the giggle box turns 30.

My daughter Jacquelyn just celebrated her 30th anniversary. An amazing feat considering I was only 5 when I had her. :) Ok, that's creepy - I found out I was pregnant with Jacquelyn on my 21st birthday.  She was such a happy, giggly baby - that I always called her "giggle box".

Stacy and Jackie are besties. Jackie graduates this December from University of Michigan and Stacy graduated last December. Their birthdays are just days apart, so we had a birthday brunch for them this Sunday. Jac has a gluten allergy, so everything is gluten free. Pancakes, cookies, muffins .... good stuff.

For months I had been hearing about how everyone has a quilt but Jackie. "Mom, even the guy you work with gets a quilt for his newborn!" she whines. I knew she had a big birthday coming up and now was the time to make it extra special.

King size quilts are not easy to quilt without a long arm machine. I started out wanting to make a double ring quilt for her. I found this video which is a quilt as you go for double wedding ring quilt here. I was very excited about it and went to my nearest Joann's Fabrics to get a template. I started working on it and realized that my measurements were all off. That the template I had did not work how I wanted it to. After messing up several times and wasting a whole day and a yard of nice expensive premium fabric, I abandoned the idea.

Because it is a King quilt, I needed to go with a "quilt as you go" version and I found this video. This allowed me have a reversible quilt and to be able to quilt each block at a time. To give it some more depth, I created some double blocks.

The whole thing took me about 2 months to make and every block is done with free motion quilting techniques. It was nice to not have a huge quilt to push through the machine - doing just a block at a time. I believe there was 89 blocks in all.

And I took the opportunity to embroider some of the blocks with endearing sentiments with her name, date and even embroidered some peacock feathers in it. Peacocks are her favorites and I was super excited to find some peacock fabric.

The thing I love the most about it is that it is reversible - once side is brown tones with her beloved peacocks and the other is more modern with black, blue and a smidgen of red.

the sports nut

Aunt Dottie had a Singer sewing machine in her bedroom and I would sit in there and watch her put together pieces of fabric. It was amazing to see her put those puzzles together. The last time I saw her at her sewing machine, she was sewing her daughters wedding dress. How wonderful would it be . .. to pass down to the younger generations something you made.

My daughter Jenny has 2 boys. Bobby wanted a quilt for his birthday - he turned 11 this year. Many times you will find him in my sewing room looking to make some little thing. "Nana, can I sew something?" I taught him how to use my sewing machine about a year ago and he loves playing with it.

He's also a real sports nut - baseball, hockey, basketball, football, bowling - does it all. Not only does it all, but is super good at it. He recently tried out and made a hardball team and hit a home run in his first game.

So I ended up choosing this pattern but he chose the colors. I found a sports collection backing for it, which also had the number 12 in it. He thought I had put that number 12 on the quilt and was insulted that I didn't realize he was 11. I'm still not sure he understands that the fabric just happened to have 12 on it.

I started with 8 inch squares and I embroidered a few things on it. I quilted it in big triangles too. This quilt fits a full size bed nicely.

I think it turned out pretty good. My little entry level brother embroidery machine sure gets a workout. I hid a couple of words throughout the quilt. I think the embroidery just adds character to the quilt.

Every time I go over to Jenny's house, Bobby has it ... on the couch, in his room and they even took it to the hospital when the new baby was born. Matthew was premature and they stayed at the hospital for a week. It was sweet and very nice to see how it gave both Jenny and Bobby comfort.

If you want to see more about this quilt, I got the idea from In Color Order.