Fabric Photo Book

Earlier this year, we took a family trip to Florida. While at the airport, I had the brilliant brainstorm to make a fabric photo book for my niece. She's still a bit too young to be trusted with paper pages, but it was her first trip to Disney World, so I wanted to do something.

The book is 12 pages long. I think selecting the photos was the longest part of the process, with shopping for supplies a close second, as it required a lot of fusible supplies and many trips to multiple stores. Actually putting it together did not take that long. The paper mock-up I made to use as a guide helped make that process go smoothly. I used printable, fusible fabric sheets for the photos, and I was really pleased how nicely they worked - both the printing and the fusing. I used fusible interfacing to stabilize the pages. The cover has fusible letters and a fusible applique. There was sewing involved in the creation of the pages and cover and binding them together.

Finished size: 8.75" x 8.75"

Congratulatory Card

A congratulatory card for my cousin who just graduated from college and is moving to North Carolina for his first job teaching high school science.

Birthday Card

Happy birthday to my dad!

Polka Dot Spirals

I had a yard of this polka dot fabric that I bought randomly and wanted to turn into a quilt. However, I couldn't settle on a design because I didn't really think it went with anything except black. When I saw this spiral design, I knew it would be perfect! It ended up requiring 8 yards of black fabric to complete it.

Quilting presented a challenge. I wanted to quilt the spiral design even in the solid black columns, so I went to the store to look for some way to mark on black fabric. All the markers said to mark on the wrong side of the fabric. I bought tailor's chalk, figuring chalk would be the most likely to easily wash out and it worked just fine! I went ahead and quilted it using teal thread.

Pinwheel detail on back

Since I only had a yard of polka dot fabric, I knew I was going to have to find a coordinating fabric for the binding because I didn't want to use black. This proved challenging. I imagined use a teal or turquoise binding, but those didn't look right. I took a scrap of polka dots to the store and purchased two failed options, so once it was quilted, I just took the entire quilt with me. I ended up using a lighter blue, which meant the teal quilting doesn't quite match, but it's only noticeable up close.

Finished size: 52" x 71"