Stitching in the Barn

 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.

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.

  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!    

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 ...

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...

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...

I was looking at my old Craftsy account and noticed I put some free baby shoe patterns on my wishlist ages ago. There have been 2 babies, a boy and a girl, born into my family recently so I thought these would make great gifts.  Then the JoAnn's ad came in and Simplicity patterns were on sale. So after looking at their website catalog, which is in the middle of being updated, I saw they had several baby shoe patterns to sew. When I got got the store, there were only 2 available so I bought those along with pink felt and fleece, on sale, and some fusible fleece to make them. I absolutely fell in love with view G on Simplicity 1677. They are the cutest little felt and fleece Ugg style booties and I knew I'd have to sew these up right away. It was only 3 pattern pieces but it took longer to sew than I anticipated. I made them over a couple of days and I stayed up too late to finish them. The color is best in the first picture.

We, my MIL, daughter and I, worked on our crazy quilt blocks all through 2015. These are our first crazy quilt blocks pieced! I used the method where you randomly cut a 5 sided polygon, place it on a piece of muslin and randomly add strips around it.

I got my order in the mail from Connecting Threads Thursday and bought the supplies I needed that night to do the Zip Zip bag in Pen and Inked . I cut it out Saturday and constructed it Sunday. I took some shortcuts by buying black bias binding and using a strap that was in my stash from an old lunchbox. This area was a bit tricky to turn the corners and sew. I broke the tip of my titanium needle somewhere around this area. Fortunately, it didn't fly into my face and I was near the end. The ugly corners were folded to the back in the end so that hid it. This was an easy gratification project. I loved the easy construction and wished I had thought up of this pattern. I feel so accomplished!  It's a good size, maybe a bit long for me. As my kids have gotten older, my purses have gotten smaller. I transferred my purse contents to this one that night. It was a tight fit and I think I travel light. I think it's because it's so flat. I might have to hang...

I started out the new year by sewing! I sewed this block on January 2. I have never done a square in a square type block before. I really enjoyed how it looked a bit wrong after the first two triangles were attached, with the long tails hanging off the ends, but then it worked out. It came out great for being cheap fabric. I literally bought these block kits for a dime before I knew there was a difference in quality. I had to starch the heck out of them. I pulled this one out because I wanted to sew something and came across it. I was really impressed with how my skills have improved. The next day I sewed up this one So easy but it was just so much fun! I really miss sewing blocks. they took me about an hour each. I have a lot of these already made in different blocks that I'll probably make up into a quilting practice quilt or two & use for car quilts. I can use the practice.

My added free time and love of quilting has brought on a renewal of a love of fabric. When I saw the new Pen And Ink collection on Connecting Threads , I knew I had to have some! I really love that when your order is shipped it gives you an estimated delivery date but it comes a couple days sooner. My order was supposed to get here Saturday, January 16 but it arrived Thursday the 14th. It may be because I'm technically in a rural area but it's really close enough to the big city that it doesn't take much longer. I got the Zip Zip bags kit , the Jazz Age table runner along with one 10 inch square sampler set of 17 fabrics in that collection. I also got some clearance stuff, 5 inch square packs and a set of fat quarters. I love getting new fabric & petting them! Then, I got the JoAnn's ad in the mail. Anti pill fleece was 70% off so I bought 4 yards for window blankets. While there, I found a lovely navy knit that looks nice on both sides. I got 3 yard...

When I played a You Tube video for my MIL, showing what I wanted to achieve on our next project, the tutorial for this ornament showed up in the sidebar. She was immediately enthralled with it so we went out to JoAnn's and grabbed a few 1/2 yards of fabric. When we brought it back, I realized we bought the exact same fabrics used in the video. I guess they really do help advertise subconsciously.

(I forgot how to use Blogger. I set a time for my posts to be published but I still saved them as drafts by accident. There are now 2 other new posts older than this one uploaded today but dated earlier.) Now that the tea set quilts were done, me & my daughter convinced my MIL to do a crazy quilt. She wasn't too crazy about it but she went along with it. We know how much she loves embellishing and know that she will have a lot of fun with this quilt. We went to the quilt store and she let my daughter pick out the fabrics for it. She chose a green to aqua color scheme with a few browns thrown in for neutrals. The lady cutting our fabric was as impressed as we were with how beautiful it was. Here's a  picture after she folded it up all nice for us. the thread spools are a couple from Connecting Threads that I had in my stash.   We couldn't wait to get started but we had to because my MIL was flying back home. It was so hard to not touch that scrumptious fabric...

My daughter, MIL & I sew together. The project we chose to do in 2014 was a paper pieced quilt of a tea set. We found the patterns at Piece By Number here: http://piecebynumber.com/grandmas-tea-party-mini-quilt/ MIL was concerned some of the pieces looked small so we enlarged the pot & cup blocks by 150% and changed the setting to only four cups. My daughter is an art major so she helped us pick some coordinating fabric for me & my MIL's quilts, then picked out some others for hers.

I'm making some dice bags for me & my son. You can find the links for the patterns and paper piecing on this post . I really started on this project a while ago up to this point. Then the woven hearts took me on a detour.  I had no problem picking fabrics for this project and they all came fro my stash! I had the red and black and white for Deadpool. 

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.

I had planned to post about another project I had started this weekend but then Monday happened.  I love Linky Parties. I love seeing what others are creating or have in the past. You're most likely reading this blog because you found me on one. On one of them I saw a picture of some cute woven hearts and had to click on the link. Vera's post is titled "Mug Rug Detour" and she detoured me from my project.  Her mug rugs were darling so I clicked the link to see how she made the hearts . When I saw how she wove together the hearts she used, I was intrigued. Then she had another link at the bottom to go to a page with different ways to cut the fabric to weave some amazing hearts! The first page was a standard 9-patch and I left. I came back later and noticed there were more pages. On the second page I found a picture of an angel woven from strips! It just blew my mind! There are 27 different patterns you can weave, some of them are incredible. It opened my eyes t...