Stitching in the Barn

  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  

       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.

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...

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!

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 got my order in the mail from Connecting Threads Thursday and bought the supplies I needed that night to do the Zip Zip bag in Pen and Inked . I cut it out Saturday and constructed it Sunday. I took some shortcuts by buying black bias binding and using a strap that was in my stash from an old lunchbox. This area was a bit tricky to turn the corners and sew. I broke the tip of my titanium needle somewhere around this area. Fortunately, it didn't fly into my face and I was near the end. The ugly corners were folded to the back in the end so that hid it. This was an easy gratification project. I loved the easy construction and wished I had thought up of this pattern. I feel so accomplished!  It's a good size, maybe a bit long for me. As my kids have gotten older, my purses have gotten smaller. I transferred my purse contents to this one that night. It was a tight fit and I think I travel light. I think it's because it's so flat. I might have to hang...