Stitching in the Barn

 I got the Westalee Design Sew Steady Starter Kit for my birthday with an Amazon gift card. It comes with a simple straight/curve ruler and a ruler foot. It was a little difficult to find the right set because I wanted it for my Singer Rocketeer that needs a Singer slant shank. There was one listing so I ordered it. I was happy to see pictures of my Rocketeer's cousin in the leaflet that came with the set.  You have to get the right foot for your machine.  Fortunately, Angela Walters has videos on ruler quilting, you can find them here . I got the foot adjusted correctly and went for it reusing a piece of previously quilted fabric.  I drew on a 6.5 inch square. I went straight for the awesome looking one and skipped the straight lines except for the border outline. I hope you can tell from the free motion quilting in the light green that I already have some skill at that, that's why I jumped to the fun stuff. This is another 6.5 inch drawn square. I skipped the borde...

 Piecing the Rock Candy Table Topper video is here . I loved this. It went together super fast. This one glows! I have to put aside Journey2Nebula to finish a Christmas quilt. I also just tried out ruler quilting on my home machine. I got the kit for my birthday. More on that later. Happy Quilting!

I cut these as I cut extra pieces for Jawbreaker from the previous post. I love the pattern Rock Candy so I couldn't wait to get started. The video for cutting Rock Candy is here .  The pieces are cut but I still need to trim the points. I have these templates so I used them to trim. I can't wait to sew these together!

School and life got intense so I had to put sewing aside 😢 I'm back in the saddle and I cut more Jawbreaker pieces and laid them out. You Tube video for Jawbreaker is here . This is not the direction in the pattern or video. This is my piece after sewing the rows.   The top sewn together.   It looked so weird with the jagged edges that I wasn't afraid to trim it. The trimmed top.  I might trim it some more because this was just making it square. I've got a couple of weird bits where I was planning on trimming it more. It might also stay unique. This came out way better than I expected! The next one is already cut out and I'm trimming the tips.

 Started the Jawbreaker quilt. I'm actually on time this week. Video on YouTube here . The strip below is the same blue and green above. Ugh, phone camera. I guess its because there was no white background but done is better than perfect. I found cutting the triangles in this orientation was easier than sideways. Ready for piecing!

 Pieced Lucky Charm. Video here: Jaybird quilts All pieced together and I even started the next one!     My intersections are amazingly good! I'm so happy with it!

 Had fun with cutting and starting the sewing on the Lucky Charm pillow. I spent about 3.5 hours on it so far. There were a lot more pieces to cut and trim. These photos were taken in early morning light so the colors aren't great. Just need to sew the rows together and take a photo in better light.

 #Journey2Nebula Seaside place mat top complete! Piecing video here. Please excuse the old pressing mat :) Took about 3 hrs total. Front:   My points came out great! Back:   Fabric inspiration from my stash that will become my backing.

 Stash pictures for #FQSScrappySeptember I want to make Moda Block Heads 3 #33 as a pillow like at the link.  

I've had these rulers for ages and now I get to use them. I'm doing the #Journey2Nebula quilt along. Click this link for the first video . And more info on the blog here . Bought a half jelly roll. Compared it against some stash fabric. Very bright for me but I like it! I chose 5 colors and the darker green. Cut for a Seaside place mat.  

 From the Fabric Patch on their YouTube channel. Watch Here.   A cute stack of pink batik fat quarters.

  Finished August 2020. Inspired by Waves by Jenny Doan here . Appliques available as free clip art here . Fabric from my stash.

  I received an extra large Stripology ruler for my birthday this year. I had received the Hex N More ruler for the previous Christmas. Both from my MIL. My husband had bought me the fat eighth stack at a craft show many years ago. It's Good Fortune by Kate Spain for Moda. They all came together for the start of an extra large hexagon quilt. Love these rulers! Lovely large stack of hexagons. I got 2 from every fat eighth. Great pile of scraps. I need to find a solid to calm down and unify these wonderful large scale prints. Happy quilting!  

 Tech pouch for a TI-Nspire CX II calculator. Project from this episode of Missouri Star Live by MSQC. Fabric from Connecting Threads. It's a little too snug but it'll do for now. Great project!    

  Finished stitching in July 2020. A Dimensions kit. Still needs finished, most likely as a wall quilt. Started when my husband was in the hospital for an extended stay. Finished 2 years later.

I want to participate in Sew Scrappy September just started by the Fat Quarter Shop but don't know if I can. Some of the scraps I have in my modest stash. There's still plenty. I want to do a pillow with Moda Blockheads #33 here . Lets see if I can with my full schedule.

Inspired by a quilt by Marti Michell from her Craftsy/Bluprint class Machine Quilting in Sections Fabric is Blast Off! by Connecting Threads and stash fabric. 50 inches by 50 inches. Finished January 2020.   Front     Back  

 Made from the information from The Fabric Patch found on their You Tube channel here . I love this pattern it makes the perfect fitted mask. It is supposed to contain 30 sizes.        Applique added to the black one above for my son. Just a font from MSWord enlarged, fused then later stitched.

       Well 2020 has been an eventful year hasn't it? Or maybe since many of us are at home it isn't. My life has been complicated long before the virus. In my retirement from being a full time parent, I decided to go to school and get a degree in Electrical Engineering. I feel like it is a calling. I've loved going back to school and it's very rewarding. At first it wasn't so bad when I was taking community college classes to get up to speed and re-learn all the math I was going to need. Then I started university in the fall of 2019. Wow did the course load increase dramatically! Fortunately, even though I didn't think so at the time, I had burned out from the job I was doing and quit right before I started Uni. If that hadn't have happened I would have failed many classes. All my free time was spent studying and preparing my brain to think like an engineer. Sewing was a dream reserved for those who had time, which wasn't me. I actually managed to get m...

Here's my completed Dresden Wreath for my MIL. My daughter got sick so she didn't get to embellish it but it still came out nicely with the different fabric textures. The solid bright red hearts are satin, the one on the lower left has texture, and the rest are cottons. I realized while finalizing this project that I don't know how to make bows and bought the wrong ribbon to make one. I ended up doing a magic bow like in the directions in this Craftster post from 2007 . (I had totally forgotten about this board and I used to be on it all the time back in the day. I can't even remember my user name but I hope I can find my old posts to see wheat I was up to back then. It looks like Craftster just went into archive only mode on Dec. 19th. and moved active participants to a new site.) The bow I made is kind of derpy looking and isn't sized right for this wreath but I'm sure my MIL will put on a nice one, she's great at making bows. I included a pai...

So I was super excited about being done with the quilt and just needing to add the binding. I hadn't done binding in a long time, well over a year, and forgot how wide to cut it. I cut my binding 2 inches. I put the strips together, pressed it and sewed it to the front with a quarter inch seam allowance. I don't hand sew binding on except for maybe my first quilt which was a table runner.  When I turned the binding over to the back it didn't reach past the stitching line! I thought if I glued it down I might be able to stitch it down. I didn't use a fine tip and I was super frustrated gluing down the binding. I even used an iron to speed it up. I am never doing that again and it took forever! I stopped gluing with maybe 25 inches left and just used my wonder clips, which I have plenty of. I started by straight stitching about 10 inches to see if the stitching was catching in the back. It wasn't. I was so close to finishing. Then I remembered, "Babies don...

 I described a bit on how I made this quilt larger in the last post. If you look closely at the photo of the front, in the corner at the edge, the batting shows. I cut some small pieces from the scrap and folded over 2 sides. I used glue to stick it down and appliqued the pieces through all the layers. Why did I do it this way? Two reasons: 1) "Babies don't care", 2) I didn't want to trim the sides down to match. The quilt came out remarkably square and I don't currently have the space to trim this. I added the last two borders mostly as described in Marti Michell's book Machine Quilting in Sections. The final corner looks good enough for a preschooler. You can only tell that the piece below the red planet is appliqued on because the glue is still there and shining from the light. It shouldn't be there anymore because I washed it. Also the quilting line doesn't go to the end because I decided to do this after I quilted it. I...