Needles and a Pen » Knitting, Sewing, and Nursing School

In honor of October’s arrival, Will and I started working on our Halloween quilt yesterday.  I picked up the fabric–a Moda Pumpkins Gone Wild charm pack–in Breckenridge last fall but decided to move a few days after purchasing it, so not much sewing happened last September!

I love getting Will involved in my projects.  Whether it’s picking out the fabric, or helping me arrange the pieces (or even just coloring on the patterns while I sew) I like sharing my hobbies with him.  When I was pregnant with him I was so terrified that having a boy would mean that I wouldn’t get to share the things I love with him…but none of that has been true.  He is my little chef in the kitchen, he loves to talk about the photos when I scrapbook, and he has all sorts of opinions about quilting.  (For instance, when I first broke out the charm pack he told me that this was NOT a Halloween quilt.  That there were little cherries [flower buds] and flowers all over the place.  I had to conceed his point, but when I showed him the witch hats, brooms, boots, and pumpkins, he got on board.)

The plan is a quilt heavily inspired by Oh Frannson!’s Charm Squares Baby Quilt.  I’m planning to leave different amounts of space between the patchwork strips, though, and to make it larger.

Will got to help me decide which squares stayed squares and which got cut into rectangles.  He also rescued the solids from the scrap bin.  I was setting aside the solid charm squaes and planning on going with just the prints, but he asked why I was leaving them out and then said that we should include them.  See?  The boy has valid design opinions!  (For his last quilt, as we talked about the car fabric, he requested that the overall quilt have “lots of colors”–Will is definitely a ‘more is more’ kinda guy.)

Today is a Friday, and since Fridays are No Preschool Days and I usually work on the weekends, I try to take Fridays off and only work an hour or two in the evening.  So today we’ll have some time to firm up the patchwork layout.  (Will’s tastes tend to go more along the lines of having all like colors together, so I’ll either take my hands off the wheel and let him go for it or I’ll gently steer the positioning by asking him specific questions like “which of these two should go here?”)   We’ll probably also use it as a chance to talk about Halloween and pumpkins, as well as colors (in preschool this week they learned about their first secondary color–purple, so we’ll probably talk about how you make orange, and the fact that pumpkin starts with ‘p’ just like ‘purple’).  Early education doesn’t come naturally to me, so I’ve been taking cues from Nic on how to make play time activities learning opportunities.

As for Ellie, she’ll no doubt take the opportunity to grab and chew any fabric scraps we throw her way and catch up on some toy licking.