Stitching in the Barn

  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!  

 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.

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...

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.

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 ...

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...

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.

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.

Happy New Year!!!! It seems like every year I start off wanting to sew and blog more. I get new quilting stuff for Christmas that I'm excited about and work slows down for me in January. Then, I get sick/depressed/busy again, forget all about blogging and last year I actually didn't get a lot of sewing in. It was a crazy year. I have 6 drafts saved up from January of last year that I didn't get to post because I didn't have the pictures ready and never got around to them. I think this will be my year to change all that. At the end of 2015, I finally got to sew something other than mending! It finally got cold here in DFW after Christmas so my daughter and I had to make our dogs sweaters. We used Simplicity 3939. I bought it on sale for under $2 a few years back. It's for smaller dogs.

I do more than just stitching in my barn. Last weekend I made soap. I never thought about making soap before last year. I never felt like I could live like "Little House on the Prairie", being raised a city girl, but I've got chickens, make my own bread (by machine) and make my own soap. The reasons I do these things is because of my health. Living with homemade products lets me see exactly what goes into it and I make sure there' are as few chemicals in it as I can afford. I use organic flour for my bread because the chemicals they use now on commercial bread are way beyond any that our bodies can handle long term. I've had great results so far cutting out a lot of everyday stuff for natural equivalents that work and cost less, even organic. Making my own soap is one of my favorite ways.

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!

Here's the start of my potholders. My husband helped to pick out this assortment of fabrics. The lighting is awful and this was originally two pictures but you get the idea. The furthest one on the right is one he dyed for me ages ago. He said it looked muddy and not as nice as the others so it's going to be the solid side of the potholders. 

Wow! I knew last year had been a doozy of one but I hadn't realized I hadn't updated at all! I've had medical problems, lost faith in doctors, and solved my own issues through eating better and natural health alternatives. I'm feeling better than I have in years and I'm allowing myself to get everything back on track. This includes some serious Spring cleaning and allowing myself time to sew. It's not that I haven't sewn at all since my last post but it's come close. The quilts I wanted to finish are still waiting, fortunately they're patient, and I've bought new fabrics to work with, but haven't used it. My MIL has a project me & my daughter sew with her and it was finished last year. I would have posted pictures but blogging hasn't been on my radar. I'll post that soon. I'm so grateful for her starting these projects with us. It allows both of us the time to do something we love together and normally inspires me to sew mor...

In my son's middle school, they have restrictions on the size of the bag they can carry around. Last school year I made my own pattern thinking it would be easy but it ended up very involved. I used the one I bought from the school, at the beginning of the year for $15 that was coming apart at the seams as a guide. It was made from cheap nylon and no lining. My remake had a cotton print outside and a ripstop nylon lining inside with grommets in the corners like the original. I used some thick cording for the straps/drawstring and it worked. It took me all day to figure out and 3 hours to make but it held up the rest of the year and his friends wanted to buy it off him at the end of the year.  It was successful but this past summer I saw this pattern at a Jo Ann's and decided to buy it. It comes in mini to medium and the biggest size was within my 17" X 15" maximum limit.