Obsessed with Love

So, Saturday morning I was feeling very obsessed with doing this Love quilt. I asked the girls (so totally nonchalant-like and casual while secretly holding my breath) if they would like to join me and we could make it a sewing party.

They were excited! Woohoo!

Molly is Big Stuff because she has her own machine. I have shown her the basics of how to use it but mostly I just let her take off and do her own thing.

There's not much to "mess up" when you're doing wonky letters and paper piecing, but if she did mess up -- like not catching both layers of fabric in the seam--I took over and re-did it for her. I didn't want her to get frustrated. Ripping out is difficult in paper piecing because you need to use a very short stitch in order to make it easier to rip the paper out later.

She took over the "L"s and sewed many of them. That is, when she wasn't trying to take the machine apart to see how it worked.

Just keepin it real--there were some times of frustration--some storming off--some pouting--we will just gloss over all that because when she decided to come back "and just do her own thing" she created her own little "art quilt".

My sweet girl!

Sophie, who is always my Busy Little Helper, took on the job of finger pressing all the seams so I didn't have to take them back to the ironing station with every seam. She also played go-fer and delivered all the finished blocks from the sewing station to the pressing station, the trimming station, and the layout station.

We all spent lots of time oohing and ahhing and playing around with the layout of the letters.

Even Izzy did a good job as Layout Supervisor. Good Doggie!

By Saturday night we had 3 full LOVE blocks (out of 13 total) completely finished, and most of the rest of the letters. I saved the"E"s for last because they seemed the most daunting but they really weren't.

Sunday afternoon we got busy again and finished up all the LOVEs.

Here are all our finished blocks! They don't look great, above, against the green carpet so here they are below, as I was planning the layout:

I spent most of the superbowl sewing plain blue blocks between the LOVE blocks. Then added a blue border. In the last few minutes of the superbowl we had a finished quilt top!

Some notes:

As I mentioned last post, I used Kelly's free pattern here

I photocopied the letters at 75% and after piecing them trimmed them to 6" x 7.75"

Which made a complete LOVE block of 11.5 x 15

I changed the "E" from lower case to capital, just cause my daughters wanted me to

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Today after school I'm going to show them how to "put that white stuff in between the quilt."