Stitching in the Barn

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

 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.

 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...

I did get our dice bags finished last year. This is the first one I did with a pocket on the lining and the paper piecing page for my next block.

I bought my son a game for Christmas: As you can see, it comes with a lot of dice and you get more in the booster packs.  We've been having a lot of fun playing it and we're thinking of taking it to the next level. There's a group that plays near us every Wednesday that we might go to. If we're going to take this on the road, and because I love geeky sewing, I gotta make us some dice bags!

I'm forcing myself to make this blog post. It's been a tough week and I don't want to do this but blogging does make me happy so I hope this helps me get back on track. I've finished my quilt, mostly. It could use more quilting but this is as done as it's going to get for now. This was the hardest one to weave and I'm really proud of it. Sorry the picture is a bit blurry, I just couldn't seem to get them all to look sharp today. I stitched around all the red sections with a continuous line when I attached the applique'. Then, after pin basting the quilt together, I stitched through all three layers around the heart on the edge and then a second time using the edge of my presser foot as a guide. I also stitched inside the border.

I got my hearts trimmed and fused down. The picture's not great but I waned to document my progress. I hope to stitch down the applique's tomorrow and layer it for quilting. The first post for this project, with the links for how to make the hearts, is here . Linking up with: Can I get a whoop whoop??

Today, I've been working on the woven hearts I started on yesterday's post . I cut out my fusible web and laid them on the pink fabric to see in what order I wanted them.

Me & the kids played around with the Slice machine after working on a project for my 10 yo son. He did a research project on VCU for March Madness. He had to put it on a poster board so we got out the Slice and cut some letters and circles out of cardstock. I bought this great stack of solid color cardstock at Target, 72 12" X 12" sheets in 18 colors, for under $8. I got sticker shock when I saw the price per sheet at the craft store and invested in these instead. I'm glad I'm not getting into scrapbooking, I thought fabric was expensive, sheesh.  Here's his poster (sorry for the blurry picture): We cut the letters and orange circles from the basic design card, which happened to match the font the school uses. My daughter drew the black lines on with a Sharpie then we added some double sided tape to the back and stuck them all on. The two images at the bottom were printed from the website, cut out and glued on. I have to backtrack and show ...

My mother-in-law came to visit last week during Spring Break. It was fun. We had a quilt project me, her and my daughter were in the middle of before she visited. It was great for National Quilting Day. It was like we celebrated all week. We completed them, well mostly. I still need to attach the binding on my daughter's quilt. It was a kit we picked up a while ago called Misty Pines by Jeri Kelly. It finishes at 7.75 inches by 21.25 inches. It came with a paper pieced center and all the fabrics to finish it except batting. We bought three to work on them together. It was my daughter and MIL's first quilt. It was a great idea to buy a complete kit for their first project because we didn't have to spend the extra time debating over choosing fabric and some of the pieces were already cut to size so we could get right to working on them. They came out great. Here's mine: And my daughter's: The kit didn't include a binding so we went out to buy...

I was in the JoAnn's Monday buying grommets when I happened to notice their original model Slice machines were on clearance. I had just seen the new Slice Elite at Hobby Lobby the previous weekend and noticed there was an applique' card you could buy for it. Also, I Have A Notion reviewed the new Slice Fabrique on their blog earlier this month. They will be carrying them & the accessories. The Slice is a die cutting machine by the scrapbooking company Making Memories that is very hard to find info about online, except at their site, even though it has been around since 2008. They are now branching out into the quilting and fabric crafting hobbies with their 2 new models but it turns out the original model  can use the new design cards. The older model on clearance was $80, at my local JoAnn's in Grapevine, TX, while the new models run at $150 and it looks like they haven't gotten the bugs out of them yet. The biggest differences between them that I...

I think I need to practice updating more often and in smaller bits. I've been thinking it over the past couple of days and realized I was going to make one giant post after the project I'm making is done. I need to either make posts more often during the progress or cut to the basics so it doesn't take over an hour for me to write up a post. I'm normally much more succinct verbally but tend to type up a storm. Sunday we picked up a small pineapple on sale at the grocery store. It tasted so good it was gone in a day. Last year, I had found some information online about growing the pineapple top. I searched around and found this page: http://www.rickswoodshopcreations.com/Pineapple/pineapple.htm My pineapple top is drying out now and will hopefully get planted. I have a bit of a brown thumb but this looks doable. If it doesn't work out, I'll try again with the next pineapple. On the quilting front, I'm in the middle of an applique' project. It'...