Stitching in the Barn

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 ...

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.

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!

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.

So I've been feeling better and once again, because I looked several months before, I looked for a quilt to make from some 5" charms, that I bought from Connecting Threads ages ago, at the end of May. I found what I wanted in Christa Quilts! Charming Chevrons Quilt along. It was simple, modern, used charms, and gave a lot of punch for your effort. I bought some Kona black and worked on it on & off for the whole month of June.  I haven't been 100% so I just worked on it for a couple of hours here and there, otherwise I think I could've gotten the top done in 2 weeks. Then, I thought it'd take another month to quilt but I decided to do the minimal amount I felt I could get away with. So now after about 37 hours of work. Here it is, my first quilt in a year+ 55" x 62" I added a 4 inch border in Kona grey. I like thick 1/2 inch bindings because it frames it. My daughter is an artist/art student and helped me arrange the half blocks into a...

I started sewing about 11 years ago before the birth of my son in 2000. I don't remember why except that I wanted to make him clothes. One of the first things I made was this mouse for my then 7 year old daughter. I don't even know where I got the pattern from. Very likely, it was from a book in the library. It's so funny now looking back at it. She still had it in her closet among all her other stuffed animals that I suggested we finally clear out. It looks more like a rat than a mouse and it always gives us a chuckle to see it. It's amazing to consider a few years later I made this dog for my son when he was in his "Clifford the Big Red Dog" phase. He took me like 21 total hours to make. I was curious so I kept track of the time. After that one, I never made another and I've rarely made a stuffed animal since then. I reorganized my sewing space last weekend. I didn't really clean it, there was nothing to throw out. I tried to ma...

My kids finished up a project each right before I caught a cold so I haven't been able to post them until now.  My son (11) made a collar for his cat Amy. We set up the Kumihimo disk with a simple blue and black yarn setup and he worked on it for quite a while until it was done. Here's Amy modeling it for us. We left the ends untrimmed so she could play with them, which she did until they came off.  My daughter (19) took Simplicity pattern #1953 and made it her own. The only animal hat she liked a little was the panda except he looks sad so she decided to make a llama instead.  She had a vintage machine that was too powerful for her to control so I gave her my easy to use Singer. She likes it a lot better and had no problem sewing this together. She designed the ears, face applique and snout. It's so cute. It was made to fit my son so he's modeling it for us. She wants to make a whole menagerie of hats now.

I've been sick since Tuesday! I have gotten some sewing stuff done but I don't feel like sharing yet. Getting the pictures ready seems like too much work. My kids have also finished projects I want to share. I'm so proud of what they've done but I'm tired. Even though I feel sick and don't feel like fixing pictures, I did design a quilt for my bed today.  Oops, I forgot to get rid of those lines! But that's the way I feel, a bit absent minded. I want to make a quilt for my king size bed but the size is daunting. It seems like such a large blank canvas. On top of that, I've seen sizes ranging from 96" x 96" to 120" x 120".  After looking at endless pictures on Google, I finally decided to see what I could find in big blocks at one of my favorite sites . I used the Drunkard's Chain pattern from Quilter's Cache . This is one of the variations she suggested. I'm still not sure of it because it looks like an awful lo...

After making my first two pincushion thread catchers , I knew I had to make one for my daughter and that she wouldn't like the same design for the pincushion part. She absolutely loves jasmine tea so I thought a teacup pincushion would be great for her. I looked on the web for a teacup pattern to sew but I didn't really like any of them or how they looked. We went thrift shopping for some buttons for her and I found this teacup without a saucer. It was even on sale!

The other week I was browsing Quilter Blogs.com when I came across a post with a picture of a beautiful bracelet like I'd never seen before . It was made from yarn in a Japanese braiding style called Kumihimo. I immediately searched the web to find out more. I found supplies , patterns and videos . It's so simple that you can start with what you have on hand if you want but I knew I wanted the disk made from thick fun foam. I searched around for it and found it at Jo Ann's in the kids' craft section as a lanyard  maker. It was very reasonable priced with a 50% off coupon so it came home with me. 

 I finished quilting the center part of my quilt this past weekend. I started quilting the border but after the first one, I knew the design I picked for it was not going to work. I'll post more about that tomorrow. I needed to take a break from it so I made an apron instead. I used Simplicity 4987 and t he skull and crossbones remnant to make this:

So I couldn't help myself & went back to Jo Ann's yesterday. I was supposed to buy some Kona solid white there but I couldn't resist the sale and I could get it with a 50% off coupon this week. I went to a different store & they had the patterns on my list that I still wanted and the 1 inch bias tape maker I couldn't find at the other store

Lately I've been wanting to sew but I haven't been able to decide what I want to sew. I keep seeing so many awesome projects online and not able to choose one. I did eventually manage to get off the computer and sew up a couple of things, so far, this week. While at the Dallas Quilt Guild Show, me, my MIL & my daughter saw Cynthia England demonstrating her Picture Piecing technique. Her booth was filled with amazing examples of quilts made from patterns designed by her using this technique. Her process looked easy so we chose that as our next group project. It was very hard for the three of us to decide but we finally chose this kitty quilt pattern & kit. I also bought a pattern for a rose block that was 1/2 off. After we got home, we took out our patterns and looked them over. Woah, there were a lot of tiny lines all over it! It looked so hard! We went to the computer to check out her website. She has a great video tutorial, and a print one, with plent...

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 couldn't get the quilt out of my mind & sketched this up earlier today on Inkscape Then I took a 2 hour nap. The day can be long when you wake up at 2:30 am to go to work. Everyone went to bed around 10 pm because they were feeling sick so I stayed up to sew and got this done Now its after almost 2 am & I'm going to pay for it tomorrow. Its a 6.5 inch 54-40 or Fight block. I decided to start with two extremely bright colors on a mini quilt and couldn't wait to get a block done. Now I'm too tired to continue. Plus, I made a mistake in my math and cut the strips for the 4-patches 2.5 inches instead of 1.5 inches & wasted a bit of fabric, which irks me so I'm off to get some sleep.