Stitching in the Barn

 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.

       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...

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...

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.

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.