Monkeys Done!

Sewing the background squares together didn't take much time at all!  The monkeys turned out to take more time than I'd hoped to finish! There were about 27 pieces of fabric needed for each monkey/banana section. So I spent most of the week working on the quilt. It's 52 x 70 so actually is more than a little baby blanket but how long are babies little really? It's  a great toddler blanket.

 The mouth was hand embroidered just before I pinned the layers together for quilting. Actually, I almost forgot about them. Good thing I hadn't worked late Thursday evening to layer it all since I didn't think about the mouth til I was waking up Friday morning!

 They're really impish little guys!

 So what do you put on the back of a monkey quilt? A jungle! folded the quilt so the jungle showed when they pulled it out of the bag yesterday! They liked that pretty much and were tickled when they saw the monkeys on the other side.

 I'd gotten the blanket done by Friday evening. I spent most of the day machine quilting it. I'd hoped to use my walking foot on my Bernina to machine quilt around the monkeys but that didn't work well, so I dropped the feed dogs, changed the presser foot and did free motion quilting around the guys. It actually worked pretty well altho I'm not the best at that. There are a few places where it kind of went wonky but I don't think a little guy will care! Free motion quilting means that your hands  move the fabric forward, sideways, whichever way you want without the machine doing it. Your foot controls the speed that the needle goes up and down so you're really controlling how big the stitches are. I'm better at it than I used to be but probably need to quilt a few more to get better at it. Once the monkeys were done I put the walking foot back on to machine quilt the rest of the blanket.
The baby shower was yesterday afternoon. Other gifts there included monkey crib sheets, plush monkeys and even a monkey mobile to hang above the crib!

Before I left for Canada at the end of July I ordered some yarn for my next production projects. Well, it finally came Friday afternoon.

Here is my part of the order. We'd also ordered some bamboo for Tuesday Weavers. I think one of those cones was what held up the order but the arrival was perfect. Until now I hadn't had time to really work on production. So, today I pull out black and begin weaving short vests just of black to add appliques to for the show in October! Just over a month til the next show! yikes!!
Black's not fun to weave, it's all kind of the same but it's a good background for what I'll be adding to it later. While I weave I'll open up the box of Borders, Season 3 DVD that my nephew gave me this summer and watch it to pass the time. This'll be just a short warp but needs to be done, 7 vests, close to 13 yards I guess. Hope to have it on, off and the next one on by the weekend since I've only got 3 days to work on it this week!
Til next week.
Carol