Stitching in the Barn

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...

One of my favorite sewing You Tube channels is The Stitch TV . One of the hosts, Pam, is someone I admire. She's an engineer and a quilter, something I'm aiming to achieve within the next couple of years. She is no nonsense and just unapologetically herself. One piece of advice, or more accurately tag phrase, she gives, I embraced recently: "Babies don't care." That simple phrase freed me from worrying over making the perfect baby quilts. It allowed me to feel free to try new techniques and fudge some trouble spots I came across while making a quilt for my 2.5 year old nephew. I'll post the completed quilt in another post, I still need to get some good pictures, but I'd like to describe some of the things I've done to this quilt.

My daughter arranged the layout of the wreath and I sewed them together. We got 2 fronts and 1 back. I don't know if I'll make more fan blades now to finish the second one. Now she's going to take the front for my MIL and decorate it before we put them together and stuff them. I don't know when she'll get to it but hopefully I'll have a couple more posts before mailing this to my MIL.

Last Night my husband helped me make some block boards like in this video by Fat Quarter Shop .  This one was actually 2 scraps of batting. After reading the comments I decided to leave off the bindings and use some tape I bought that was sticky back fabric. It was too thin so we just mitered the corners and wrapped the excess batting around to the back and they work well. We also hot glued all sides down taut first. I just used them today to move my Dresden wreath after my daughter arranged the hearts. She arranged three and they stacked easily as advertised. I just picked up two hearts at a time to piece them and then placed them back and they always stayed in order. Now I just need to make bigger ones. I got 4 from a foam core board that I cut evenly down the center each way. They finished at 11 x 14 inches.

Below is the one tool I cannot sew without, the bobbin winder. My vintage machines don't always wind bobbins or wind them oddly. This little gadget is a must have in those situations and it will do all my bobbins no matter the type. The power plug input doesn't work, or maybe it's the plug itself, but it runs just fine on battery power. My daughter also uses vintage machines and borrowed it the one day. Late that night it was still in her room when I needed it. I had other sewing things I could do but now I see I might need to get another. I'd like to find one in purple like I saw online somewhere. That would be fun and this one is so old the white is getting discolored.

I saw this wreath on the Charm About You blog while I was scanning Quilter Blogs over the holidays and watched the video at the bottom of her instruction page   and saw a lovely new years wreath in it. In the new years wreath the similar fabrics were paired and I thought they looked like hearts.  I asked my daughter if my MIL would like the wreath in Valentines day fabrics and she thought it was a great idea. We are blessed to have a crafting thrift store nearby. She went and picked up several different fabrics at $3 a yard. It's funny because I donated some Valentines day fabrics to them in the past year because I never thought I'd use Valentines day fabric. She brought home some lovely fabrics, I already had a Dresden plate ruler and I cut an 8 inch strip from each fabric and made a total of 36 hearts over the past 2 days. We only need 20 hearts for the whole wreath. My daughter is going to arrange them into a wreath and add some gems and decorate one side ...

Yep, I cross stitch too. I hadn't done it in years because quilting is more useful. Then my husband was in the hospital and I needed something to do with my hands.  I picked up a cute motivational kit to take with me. This is what I had done by December of 2019. Here's my progress now. All the cross stitch is done. I'm working on the half stitch. It'll still need the back stitching and french knots. I find it helps calm my mind to just take a row of stitches at a time.  I don't like how my photos turned out after the editor. It looks more like the first one. I'll try using a new editor next time.

I'm going to change up my blog soon. I like the newer modern template choices.  Today's post is more documentation for my process on this quilt. This is probably TLDR. Worked on fitting the quilt to the Marti Michell Perfect Patchwork Templates for making Drunkard's Path blocks in 3 to 4 inches. I had these, they'll make cutting easier and I haven't used them in a while. To make them fit the quilt, I had to make my blocks 7 inches finished and use a 6 by 6 block layout. I use EQ7 for designing so changing it up is easy.  I will need 36 blocks, 18 with black pie sub-blocks and 18 with bright pie sub-blocks. I need 72 HST which divide into 8 sets of 9 different colors. I can also evenly divide the number of Drunkard's Path blocks into 9 so I trimmed my fabrics down to 9 from 15 in the last post. All of these are from my stash. Pretty good picture but the greens got lost. I'll get 8 HST from each color and 8 Drunkard's Path sub-blocks...

At some point I bought 2 charm packs of Island Hopping by Connecting Threads that were a group of 16 fabrics and decided to make a baby quilt from the squares. I put both packs on my design wall with the packs split evenly in the middle. I changed the placement for a week until I found one that was balanced and pleasing. Sewed it together and got a couple of fabrics to round it out to a decent size for a baby a long time ago. Meanwhile life happened and this quilt has been intended for 2 babies and will end up for a third being born this week. I'm really happy with it. I quilted it around the beginning of August 2019 with an orange peel motif in the blocks and swags in the first border. I couldn't figure out what to do in the last border that wouldn't be too dense. While I was sick in bed recently, I came across a way to quilt a braid design that was simple, fast and not dense. It worked great! I finished the quilting, trimmed the front and batting, then turned t...

It was February 2016, wow!  I wrote several posts and left them in the draft folder at the end of 2017 but never published them. Life has totally crippled my quilting game for a long time but quilting makes me happy. I'm getting back into quilting and realizing how much joy it brings to my life that I am totally convinced I have to quilt more. I'm going to start with a picture of some fabrics I pulled from my stash for a toddler quilt. I'm going to use these in a quilt inspired by Waves by Missouri Star Quilt Company, info on this page https://quiltingtutorials.com/tutorial/make-a-waves-quilt-with-jenny It's going to have a black background and the multicolored batik as a border. Finished size will be about 50 inches square. If you want a bit of life story you can read it below. I mostly wrote it for self documentation. I've got one baby quilt finished at the end of last year and I'm working on another baby quilt with a QAYG method that I think...