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!  

       Well 2020 has been an eventful year hasn't it? Or maybe since many of us are at home it isn't. My life has been complicated long before the virus. In my retirement from being a full time parent, I decided to go to school and get a degree in Electrical Engineering. I feel like it is a calling. I've loved going back to school and it's very rewarding. At first it wasn't so bad when I was taking community college classes to get up to speed and re-learn all the math I was going to need. Then I started university in the fall of 2019. Wow did the course load increase dramatically! Fortunately, even though I didn't think so at the time, I had burned out from the job I was doing and quit right before I started Uni. If that hadn't have happened I would have failed many classes. All my free time was spent studying and preparing my brain to think like an engineer. Sewing was a dream reserved for those who had time, which wasn't me. I actually managed to get m...

So I was super excited about being done with the quilt and just needing to add the binding. I hadn't done binding in a long time, well over a year, and forgot how wide to cut it. I cut my binding 2 inches. I put the strips together, pressed it and sewed it to the front with a quarter inch seam allowance. I don't hand sew binding on except for maybe my first quilt which was a table runner.  When I turned the binding over to the back it didn't reach past the stitching line! I thought if I glued it down I might be able to stitch it down. I didn't use a fine tip and I was super frustrated gluing down the binding. I even used an iron to speed it up. I am never doing that again and it took forever! I stopped gluing with maybe 25 inches left and just used my wonder clips, which I have plenty of. I started by straight stitching about 10 inches to see if the stitching was catching in the back. It wasn't. I was so close to finishing. Then I remembered, "Babies don...

 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...

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.

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.

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 bought these 2.5 inch Urban Odyssey strips from Connecting Threads and sewed them into a quick quilt ages ago. It's like the Jelly Roll Race 2 quilt from MSQC . I used 2 jelly roll packs because they had less than 40 strips but I can't remember how many there were. I pulled out the brown colorway strips and used them for the inner border and the little squares. To use two of the same prints, I sewed them short ends together with a square between to break them up a bit. if you sew them like individual strips, they can fall in weird places in the quilt and sew together in distracting ways. I love how the brown squares are scattered like confetti.

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!

You can skip straight to the review under the break. I bought Burda 7670 at Jo Ann's when they went on sale for $2.50. I buy most of my patterns when they go on sale for $1-$2.50. They go on sale at different times but usually once a month. Burda used to never go on sale but now they do and this one was one of the first I picked up. Before the sale, I get on the company's website, look through the catalog & write down the pattern number and sometimes a brief description. It saves time but sometimes, when I look at the pattern envelope I decide to not buy it because it looks different in a larger picture. Sometimes, I flip through the books at the store and see patterns I wouldn't have picked because the pictures are so much bigger than online, even though they are the same pictures. I've picked up a lot of patterns for basic things like button down shirts, boxers, pants, jeans and coats. I don't ever stitch them up right away but I do read the instru...