It’s been a busy week over here! The LAMQG’s retreat was a ball.

Aside from doing loads and loads of quilting, I made teeny tiny pants!

I used the quick change trousers pattern from Anna Maria Horner’s book “Handmade Beginnings.” They sewed up so quickly and are so cute with little yoke on the butt.

And it worked out well that it was Anna Maria’s pattern I was sewing with because she came to speak to the LAMQG early this week.

What an inspirational woman she is! So filled with passion, talent and a love for what she does. And she does so much! It was very motivating and encouraging to see someone who clearly loves her work and is so driven. Plus she’s just downright nice.

I’m back to my day job on Monday. The new schedule is going to take some getting used to but I’m certainly going to try to keep up with the sewing and blogging.

Hope you all have a wonderful weekend!

Of course I instantly had to pull some fabric for a baby quilt for MY baby!

I’m off the the 2nd annual LAMQG retreat today (four days of sewing with friends! What could be better??) and I hope to get something started. I’ve got lots of other projects to work on too…

And otherwise, I did some blog/pinterest/google searching and there just aren’t that many cute boy tutorials out there, are there? I’ve heard this from lots of moms but hadn’t experienced it first hand. So tell me, what’s your favorite pattern or tutorial for boy stuff? I wanna make this kid more than quilts!

I’m gonna hold off on showing you the inside for now but you’ll all see it plenty in the future…

The beautiful style photography in the book was done by Bethany Nauert and I had such a good time working with her to style all of the shots. I also hit up every single friend I have with a beautiful home (I’m lucky to have so many!) so it’s fun to see their spaces featured in the book along with the quilts!

I can’t wait to show you more!!

I put together a straight forward little tutorial to explain what I mean. A lot of you might already know how this works, but in case some of you don’t…

One thing before we get started – it’s key that you use a uniform 1/4″ seam allowance for all of this piecing or else it won’t all line up correctly.

So let’s say you want to piece together this little bit of plaid:

It’s pretty clear how you sew together most of it…

But what to do with the center bit that falls right in the middle of all four portions?

First sew it onto the lower corner of the upper left portion – but leave the top of the seam unsewn (hence partial seams!)

Then sew on the bottom left portion and then the bottom right portion. Three portions are now sewn to the center piece and now you’ll use that unsewn part of the seam to sew on the final portion.

With the top right portion placed on the lower right portion, right sides together, sew them together. (BTW – think that it’s time for me to get myself a new cutting mat?!?)

When you’re done, your piecing will look like this.

Finally, finish up by folding your piecing down the middle, right sides together, and sew the remaining seam until you get down to the already sewn part of the seam. You’re all done!

See? Easy enough! It gets more involved when you have a ton of these partial seams in your quilt top (there were a LOT in the top I just finished), but I find that having all the cut out pieces displayed on my design wall, thinking it through, assembling it piece by piece, and then portion by portion, works well for me. I don’t think I could think it through if I didn’t have it all laid out in front of me though. I’m  a visual person.  I need to see it to get it.  This is just one more reason I think that a design wall is one of the most valuable things you can have in your sewing space!

I went the extra mile with this top and sewed it up using Y seams. I only wanted pieced seams where it made sense in terms of the weave of the plaid … Though I’m gonna go ahead and call it: Y seams are a pain! But I’m really happy with the end result

I also matched up the stripy fabric in the one place where it had to be pieced. And now I need to quilt it!!

Here’s a mosaic of a lot of the sewing I did in 2011.

Things that I realize by looking at it all in one place: I’ve really moved away from using white as the negative space in my quilts, and I’ll never tire of improv pieced blocks that are just lotsa lil’ squares together. Actually, I shouldn’t say never. I used to sew wonky log cabins this often and I moved on from those! Makes me wonder what will be next!

In early 2011 I also finished sewing 20 more quilts that I can’t show you yet because they are all in Modern Minimal. Can’t wait to start showing them to you in the next couple of months when the book comes out!

2012 is going to be a big year for me! The next book comes out and I’m going to become a mother. Whoa. That last thing is a big one!

There are also big things in store for The Modern Quilt Guild! Did you see that we kicked off 100 Days of Modern Quilting? And there’s more – much more – coming down the pike for The MQG! What a great year it’s going to be. Hope that you’re all just as excited about it as I am!

I went ahead and used my pattern that I posted a while back.

They sew up so quickly and easily! I used a Moda Crossweaves as the background and three different shot cottons for the lines. I’m addicted to these solids that have some added texture… I wish I had every color there is!

I love my Horizon so I am super excited to be one of Janome America’s featured friends and I’ve contributed one of my books to that mystery bag of goodies!

It’s easy to enter. First, click over to janome.com where you can read a little about me and the MQG, as well as some of Janome’s other great sewing friends. Leave a comment on the article, and you are automatically entered to win. You can leave a new comment each day, increasing your odds of winning. Then, click to Janome’s Facebook page, give them a “Like” and encourage your friends to do the same. There are almost 18,000 now and the sooner they get to 20,000, the sooner they’ll draw a random winner from the janome.com comments for that amazing Friend-to-Friend prize bundle!

You can read more about it here. Good luck!!

You can find it here!

Also, thank you so much everyone for your kind comments about my last post. We’re very excited!!