Stitching in the Barn

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.

My added free time and love of quilting has brought on a renewal of a love of fabric. When I saw the new Pen And Ink collection on Connecting Threads , I knew I had to have some! I really love that when your order is shipped it gives you an estimated delivery date but it comes a couple days sooner. My order was supposed to get here Saturday, January 16 but it arrived Thursday the 14th. It may be because I'm technically in a rural area but it's really close enough to the big city that it doesn't take much longer. I got the Zip Zip bags kit , the Jazz Age table runner along with one 10 inch square sampler set of 17 fabrics in that collection. I also got some clearance stuff, 5 inch square packs and a set of fat quarters. I love getting new fabric & petting them! Then, I got the JoAnn's ad in the mail. Anti pill fleece was 70% off so I bought 4 yards for window blankets. While there, I found a lovely navy knit that looks nice on both sides. I got 3 yard...

(I forgot how to use Blogger. I set a time for my posts to be published but I still saved them as drafts by accident. There are now 2 other new posts older than this one uploaded today but dated earlier.) Now that the tea set quilts were done, me & my daughter convinced my MIL to do a crazy quilt. She wasn't too crazy about it but she went along with it. We know how much she loves embellishing and know that she will have a lot of fun with this quilt. We went to the quilt store and she let my daughter pick out the fabrics for it. She chose a green to aqua color scheme with a few browns thrown in for neutrals. The lady cutting our fabric was as impressed as we were with how beautiful it was. Here's a  picture after she folded it up all nice for us. the thread spools are a couple from Connecting Threads that I had in my stash.   We couldn't wait to get started but we had to because my MIL was flying back home. It was so hard to not touch that scrumptious fabric...

I had a fun and busy weekend. Saturday, me and the husband went to the Dallas Quilt Show . There were many amazing quilts. The artistry and craftsmanship was a big step up from the last one I went to . Unfortunately, I can't post photos but there are a couple at the link. I came away with a lot of inspiration and motivation. We also saw a quilt my husband would like me to make for the bed. It was a lovely french braid quilt with Poppy fabric and black and white prints. So I'm scrapping all my other ideas and I'm going to focus on that one. We were both completely quilted out by the end.  I did find and buy this Our Lady of Guadalupe fabric panel. It's folded in half, the other half is the same. Sorry for the blurry picture. I'm sure I'll post clearer ones some other time. I'm not sure if I want to make one quilt or 8 individual wall quilts for my friends and family. I had a pattern for a rose that would go great with it but I couldn't find it....

I went to my mailbox and found my prize waiting for me, to my surprise. I never got an email or anything but I'm not complaining. Connecting Threads sent me the Fauna collection of thread. This collection and several spools from it were on my wishlist. How can you pass up thread with names like Milk Chocolate and Latte. They are scrumptious in person and I'm thinking up coffee or cocoa ideas for a mini quilt to try them out. The light colored ones are needed for piecing. They're the perfect shade to blend in to many colors. I do have a small wallhanging that I wanted to put more quilting on that these colors would go perfectly with so that's probably going to be the first thing I do with these threads. I also need to go pick up a new tackle box to keep them in since the last one I bought was filled immediately from my last order of thread from Connecting Threads . I've also joined their site and Perfect Points Quilt a Long.   The first official Q...

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...

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...

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

On Friday, after work, I went to Jo Ann's because of the sale.