Tea time!

My grand girls (6 and 11) are into tea parties--for real. Fancy dresses, hats, gloves, cloth napkins, the works. So I have been making tea cozies. :-) The 11 year old's favorite tea right now waivers between peach and blueberry, the 6 year old's in apple cinnamon. I still am stuck on my favorite being Earl Grey, but I have not found many teas I do not like. 

And did you know (from the emails I am receiving) that chickens are an in thing? So making more of these chicken placemats-they will be different prints:

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Unfortunately that means cutting--ugh. Cutting is my least favorite thing, followed closely by basting a quilt for quilting.  

And then there will be pinning--this is  a pile of tea cozies ready for their next step:

And then there will be a bigger pile than this of scraps that need to be cut

I am very glad to have taken a Scrap Therapy class long ago--and expanded it a bit to reflect my sewing mannerisms...probably will need to buy some more scrap buckets--but those scraps are the only scrap I have,...the rest is cut and in bins. Getting behind is NOT a good idea...it becomes quite a project to wrestle if you let it pile up. Yes,  speaking from experience here.  Grand girls who like to sew are good users of 5" squares. The 11 year old will graduate to smaller squares, and is working on curves :=) 

What's under your needle?

Auditioning fabrics for a client

for a simple stacked bricks quilt (simple rectangle with offsetting squares-the way Grammy used to do it) and working on my 3 Dudes lap quilt

this was audition 1:

fail.. needs to be less  loud

                 Audition # 2-still under consideration (placement will vary)

Some people don't like auditioning fabrics for quilts. But I do. yes it a lot of cutting. But I like seeing people figure out what it is they really want. And we all know that fabric on a bolt, or large cuts; do not give non-quilters a reasonable expectation of what things look like together. The orphans will become a scrap stacked brick quilt-probably with a tan background fabric....but that could change depending on the scraps vote (yes my fabric votes)

 This will be the backing for the 3 Dudes lap quilt

Would have made more progress if the ick that is going around hadn't visited our house--but such is life.

What have you been sewing?

Yes---It is still winter....

We decided to have a handmade Christmas. To be honest, they are mostly hand made anyhow, but for my 6 year old Granddaughter is was good for her to see how much thought and effort goes into all those handmade things.

For instance, to make her Mom's tote she enlisted Grammy help. She picked the fabric and helped make the pattern on freezer paper. She had to measure, use a ruler, do fractions, cut some, pin a lot, help with sewing.

She was also introduced to the "magic" tube turner.

I bought my Fast Turn tube turner set-I think in 1978. It cam in a pretty silver foil box and cost me $20--a pricey set of tools back then--but oh so worth it.! She was convinced I was crazy and had sewn it backwards until she pulled enough to see it coming out right-sides out! The joy of watching happy amazement in a child's eyes! 

She used the long chopsticks to poke corners, and watched the magic again as she turned the bag inside out (it was lined so it was pretty inside and out)-and bad Grammy did not get a picture of the bag.

So here are some of the Christmas gifts that couldn't be shown:

This ended up larger than I thought- I did read the instructions and I did cut it--I was just surprised a bit by its size-but Wally the Whale was a hit!

The whole grand-kid menagerie

and the daughters annual bear

Been working on cleaning the sewing room up, and mending.



yeah--the necessary evil-mending.

I got these templates for Christmas from the hubby

So will be starting to cut for a Patchwork of the Crosses quilt.

What are you sewing/quilting?

And then there was Bag #4...

The first misstep? Perhaps, or maybe the cats got one over one me..suffice it to say Bag#3 is done:

So....then I went to lay out Bag #4, except there are not enough pieces. I check the other bags, the scrap bag (I keep the scrap from the project I am working on separate until I am ready to bind), I review the cutting directions (no-I am not a fan of the cutting process)..check-mark there..hmmm. 

Being pressed for time, I decide not to hunt the 12 missing pieces. I either didn't cut them or they grew legs. I do not have time to search for them. So I dig into the Batik stash...

I only had to get to the 2nd container (and no this is not all of it-just what I am using on some other projects I put aside for this and another project.) 12 new pieces cut.

First 4 units (of 16) for bag #4

And, I had to start a new scrap bag.

The next bag will start the border blocks-yippee!

Had to take a cutting break and clean...

A few large projects, a large change in project line-up,getting my web site ready to host my store to start selling my completed quilts; and the cats for some strange reason (well the reason is known now) decided they wanted to burrow into the fabric stash, and were pushing it out to where it was toppling over.

So the clean-up got finished, the day before we had a moderately large Earthquake (4.7) Now Reno is capable of and had much larger; but it explains the cats behavior-as they has not done that before.

This is what a fairly clean sewing space looks like for me:

  2nd sewing station

kinda self explanatory, between the above picture and this one is a set of wire cubes (full) that the design wall is hanging in front of, The bedroom door is to the right of this

 To the left of my main sewing station

To the left of my main sewing station

To the right of my main sewing station, stack ranked projects, the Judy Niemeyer Tropical Rainbow I am sub cutting on top...trying to finish by Oct 1 for contest (just the top)








Below the computer screen sits to the right of my main sewing station (yep Tropical Rainbow direction on the keyuboard

My cutting table sits in the middle of the room and I use the space under it for storage as well.

And one of my helpers-Sushi.

 She likes the sewing room better than my other helper who prefers helping with layering and Quality control-her name is Lilo

So now back to cutting...

Quiltworx Tropical Rainbows foundation papers cut...

From this

to these:

Today I will start cutting fabric, as I have also cut the template sheet and templates :-)












And the cutting for the Quiltsmart Bitty Broken Lone Star is done

So, back to cutting... and after fondling the fabric for Tropical Rainbows for a bit last night, I am even more in love with the fabrics I got from Quilting by the Bay, and their service is AWESOME!

One large project done, and a few more starting...

So now that the Veteran’s Guest House (Reno) pillow cases and valences are done it is on to the 4 BOM I am behind on, a Quiltsmart Bitty Broken Lone Star, and the Quiltworx Tropical Rainbows; and you know what that means—yep—Cutting-AAAGGH….So here is my start last night:

The 4 BOM’s

One BOM quilt is Bright and the other Blue n White..

The first  356 of 512 1.5" x 3" pieces for the bitty broken star

And I am still only on my 2nd Clover Blade--I LOVE these blades!

I hope to start cutting Tropical Rainbows on Thursday night or Friday.

Friday night (8/23) I will be at the Sew-n-Such Mixer from 6-8pm. Stop in and see what's up.

And this hangs in sight of my machine

Happy sewing!

I love my light box

I cut all these 4.5" circles that needed an embroidery pattern marked on them for satin stitching. The circles have interfacing on the back, so light box to the rescue..do you have a light box? Sometimes a sunny window will work, but not so much really late at night. I have an old fashioned one..not one of the newer, less bulky LED ones..but it works:

These are for pillow covers for our local Veterans Guest House

Before I cut this many there was testing:

Test pillow cover success, so now assembly line shall begin (more cutting first--and you know how I feel about cutting!):

I did manage to get my two blocks of the month done:

 And the Take 5 is almost done quilting:

And we have our first squash growing, a bit behind this year, no tomatoes yet, and the plum tree looks like it doesn't have any fruit again this year :-(   Jack Frost won.

Wishing you all  a great 4th of July!