In-progress: a yellow and gray library

We have an extra room on the first floor of our house that we've used as a guest bedroom. Truth be told, it's more accurately the "messy room" in our house (and that is really what we call it). It's the room where we dump random stuff that doesn't have a home (and only gets cleaned up when we do have a guest) . The doors stay shut so I don't have to look at the mess. The problem is that Nathan really wants a library so we have some place to put all his books, but we do need a place for guests to sleep when they visit. To solve this problem, Nathan's dad graciously offered to make a murphy bed. It is about 90% done, so I've been having fun coming up with ideas on how we want the finished room to look. Here is a little mood board I made with different elements and the color scheme I want to incorporate:
Yellow and gray is one of my current favorite color combos. I have started collecting yellow and gray fabrics to make a quilt for the bed. Now I just have to find a cool yellow chaise lounge like that. And figure out what to do with all the "stuff" that has lived so carelessly in the messy room.

The Anna Quilt

Anna Maria Horner is one of my favorite fabric designers lately. When I saw this stack of fabric, I knew it'd be perfect for a baby quilt for my niece Anna.

It started out as just a random patchwork quilt, but I didn't like the look of the randomness. So I designed a 4 block pattern made up of blocks of 4 of the same color.

I quilted it in a diagonal pattern through the squares





And for the back, I just used up some random lengths of leftover fabric.

All folded up!

I learned a few important things with this quilt. First of all, the batting matters. I usually use Warm and Natural, but when I went to the store they were out. So I got some cheap-o stuff that was lumpy and uneven. I got the entire thing quilted and had to tear it all out, get some Warm and Natural and start over. Second, I learned the importance of a walking foot. This fabric is voile - it is not normal quilting cotton. It feels almost like silk and makes for a super-soft quilt, but it is very slippery. Finally, I learned how fun and important it is to design a quilt instead of just winging it (like I usually do).

Teacher holiday gifts

For holiday teacher gifts this year I started out with the standard and somewhat boring gift card. I know teachers get inundated with coffee mugs and ornaments, so I wanted to stay away from that. I found a great little tutorial on how to make gift card holders here, and used that as a basis to make these for the kids' teachers:




If anyone is interested in a pdf that has 10 "Happy Holidays" tags in that cool western font (used on several of the cards above), let me know and I can email it to you...unless I can figure out how to insert the pdf to this post directly.

The other thing I made for teachers and friends is Peppermint Bark, an idea I stole from my sister-in-law, Rebecca. The kids and I made a ton of it yesterday and then packaged it up into these cute little boxes: