Another UFO Bites the Dust!

About a year ago, at the height of my Farm Girl Vintage frenzy, I was doing projects left and right. It was around this time that I realized my "style" or quilting, so I took advantage and made project after project. No harm there! However, I have a few unfinished projects here and there in my sewing room as a result fo the FGV mania. This weekend, I finally finished one of them.

First up was getting the batting ready. I have so many 6" or 7" wide scraps of batting, most of them leftover from quilts taken to the longer-armer. I can't say it was a real joy to piece them all together, but it did yield enough batting to finish the project.

I butted the pieces up against each other and sewed them together with a wide zig-zag stitch then flipped them over and did the same on the other side. Stitching a second time may not have been necessary but I wanted to be sure they wouldn't come apart. A good pressing with the iron flattened them out nicely.

The main aim was to "git 'er done!" so I opted for a quick straight line quilting job. Easy peasy! Typically, I'm a fan of attaching the binding by machine and then hand-turning it. I love the look of a binding with no visible stitches, but lately I've gotten a lot better at doing the binding completely by machine. That's now my go-to binding method for some projects, mostly quilts that aren't going to end up on a bed or a lap. Within four hours, I had four of these little cuties quilted and bound...

The design was inspired by the Blue Plate Special pattern. This particular placemat is mine; I'm a lefty, so the cutlery pocket is on the left. ;) Although I have a couple projects that I've yet to finish from when I first learned to sew and quilt three years ago (don't judge!), I was happy to tick this year-old project off the list! Not only did I get satisfaction from that, but the patchwork pumpkin design also somewhat sated my desire for autumn. I am not a summer lover, and I'm looking forward to cooler temperatures, shorter days and those comforting foods of fall. These will be on our dining room table for a while.

Lastly, I finished my aunt's quilt - the Jinny Beyer project that scared me half to death and ending up being not so terrible - and mailed it off to her, but I completely forgot to take a photograph of the finished quilt! Ugh. She was kind enough to share a photo of it with me.

I'm happy that she is so happy with it!

I'm linking up again with Sew Fresh Quilts this week. Lorna is so creative and makes beautiful patterns...go give her a visit. Now if you'll pardon me, I have to make a torturous decision - start a fun, new project or tackle a long-idling one. Decisions! Decisions!

Picnic Quilt

Yesterday was kind of a dull day, just a monotonous Tuesday morning. That is, until 9:45 when I got one of my favorite calls. "Hi, Dan. This is Millie P's, and we're calling to let you know that your quilt is ready to be picked up."

HOT DANG!

Then my day wasn't so boring, but I found it hard to focus, because all I wanted to do was get out the door and get my quilt so I could get it home and bind that baby! I handed it over to them four weeks ago and was eager to get the job done.

That's the quilt top pre-quilting. I went with an all-over feather pattern.

There are a couple of close-up pictures of the quilting. They did a great job (as usual)! I didn't waste anytime once I got home; I picked out a fabric for the binding, a little yellow chick pattern from Lori Holt's Calico Days line, and got to cuttin'.

Here they are all cut, joined and pressed. Aren't they just precious? I decided to do this one completely by machine. When I'm making a quilt for somebody else, I attached it by machine and then hand-turn the binding to the back. I need to brush up my machine-binding skills and this one is staying in-house, so I wouldn't mind a few mistakes by completely machine-binding it.

Now that she's all done, I just have to run it through the wash and snuggle with it in the basement.

I love how colorful it is, and the layout made it really fun to piece the blocks together.

Now that I've ticked another one off the to-do list, I can move onto the next! :)

Today, I'm linking up to Lorna's Sew Fresh Quilts Let's Bee Social.

Berry Cherry Potholder

I've finished two quilt tops in the last few weeks, so I'm taking a wee bit of a break from big projects at the moment. I almost took the weekend off from doing any sewing at all but decided yesterday to break my boredom with a bit of time in the sewing room. I thought about doing yet another small project from Lori Holt's Farm Girl Vintage book, but I've already done approximately 1,305,211 projects from that to date. I can't help myself! And then I saw Lori's Bloom Templates when I was digging through the drawer on my sewing table.

Why not do a block from Farm Girl Vintage using the templates? Easy peasy! I need to keep brushing up on my applique skills anyway. I would only need two of them: A-3 and A-11.

I picked out a few fabrics...

...and a few tools, and I was on my way. That little Clover 1/4" bias tape maker has come in handy lately, and I also really like using lightweight sew-in Pellon as backing for the applique pieces. One of these days I'll give a go at hand-turned applique, but for now this is my comfort zone and it makes for good results.

I went with this guy  at first, because I love the little Scotties, but in the end it was too close in hue to the other red I was using and went with a pink print instead.

In virtually no time at all, I had a little cherry block! I'd been wanting to try the Fat Quarter Shop's tutorial (their video tutorial is at the end of this post) for using the backing fabric as the binding to see how I liked it, so after a quick quilting job...

...I attached the backing fabric, and cut and pressed it according to their directions.

Then it was time to sew the binding to the front of the block. It's only an 8" square, so binding only took a half an hour or so to get the job.

And there's the finished product. Cute as a li'l button! I'm not sure how much I love the backing/binding method. The corners look good not great. Perhaps it's just a matter of getting the method down, but it certainly was more than adequate for a first time, and I have another adorable little nugget to use in the kitchen.

Off to the The Quilter & Weekend Tidbits

It felt good to get another quilt top done, but once that part of the process is done I get obsessed with piecing the backing. It's another one of those thing where if I don't do it now, I won't do it all. I'm not always the most adventurous with the back of the quilt - often just a solid color - because I like the focus on the top and because...lazy. But this weekend was a start in the right direction! Still not the most creative, but I pieced four different small prints together.

It should look nice with the quilt, a 69-inch square. I don't know if I'll ever get tired of this happening when I'm piecing...

Those points lining up properly on a four-patch make me giddy. I folded it up neatly with the top and 100% cotton batting and off to the quilter it went!

When I don't do the quilting myself, I always take it to the good people at Millie P's Quilt Shop in Anoka, MN. They do a terrific job of quilting and are always very friendly. The downside is this -- I can't just drop off the quilt and go. I've always got to shop, and they've got a large fabric selection. How I managed to leave with only two yards of solids is beyond me (actually, it's because I spent $60 the day before at SR Harris).

I picked out a pattern and soft yellow thread for the quilt, got an estimate of a 4-week turnaround (baaa!) and decided to do some shopping.

The big draw to Anoka for a lot of shoppers is the antique shops. There are a lot of them, and they are stuffed with lots of goodies. So stuffed with old things that after a while, my throat gets dry, my eyes start itching, and I get a headache. Allergies are a joy. I stopped into Amore Antiques and walked out with this beauty.

There's a tiny scratch on one side, but $23 for a vintage pink Pyrex casserole? Shoooo...my mama didn't raise no fool!

I planned on doing some quilting today, but after a look around my messy sewing room, I couldn't do it. I had to put some stuffz in order. Things were a mess. I try my best to put fabrics away as I'm done using them, but I was in such a hurry to get the quilt top off to the quilt shop, that there was fabric everywhere. EVERY.WHERE. I folded up the fat quarters that were mostly in tact and cut the rest up into strips for later use -- 1.5", 2.5", 3.5" and 5".

Now things are in a semi-orderly state, I can sit do other things I enjoy like nerdy kitchen alchemy. Today I made a fresh batch of soy cashew yogurt.

It's tangy, creamy, smooth and delicious. It's also very easy to make. I'm vegetarian, inching toward vegan and trying to cut out as much dairy as I can. Most of the time when people say, "It tastes just like the real thing!" I don't believe them. This, however, is an exception. I buy plain yogurt and sweeten it myself with a little fruit and agave syrup, and this tastes every bit as good as regular plain dairy yogurt. Actually, better. Homemade yogurt is one of those things that really does taste better than store bought. It's also great for cooking.

The house is quiet, things are in order and now I'll sit down and watch a little (okay, a lot) of Investigation Discovery. It's my drug of choice.

And She's Done

I know myself well enough to know that if I plan on doing something when I get home from work, I bester do it right away. Once I find my way to the couch or the bed or to the Wavy Lays (it happens), all bets are off for the evening! I wanted to get the top for this quilt done today, so as soon as I walked in the door and took care of the dogs, I headed straight to the sewing room. And GET 'ER DONE I did!

This is the picnic quilt setting from Lori Holt's book, Farm Girl Vintage.

I made the borders just a couple of inches wider than the pattern suggested and staggered them with partial seams. If somebody knows the actual name for that type of border, please enlighten me. This was my first time sewing partial borders, and it was far less difficult than I anticipated when making the top, so I went ahead and did the same on the borders as well. I'm happy with the outcome! (The bottom border isn't wavy; it just needs to be pressed) I'll piece the backing - hopefully this weekend - and send it off to the quilters straight away.

And then it's back to yet another of Lori's fun projects, her Bloom Sew-Along. These are the first 8 blocks I've sewn.

This one is my first applique project, and though I'm satisfied overall with my progress, I can definitely see areas for improvement. Even still, it'll make a fun surprise gift for a surprise somebody!

How Many Projects Is Too Many Projects?

Like most quilters, I suppose, I tend to work on several projects at a time. The second I get bored with one, I switch to another to avoid complete disinterest in another long-term project. One of the ones I keep coming back to is this fun little lap quilt.

It's the picnic quilt setting from Lori Holt's great (and addictive!) book, Farm Girl Vintage. I've had the book since it was released about a year ago, and I'm still making projects from it. I wanted a simpler block since I was going to be making fifty-two of them -- some 6" and some 12" -- so I went with the crystal star block, a modified version of the simple star block.

I used fabrics from some of my favorite designers: Lori Holt, Pam Kitty Morning, Lecien, and Ellis & Higgs among others. I love how scrappy it is and that it's so bright and colorful. All that's left to do on the top is to attach the borders, and then off to the quilter she goes! One of my local quilt shops, Millie P's, always does a great job quilting them on the long arm. Smaller projects I'm willing to tackle myself, but for bigger projects (and when I'm feeling exceptionally lazy and impatient) I will gladly hand over my dough to the professionals and let them do it.

Once I attach the borders, I'll have a better quality image of the finished top. After that, it's back to one of the eight(!) or so other projects I've got on the back burner.

Today I'm also linking up to one of my favorite pattern designers, Lorna McMahon at Sew Fresh Quilts. She created the pattern for this reindeer block that I used to make these pillows.

Until next time, a glass of wine and Chinese takeout is calling my name...