Stitching in the Barn

 I got the Westalee Design Sew Steady Starter Kit for my birthday with an Amazon gift card. It comes with a simple straight/curve ruler and a ruler foot. It was a little difficult to find the right set because I wanted it for my Singer Rocketeer that needs a Singer slant shank. There was one listing so I ordered it. I was happy to see pictures of my Rocketeer's cousin in the leaflet that came with the set.  You have to get the right foot for your machine.  Fortunately, Angela Walters has videos on ruler quilting, you can find them here . I got the foot adjusted correctly and went for it reusing a piece of previously quilted fabric.  I drew on a 6.5 inch square. I went straight for the awesome looking one and skipped the straight lines except for the border outline. I hope you can tell from the free motion quilting in the light green that I already have some skill at that, that's why I jumped to the fun stuff. This is another 6.5 inch drawn square. I skipped the borde...

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

Inspired by a quilt by Marti Michell from her Craftsy/Bluprint class Machine Quilting in Sections Fabric is Blast Off! by Connecting Threads and stash fabric. 50 inches by 50 inches. Finished January 2020.   Front     Back  

I've finally "finished" quilting the middle of my jelly roll quilt! These are the left, center and right of the last row I quilted. There's still a bit of a gap that I might go back and fill in. Doing the loops in the bottom picture was one of my favorite parts. The center picture shows my ugly starts and stops but it was quick and easy without having to bury threads. The line is the inside of the 1st border and I quilted the outside one too, I just don't have a picture.  I'm stumped a bit on the outer border quilting but I'm sure I'll figure it out by this weekend. I'm a slow quilter but I hope to have this done withing 2 weeks. I think I'm going to end up naming this one "Done is Better Than Perfect" because it's far from perfect! Happy Sewing!

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 shouldn't have started this project on a day I wasn't feeling the best but I thought it would help spur me on to get something done. I started with the X-men symbol block because it was the simplest. I thought I knew what colors went where without looking at my notes and sewed on the wrong color. There were only supposed to be the medium blue and yellow up to this point, not the dark blue. I jumped the gun on the last color. I reprinted my block out & started over because I just didn't want to rip out what I had done and it wasn't much anyway. Then I set it aside until I felt better.

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.

Recently I've done a lot of my sewing on this baby She's a nice green tea colored Sears Kenmore model #158.15160.

They are finally done!

I'm still working on my potholders.  I used an old friend from high school to help me baste them. Aqua Net is cheap and the fumes are not as toxic as basting spray. I basted them in the bathroom so it wouldn't get on the carpet. I ONLY use it on small projects. It's not the stickiest stuff.

This is my first post in over a year. Hello, again! I'm back to it and this week I made new potholders for my kitchen, from old scraps. I need like a ton of these! I haven't made any in years and my old ones were starting to look very bad last year! I found this quick tutorial on You Tube last week. The original instructions started with 10 inch squares. It made the too big one on the left. I made the one on the right with 8 inch squares and it's the perfect size. Of course, it called for Insul-Bright batting but I just used two layers of Warm and Natural batting scraps I had and it was plenty, in addition to all the layers of fabric, to protect my hands. The last one, at top, I made from a hexagon template but it's just basically a very large coaster. The design is made by weaving together folded squares. On the hexagon, I used 3 hexagons like the wine coasters I've seen on Moda Bake shop . My daughter said they'd be tempted to put their hands in th...

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...

(If you're here from Sew Many Ways FAFF , welcome! If you want to follow me, I'll follow you back.)   So with my top done I decided to use flannel for the batting this time. I basted it on with good old Aquanet hairspray, unscented. I then quilted each hexagon in a different motif. I just made some up while others were inspired by free motion quilt-a-longs online. Then came the hard part, cutting it in half to get two postcards.  This was pretty tough. I realized I should have made it longer in the middle than the ends. I cut it fairly close. I first drew on a 4" x 6" rectangle to get the best parts in then I trimmed them up. Since I'm new to this, I experimented on the finishing by doing binding on one. I made it with my 1/2 inch single fold bias tape maker. I pinned it around the edge and stitched it on by machine through all the layers. The other one was finished with a zigzag stitch around the edges. I liked both finishes but the st...

Yesterday I went to the Bear Creek Quilt Guild show. The theme was "Quilts Across America." It was held at a very nice conference center. This is the first show I got to go to without my kids. I got to read every sign and take my time. The quilts were beautiful but I don't know if I should share the pictures, they said personal use only. My pictures were also fairly blurry because of the low lighting. I'll just share my thoughts instead. This year I found myself looking closely at the quilting itself and how it related to the quilt top. I felt very humbled about how far I thought I've come on my free motion skills, but I noticed that most quilting looked too perfect. They looked stitched on the long arm machines with extremely even stitches. I did read that most quilts had credited a different quilter then piecer. Though, there was a pretty modern 1st place winner that credited Lea Day's Free Motion Quiltin g site for the filler patterns. I saw a lot of...

I was sick last weekend when I wanted to finish this quilt so it had to wait until yesterday. It's about 33 inches square and made from a kit by Connecting Threads that I got for Mother's Day last year. It's made exactly as pictured in the directions but I pieced the blocks the way I preferred. I thought about changing it up some. I wanted to put something in the light print squares other than the letters but I couldn't decide what to do. However, once I traced out the letters and put the fusible on the fabric, I noticed the fabric went perfectly with them. In the end, I'm happy I didn't do something off the wall.  Since this is a wall quilt, I free motion quilted it very tightly. I had so much fun doing it and picking out what I wanted to do in each square. I think my favorite are the pinwheel and the spool blocks. Quilting it around Valentines' Day also influenced my design. In the blue corner squares, I used a red variegated thread and did a sti...

I have a Live Journal account where I'm a member of a community that has a fabric postcard swap. I missed out on the first two rounds, because I didn't really sew last year. They recently announced the third round and I'm ready to participate.  This is a no stress swap which means it's been announced that the postcards will be mailed at the end of February. Near the end of February, a post will be made and you sign up and say how many you already have finished. So if I have 3 finished by then, then I can sign up for 3. The host will gather all the snail mail addresses then divide them out, you get the addresses where to send your postcard and mail them by the due date. If you don't have any ready to go, you just don't sign up, therefore no stress.  Fabric postcards are a great way to make small samples of new techniques that are useful. I made this one after they first announced it.

Thread, thread, thread. It was on sale last weekend for 50% off so I decided to pick up some. I've never used Sulky thread so I picked up this lovely variegated red, on the left, to maybe quilt something for Valentine's day & try it. Next, I needed denim thread to hem some jeans but I didn't like the color very much so I also picked up some heavy duty in a couple other colors to choose from. The spools look much smaller than they used to, the jeans thread only has 60 yds, but the price was right. This is actually the results of 2 shopping trips. After I bought the first spools, I decided I wanted the Sulky in another color but I went to a different store & they didn't have the quilting threads so I instead picked up a Coats & Clark in a 30 wt. cream color and a spool of invisible smokey polyester.  I haven't used any of these threads yet but I did pull on the C&C machine quilting cotton one to test it's strength. I was impressed it d...

I finally got back to quilting the borders of my quilt this past weekend. I bought some green variegated YLI machine quilting thread to encourage me. I did some warm up quilting with this thread, pulled it out and got ready to put my quilt under the needle when I saw this: I have never gotten a spool of thread with a tie in it. I'm sure it happens but if I had found this on the top of my quilt I think I would have been upset. The thing was, I hadn't done much quilting before the tie so why include it in the spool. I guess it's because it's machines doing the work and people are not even watching them anymore. This knot wouldn't even go through my needle. I could have had a major thread break if I hadn't noticed this. I finally sat down and free motion quilted some swirly loops in a density to match the rest of the quilting. I gave up after 2 of the 4 borders were quilted because it was boring, really, really boring. I started another project instead. I...

I felt like I needed to add more to the pirate apron I made for the guys the other day. I came across this tutorial for some simple potholders that I wanted to try and decided this is what it needed, attached potholders! It's not my original idea. I know I've seen something about them on the web before but it was ages ago so I can't tell you where. I will admit, I bought 2 cheap $1 FQs because my potholders see heavy use and I won't feel too bad taking these off to replace one day. I made 2, 9-patch blocks with the second method on this page. I read the directions on the potholder instructions wrong so I made my blocks 12.5 inches square instead of using 4 inch squares and making it 11 inches square. I just kept on making them, measured the un-batted finished square and cut 2 pieces of Warm & Natural batting 8 3/8 inches square to fit. It'll work out fine since my husband has large hands anyway.

I was happily quilting along when this happened! If you click on the picture you'll see long threads on the back. They snapped and I couldn't see them on top so I kept quilting. When I finished this block I found them. I tied the ones I could find both ends to off and threaded them into the quilt. I re-threaded my machine and still had snapped threads. So I took out the bobbin to check it and that's when I found that I accidentally knocked the feed dog lever up a bit and they were catching the thread and breaking it. This might not happen on a modern machine but I love how it quilts & now I know to check that lever when I put in a new bobbin! Since this quilt is for me and a wall quilt, I'm not too fussed about it. I'm going to leave the over-stitched threads on the back and pretend they're not there.