Beautiful Things for Boys: Triangle Quilt

I made this quilt for my son in the few months before he was born.  Honestly, the hardest part for me was making a final decision on which fabrics to use.  I ended up making it with solids, mostly in neutral colors--blues, grays, whites, browns, tans.  I cut each fat quarter into 5" squares and then cut them diagonally.  I randomly arranged them and rearranged them until I felt happy with the placement (I find it super helpful to take pictures of my quilts before I sew them together, for whatever reason the camera always reveals more than my bare eye does and I usually make changes that I like so much better!).

I sewed them together with a quarter inch seam, used cotton batting, and backed and bound it with Kona Cotton in Charcoal.  I chose to quilt it with straight lines a quarter inch away from each seam, making a grid pattern.  I also embroidered a little message to my sweet boy.  I love, love, love how this turned out.  As much as I love fun prints, there is something so soothing and beautiful about a quilt made in solids.  I hope my sweet boy will love it just as much as I do someday!

Getting Started with Copperplate Calligraphy

I have always wanted to learn calligraphy and this winter I decided to give it a go.  I bought the book Mastering Copperplate Calligraphy as my guide and then bought some copperplate nibs, a nib pen, ink, and a pad of layout paper (this paper is super useful because ink doesn't bleed on it and it's transparent enough that you can lay a guide page underneath it to help you with your letter formation).  Shortly after I started I bought some fun colored ink made by Speedball at a craft store and was super disappointed, the quality was far inferior to the Winsor and Newton ink and my penmanship looked significantly worse with it.  Perhaps if you are more advanced at Copperplate it wouldn't be such an issue, but for me it made a huge difference.  I also use the free printable Copperplate guide from here...there are a bunch of others out there, but this was the one I liked best.

It is a fairly inexpensive hobby to try, all in all, I spent about $25, but it does require some devoted practice time.  For the first month I typically tried to write a page a day.  I would always start with some lines of warm up strokes at the beginning and then transition to practicing letters and eventually words.  I can't speak highly enough of the book Mastering Copperplate Calligraphy.  It really breaks everything down step by step, gives you letter variations, and practice words and sentences.  If for some reason something was hard to understand at first (like for me, the letter "o"), I would turn to YouTube.

I still have so far to go with my calligraphy, but even within the first month I saw significant improvement. The hardest part for me has been carving out the time to sit down and write.

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