Merry Christmas from Christa Quilts and Family

December 24, 2011March 19, 20131 Comment

We wish you a Merry Christmas and a Quilty New Year!We’ve had a wonderful Christmas! All of our extended family gathered around for Christmas Eve dinner and to open presents. It was fun to see my children’s excitement as they experienced the fun of giving and the joy it brought to others.

The younger kids and cousins made candy Christmas trains while Jason Sr. and Jr. battled each other on their favorite computer game. Ryan was off in the distance, admiring his new collectible card games. My favorite gift was a set of warm fleece pants & top, gloves and a scarf. I just love to be comfy-cozy!

Jenna got her very own sewing machine. Now we can both sew at the same time and work on projects together. Merry Christmas!!

Christmas Cookie Exchange and Recipe

December 16, 2011March 19, 20134 Comments

Yesterday, some friends and I had a really fun cookie swap. 12 of us met for dinner and we each made 12 dozen of the same cookies, then took home 12 dozen different cookies!

I used my son’s favorite chocolate chip cookie recipe. It calls for ice cream in the batter which makes them very rich.

Doesn’t the batter look delicious?

Here’s the recipe: 2 sticks butter, 1 cup sugar, 3/4 cup brown sugar, 2 eggs, 1 1/2 T vanilla, 1 1/2 T mint extract, 3/4 cup mint ice cream, 4 cups flour, 1 1/2 t baking soda, 1 1/2 cups chocolate chips.

Cream together wet ingredients; mix dry ingredients and add to wet mix to combine. With cookie scoop, drop onto baking sheet. Bake for 11 min. Makes 4 dozen cookies.

Jason Jr. made the dough while I spent 2 hours baking 144 cookies. The cookie scoop was fun to use. I packed each dozen separately so they were ready to swap for our party.

My fiiend Katie and I hosted the dinner at her house and we all swapped the cookies with recipes after.

Katie has the same model house as me. It’s fun to see how she decorated it, especially with fabric centerpieces!

It was such fun sampling all the different cookies and adding to my recipe collection. I ate as many of them as I could, then packed up the rest for my neighbors and friends. After a couple of days of indulging, I’d better hit the gym, first thing in the morning!

Baby Bricks Free Quilt Pattern Tutorial

November 30, 2011June 15, 201313 Comments

Here is one of my favorite quilt designs I want to tell you about, that I call “Baby Bricks”. I’m developing a pattern for it so I’m making lots of “tester” quilts as part of the process. Enjoy this free tutorial version but please note that these are copyrighted images and text.

I love taking a pile of fabric and cutting it up into useable rectangular pieces.

A piece of “Cute as a Button” flannel for the backing was the inspiration for the color scheme. It also limited how big the quilt would be. Since there are two sides to every fabric, I used the backside of one of my blue bricks since the right side was too “girly.”

Cut out as many rectangle bricks as you want to make your quilt big enough. Make them as wide or as long as you want.

I like to offset each of the rows so it gives a “staggered” look. To do this, fill in the gaps with 1/2 of a rectangle (plus seam allowances).

Randomly sew the bricks together to create rows, then sew the rows together into the top.

I laid all my bricks out into a pleasing arrangement first.

It was fun to stitch baby phrases on the quilt.

Here’s the finished quilt, made for a friend’s new little baby boy.

I’m making the green version for my sister’s new baby boy. It still needs a few more monkeys!

Updated: Baby Bricks is has now been featured at FaveQuilts.com.

Click here to see my other featured tutorials.

Family 5K Turkey Trot

November 25, 2011March 19, 2013Leave a comment

Each year my family has a tradition of running a 5K on Thanksgiving morning. This year we kept with our tradition but it was a little simpler and lots more fun!

Jason, our kids and I, along with Grandma, Grandpa, Aunt & Uncle (& the dog!) gathered up a few friends and ran a 5k (3.1 miles) in our very own neighborhood, rather than traveling across town for an “official” race, like we have done in years past.

We had a nice showing from our running neighbors and friends. We ran an easy course with light traffic and beautiful weather. Families with kids in strollers and bikes all got to participate in the fun, too.

My oldest son finished first with a time of 21:16 and my younger son ran with his dad. (My daughter and I did a shorter run so we could be there at the end to take pictures.)

My friend Marci (one of the fastest runners I know and last year’s winner), got to be the Turkey while everyone tried to catch her.

She ran with her kids this time so she slowed her pace quite a bit. I know she was sad to give up her Gobbler Crown but now it passes to my son for next year.

At the finish, we celebrated with bagels and snacks. Everyone who finished got a small prize, courtesy of ChristaQuilts.com. What a great way to start our day!

Happy Halloween – Toy Story Style

October 31, 2011March 19, 2013Leave a comment

Ok, so Jason and I are never too old to dress up for Halloween!

This picture was actually taken last Christmas at our in-laws house.

We all dressed up as characters from Toy Story and had a costume themed scavenger hunt with clues from the movie. We loved the costumes so much that Jason and I decided to use them again for this year’s Halloween fun.

Say hi to Jessie the yodelin’ cowgirl with the yarn-made braids and Sheriff Woody, the cutest cowboy in town!!

Our kids however wanted new costumes. Jason Jr. picked out a commanding “Star Trek” themed outfit, Jenna wanted to be a “cute” witch and Ryan looked just perfect in his police officer’s uniform. He rounded up all the kids and kept them in line!

We had a safe night of Trunk or Treating on Saturday (people from church decorated their cars and handed out candy from their trunks). Then tonight, we’ll head out in the neighborhood for more yummy treats!

Aren't these Witches Cute?

Quilts Are the “Ties” That Bind

October 22, 2011October 15, 20116 Comments

I want to share with you the story of the Tie quilt that I helped orchestrate for a very special person I know from church. He served as a stake president for our church for 9 years and his term of service was up last summer. This quilt is special not only for the person who received it but also for the men represented by the ties on the quilt and the story of togetherness that the quilt created.

My dear friend Alberta from church had the idea to give a quilt to the outgoing stake president, made up of 68 ties from all the men that served with him during his 9 year tenure. These were counselors, bishops and council members, many of whom had moved out of town and had to be tracked down again. (My husband Jason’s tie is in there, too but now I can’t remember which one it is!!)

We took all the ties and formed them into a circular Dresden Plate design.
I had nearly gotten it all quilted when I decided it looked all wrong. The ties curved too much and the circle did not look like a nice flat circle – there were too many ties so it bunched up too much. I had not figured out the math ahead of time – I thought I could just sew them all together and they’d magically create a circle. The pictures in this post all show the corrected finished quilt – I was too traumatized to take any “before” pictures!

After much agonizing, I had to take it all apart and start over. This was on a Tuesday afternoon and the quilt needed to be finished for a presentation on Friday of the same week. I told Jason about the problem and he figured out the correct math for me, based on number of ties, the circumference of a circle, and the length and width of the ties. I then enlisted lots of women from my ward and they helped me for 3 days solid, nearly round the clock to finish it. We had to unpick every single tie, recut them all, resew and quilt them down. We finished it just in time and it was very well received. We even finished the binding by hand and it was nearly queen sized when done.

This quilt really helped me learn the value of advanced planning and the very true saying “measure twice, cut once!”

This project was completed last summer but it wasn’t until our church fair last week, when I was able to get the quilt and the former stake president in the room with me to take a picture. It was the most spiritual experience I’ve ever had making a quilt!

Las Vegas Temple Quilt

October 19, 2011October 15, 20114 Comments

For the community fair that my church hosted recently, several of the church members got together to make and donate quilts representing their congregations.

When the idea was first introduced to me, my immediate thought was to make a quilt of the beautiful LDS Temple here in Las Vegas, Nevada.

I gathered a few sewers together from my ward and we set to work!

After the fair, we gave the quilt to the Stake President and it is now hanging in his office.

Community Carnival & Quilt Show

October 17, 2011March 19, 20132 Comments

As part of an outreach effort, my church recently put on a Country Fair for our small neighborhood community.

It was quite a show with carnival booths, free food, entertainment and of course a little quilt show!

Here are a few quilts that some church members made to share their talents. Many of them were donated afterwards.

I loved the set of Halloween charm pack quilts and the family tree quilt was simply adorable. Notice the little Sunbonnet Sue quilt to the right.

I also made a very special quilt that I’ll blog about in my next post.

The committee asked all the local bishops to take a turn in the dunk tank and Jason was a good sport to participate. To add to the fun, he dressed in a full dress shirt and tie and was dunked quite a few times. Thank goodness it was a rather warm October evening!

Each ward was responsible for creating and manning an activity booth. Ours did a Cornhole bean bag toss which everyone loved. My kids’ favorite booth was the cupcake walk!

It was a fun evening!

Baby Showers Galore

October 14, 2011March 19, 2013Leave a comment

I live in an area where I’m really close to a lot of ladies that I attend church with. Many of them are sewers, several are learning to quilt, and most of them are young moms. That means lots of baby quilts and oodles of baby showers!

I went to lunch this week to celebrate two friends and their baby girls. For my friend Alissa who has been hit by the quilting bug, I gave her this little wrapped up bundle for her new bundle of joy.

My gift to her is to teach her to make a quilt from it. I selected a pack of pink & green City Girl fat quarters along with the French Rose Buds baby quilt pattern.

We are going to have a good ole’ fashioned sewing bee while she puts this quilt together.

A few years ago I made Alissa’s first daughter the quilt below. I thought it would be cute for her to make a coordinating quilt for her second daughter. It’ll be “sew” much fun!My other friend Heather has 3 boys and finally had a sweet baby girl last month. She’s the one I made the pink and green French Roses quilt for. (See previous posts for pictures of that one). I had to snap this adorable picture of her cute little girl dressed in a day of the dead skirt with matching “Skull” cap! Perfect for an October outing, don’t you think?

It was hard to get her to wake up and the lighting was bad but it’s still a cute picture!

The skirt reminds me of the new Day of the Dead & Sugar Skulls fabric from Alexander Henry that I just posted on my website this week. Too fun!!

Fun Friday

October 7, 2011Leave a comment

On Fridays we usually try to reward our kids with a fun outing or some extra free time if they’ve finished their chores and homework for the week. Well, I got MY chores done early today so I got to have my friend over to play…

Tamara has been bitten by the quilting bug so I’m helping her make a quilt. She cut out and sewed this pretty green and brown quilt top over the last month or so, then came over to my house so I could help her baste it. Next, I’ll show her how to machine quilt it and then bind it.

As a true quilt-aholic, she also brought over her adorable Abby Bag that she managed to whip together in a few hours in between taking care of her husband and kids (whom I thank for allowing her to get away and hang out with me for the afternoon!) Her bag is the one one the right and mine’s the one on the left. Do we have great taste or what??