspi­ra­tion for my lit­tle quilt.

• Here is a great down­load­able Coin Quilt tuto­r­ial by Cluck­Cluck­Sew.
• A Stacked Coins Baby Quilt tuto­r­ial is avail­able at The Moda Bake Shop, pro­vided by Crazy­MomQuilts.
• Great Coin Quilt inspi­ra­tion at Hand­made by Alissa.
• Another Coin Quilt tuto­r­ial via Home School Blog­ger.
• MaryQuilts.com has a few Chi­nese Coin Quilt tuto­ri­als in the right side­bar, though there are many many more beau­ti­ful tuto­ri­als listed as well.
• More Chi­nese Coin Quilt instruc­tions from Field Trips in Fiber

If you feel the urge to par­tic­i­pate, please join us!

Some Links:

• 75 Tips for Left­overs and Ingre­di­ents - via The Kitchn
• All-Natural Mois­tur­iz­ing Kitchen Hand Scrub — via Good Life {Eats}
• Child Cre­ativ­ity Linked with Out­door Free Time — via Steve-Olsen.com
• Your Favorite ‘Nat­ural’ Brands May Not Be What They Seem — via Mercola.com
• Nutella Self-Frosting Cake — via Car­men Cooks

Some awe­some tutorials:

• Funky Quilted Binder Cover — via Moda Bake Shop
• AWESOME Dog Bed — via Jezze
• Kid’s Teepee — via My Tiny Sweet Cheeks
• Hot Pink Cross Quilt Block Tuto­r­ial — via Betty Ninja
• Alpha­bet Quilt — via Reese Dixon

And a funny:

New Car via XKCD.com

Step One: Choose an accept­able shirt — such as the long-sleeved one hid­ing in the back of your hus­bands dresser that you’ve seen worn once for 5 min­utes. Even then it was obvi­ous that the sleeves were much too short. Make sure it’s stretchy and warm — knits and fleece are great for this.

Step Two: Mea­sure your child’s, or your own, head. Take two mea­sure­ments — One around the biggest part of the head, where the brim of a hat nor­mally sits. The sec­ond mea­sure­ment is taken from between the eyes over the head to the base of the skull. Don’t worry about being exact, we mainly are mak­ing sure that we make it big enough to fit prop­erly on the nog­gin and isn’t too small.

Then add an inch for seam allowances to both mea­sure­ments. If you are going to reuse the seam along the bot­tom of the T-Shirt these are your final mea­sure­ments. If you need to add your own hem, add an extra 1″ to the eye to nape measurement.

For exam­ple:

Reusing hem — Declan’s head cir­cum­fer­ence is 20″ and the eye-to-nape mea­sure­ment is 15″, so after adding seam allowances I have a mea­sure­ment of 21″ x 16″. Now divide that mea­sure­ment by 2, which equals 10.5″ x 8″.

Not reusing hem — Declan’s head cir­cum­fer­ence is 20″ and the eye-to-nape mea­sure­ment is 15″, so after adding seam allowances I have a mea­sure­ment of 21″ x 16″. Then I add an addi­tional inch to the eye-to-nape mea­sure­ment which is now 21″ x 17″. Now divide that mea­sure­ment by 2, which equals 10.5″ x 8.5″.

Step Three: Lay out the shirt you found and cut two rec­tan­gles using the size we deter­mined above. If you don’t have the child around to mea­sure, Declan has a pretty stan­dard sized 2yo head. I like to iron the shirt out flat and cut the two pieces at the same time using a rotary cut­ter. Make sure to feign inno­cence when your hus­band finds you shred­ding his old “paint­balling shirt”. You’ve never seen him go paint­balling anyway.

Step Four: With wrong sides together, sew together one long side of the rec­tan­gle. Now grab a ruler and make a mark 3/4″ in on the unsewn long side of the rec­tan­gle. Make another mark 1/4″ in at the top. Con­nect the marks using a ruler to deter­mine your seams for the short sides of the rec­tan­gle. This, along with the stan­dard 1/4″ seam, will ensure that the skully will fit around the head with­out gap­ping. Sew up the seams you just drew.

Now your skully should start to take shape.

Step Five: Fold the open­ing up by 1/4″ or what­ever you would like. Press and sew to form the bot­tom hem. Turn right side out. Viola! It’s seri­ously as sim­ple as that.

To make the lit­tle ears, cut some strips from what­ever fab­ric — I like to use strips of the knit T-Shirt because it will stop unrav­el­ing if you stretch it out — and tie them at the cor­ners using a square knot. The size of the ear deter­mines the final shape of the skully, though they all look the same while being worn.

Lit­tle adorn­ments are easy to make if you hap­pen to have some HeatNBond lay­ing around. Basi­cally just cut out your shape from a coör­di­nat­ing fab­ric, iron the HeatNBond to the wrong side, peel the back­ing and iron it onto the Skully in the desired loca­tion. I then go around the edges with a Zigzag stitch just to make sure it stays on and give it a cute lit­tle flair.

You can also use one long rec­tan­gle and fold it in half so there is no seam in the top.