Zip, Bang, Boom!

Two little quilts for two little firecrackers.

When I was in high school, I had a great group of guy friends.

Even better, I still have a great great of guy friends :)

And for the cherry on top, they have married (or are about to marry) some fantastic women. My friend Rob set the bar really high when he married Holly.

She is an amazing entrepreneur and after countless hours of work squeezed in between a day job, husband and child, her business is really taking off. Please go and check out her shop, MarshMueller, full of goodies for little ones in fabulous fabrics!

Before Tatum was born we were over at Rob and Holly's. It just so happened that Holly was also pregnant, with her second baby. Our boys were due just a few months apart and even though Buddy and I were keeping the baby's name to ourselves, we thought it was important to compare notes with our friends :)

During the conversation, it came out that we were both thinking about names that resulted in awesome initials, TNT for us and BAM for them. Hehe.

SO, when I saw this fabric when I was shopping for flannel for burp clothes, I had to have it and I had to turn it into matching quilts for the boys.

I wanted the quilts to be simple and graphic so I went with a brick layout in bright solids and geometric prints. I searched online for a font that captured the comic book theme. It took some doing, but I think I hit the nail on the head!

The applique foot for my Bernina makes this kind of thing a breeze.

Voila!

This picture gives and interesting view of shrinkage since the TNT quilt has been washed and BAM's has not.

I love how these turned out. I may have spoiled the surprise for Holly a bit, but I think she'll forgive me ;)

I smell a photo shoot in our future!!!

Linking up:

Can I Get a Whoop Whoop

Tackling the BEAST

The Biggest of them All

Remember this UFO?

A twin size quilt for Brother. I have been pretty intimidated by idea of quilting this at home. I toyed with the idea of renting time on a local long arm machine, but decided I am too cheap and too busy to make that work.

After a lot of the usual hymning and hawing, I decided to keep it simple just do straight line quilting.

I pin based half of the quilt and spray basted the other half. I figured that if the spray worked out well, after I quilted that half, I could take the pins and out and spray the other half. That way at least half of the beast would be fully secured at any given time.

I'm not going to lie, this is A LOT of quilt to wrangle. I moved my machine as far over and as far forward on the desk as I could to allow for maximum work space.

The first bit in the very middle was the hardest. After that, it got quite a bit easier and I hardly noticed the giantness of the quilt. I did a full 3.5 hours and finished half of the quilting!!!

The rest didn't go quite as quickly, but I was excited to get this done and managed to find time here and there to get it all finished up. All that is left now, binding the beast. I have the fabric and plan to machine stitch and finish with a zig zag as opposed to hand stitching. I know that this quilt will need to endure a lot of washing so I want it to be extra durable.

The quilty goodness.

Hopefully this will be a finish very soon, but there are a few other projects out there distracting me. . .