Dining Room Decorating

I love the farmhouse rustic style that is very popular right now, especially if you live in the country! Last Christmas, my present from the husband was a farmhouse table and I love its old charm. Almost any table runner looks great on it especially vintage inspired ones. We recently bought a hutch that was finished to match our dining table because I needed a space to hide all of my daughters' schoolwork because we homeschool and the dining room is also our schoolroom! I had these plastic totes laying out full of schoolwork that were somewhat functional but ugly and out of place. Here is a picture of the new hutch!

I originally had a wall of pictures from my husbands and I's travels but had to remove some to put the new hutch in and the pictures that were left didn't quiet match the look of the dining room anymore so I took them down and put them elsewhere. (Here is what it looked like at first...)

To fill some of the empty space I used a rustic wood frame from that I found for a few bucks at an antique store, that originally had a paper picture in it that wasn't very pretty, and replaced that with a quilted table topper I made to fit the frame. I used the scrappy strawberry block from Lori Holt's Farm Girl Vintage book and filled in the rest of the space with a cream fabric. I free motioned quilted vines on the strawberry topper to go with the strawberry motif. 

I love the strawberry, although I originally thought of making an apple block or a barn block for this frame, but the strawberry worked great. 

Here is what the dining room looks like now. 

Happy Fall Ya'll! Pumpkins and apples galore!

Fall Table Runner

SO, I finally bought not so long ago The Farm Girl Vintage quilt book by Lori Holt and I love it!! So many fun projects and quilts in it. I made a fall table runner for my dining room table using the maple leaf block and the pumpkin block from her book.

These blocks are so much fun to make let me tell you! You can search on Instagram for hours with these block names as hashtags and find the coolest pictures! It is so neat to see how many different outcomes this quilt can look like with all of the different fabric choices. It really is awesome! 

 Here is one small 6 inch maple leaf block. I combined four together with one inch sashing to make one block. I did this again so i would have matching ends on my runner and then decided to put a pumpkin in the middle because i wanted all the fall colors in my runner.

 It is 3 12" blocks put in a row with sashing in between and on the outside, 1.5 inch sashing in ivory and then a 2.5 inch outside border around the entire runner.

I love quilting runners and table toppers because they are so easy to quilt on my home machine. I free motion some pumpkins and pumpkin patch vines to make it even more fall themed. I love the way it all went together! 

Here is close up of the quilting, not perfect but you get the gist. Pumpkin-y fun! Vines are pretty easy when doing free motion and pretty fun to just swirl around wherever you please. 

This is the finished project minus binding!  I love the way it turned out. I ended up outlining the pumpkin and leaves and did not free motion on them, except for a few pumpkin lines on the pumpkin. I binded the runner with the white/ivory fabric. 

This is the only picture i have of it with the binding. My daughters are devouring some pizza in this picture, but that is where the runner stays until it is christmas time and the christmas runner will take its place!

(A picture from Christmas last year.) 

These are currently my only two main runners for now but maybe i will have one for all the holidays as the years go on! 

The runner was simple! I hope you are inspired to make one! They are fun!

~Jaclyn 

Somerset Log Cabin Quilt Top Completed!

I have not posted on the blog in awhile so I thought I would take the time to make a quick post to show the completed log cabin quilt top using the Somerset Jelly Roll and Ivory Fabric. I love Fig Tree Fabrics and this quilt came out beautiful! I think with the right quilting it could be a very unique quilt, especially if colored thread (maybe red or orange!) was used in a neat design on the ivory fabric! Im not sure if i will quilt it myself or get it professionally done. Queen quilts are a lot of work on a small home machine!

This is a picture of it without a border. I decided on an orange border.

I used the same orange poppy fabric from the Somerset line of fabric that is on this Mama Hen Block for my border. (I am currently working on farm girl vintage quilts by Lori Holt! Really fun projects in her book!) 

Its hard to take a picture around here without two little girls or a cat or dog in them and keeping animals off my projects is a near impossible task.

But in the end i decided to make all the blocks face the same way and I like the way it turned out. It will be a lovely quilt to have on my bed when it is quilted one day!

Hope everybody is having a happy Friday!! God Bless!!

~Jaclyn