Charity Quilting

There's been plenty on this blog lately about me and my struggles.
Let's spend some time talking about others.
Better yet, join me in spending some sewing time dedicated to others. 


100 quilts for kids
http://swimbikequilt.com/2013/07/100-quilts-for-kids-charity-quilt-drive-starts-today.html
July1- Sept 30th 2013 
Ready to get started?
1. Make a quilt.  Great time to use bee blocks, try a new pattern, or experiment with a design of your own.
2. Donate it to a child in need, locally if you can.  Consider donating your quilt(s) to a local foster care program, domestic violence center, homeless shelter, children’s hospital, or to a local military family support organization.

Slabs for Southern Alberta
http://naptimequilter.blogspot.ca/2013/06/slabs-for.html
Just make a 15.5x15.5 slab and snail mail it to her, and she'll combine them into quilts, and send the quilts to long-armers who are volunteering their time. The quilts are headed to Calgary and Southern Alberta to help in recovery from the flood there.

"How do you make a slab? If you have the book, [Saturday Morning Quilts] refer to the directions on pages 48-49. If you don't have the book let me summarize how to make a slab:

Take two pieces (scraps) of fabric and sew them together. Do that a few more times. Then start sewing more pieces to those first pairs. Sew groups together. Add additional pieces of fabric as necessary to get up to your finished size. Start with small bits or big ones, it doesn't matter. Raid your scrap bins and go with what you've got.

Feel free to grab that top image and share it on your blogs/web-sites. Tell the world about how you made your slab. Link back to this post if you do.

DEADLINE - July 30, 2013.

I plan on assembling the blocks, with the help of some local friends, in early August. "

I know I can get a slab done this month.  A whole quilt for charity, by Sept 30 may be more challenging. Anyone want to team up with me? Mom?
- Jennie

Sew and Tell!

As promised, here are a couple more of the projects I've finished up lately.

The purse was completed right before New Years. I wanted something nice to take to the New Year's salsa dance I went to, as well as the wedding on the 19th.
I put interfacing on both the outer and inner layers, so it would hold shape as a clutch purse.  Currently clutch purses are the only ones I can stomach. I'd still switch to a wallet in a heart beat if women's pants were actually  designed to handle that.   Since they aren't, I try to keep things as minimal as possible.
I wasn't 100% happy with how I executed the sides of the purse, but overall, especially since I free handed the whole thing, I'm very happy with it.

The table runner, in a fun fall pheasant scheme, matches the ones I made for various relatives this Yule. I liked them so much I had to have one too!  It may not come out to decorate my house until the end of next summer, but I'm ok with having it done early. :-D

On the list next for the sewing room is a padded bag for Dave to carry the coffee press in for camping trips. Also, some more clothing for me I think. Probably need to sew a few diapers or covers too, just to keep up with things on that front.  I have curtains for the living room to design, and a large quilt (butterflies!!) to design, well it's already designed, but I'll need to tweak the design that the pattern has, to match the fabric I have and the finished size I need. :-D  Because how boring would it be to just follow some one's directions?! lol

-Jennie

WIP Weekend

WIP stands for Work In Progess.  It's a handy phrase for the half finished projects that seem to follow around every seamstress I know.  It's a little hard to explain to non-sewers how these things come into existence, but I'll try real quick.

A lot of times I make more than one of whatever project I'm working on.  If it's quilt blocks, a few extra are nice to have on hand, in case one or two blocks don't work for whatever reason. If it's a present, like a table runner or bag, a lot of time I have enough material to make more than one, and it's just as quick to cut out double if I fold the fabric and cut them both at once.  That double though, often doesn't have the same priority as the first one. The first one might be for a birthday or holiday present, and has a deadline for completion. The second one might be for me, or as a backup gift to have ready for the next holiday or something like that, so it often languishes in the pieces form, until I get done with the high priority stuff. Sometimes I have a project that stalls because I'm missing a component, whether that's batting, or a zipper or the right color thread. 

In order to keep clutter down, I have a place dedicated to WIP's. That way they stay together, out of my way, and the amount of WIPs can be monitored. The size of my pile in the wake of Yule/birthday/wedding rushes, is a little too big. So, this weekend was dedicated to whittling that down a bit.

 I finished up the last of the cute mug rugs that I made for Yule.  A ton of those went out in boxes as presents, but they were too cute not to make any for me. So I have a set of 4 now. Or 5.. I don't know. :-D

I also finished up one last cloth present bag.  It got cut out after the holidays, from sale fabric, but then wedding prep took over and I didn't get around to sewing the sides together.  It does still need some ribbon to go in the top as closure, but there are a few like that, and I'll buy some more ribbon next year and get all of them at once.

Finally, I completed Knitting Project #2!! A wool earwarmer. I learned how to do a bit of ribbing, and a new cast off method that works with said ribbing.  I also took the time to do a bit of embellishing, since I intentionally made the project out of a basic black wool.  Some pretty white made a nice contrast, I may yet put some more color in it. We'll see. Fits great. Feels great.  I LOVE getting this one finished and off the needles.  I was a bad girl and went ahead and started a new knitting project, flaunting my self imposed rule to only finish projects. Project #3 uses some more new stitches, YO and K2tog for you knitters out there, and a gorgeous bunch of yarn I picked up at the Des Moines Quilt Show, (2011 I think!!) and big circular needles, which is another first for me. I even made my very first yarn ball last night. Since the yarn is a hand dyed batch of fashion yarn, it was not in a ball.  This project has been waiting for so long because I didn't have the skills to take it on until now. And I didn't want to mess up my pretty (expensive) yarn with failure. I'm 3 rows into the project now, so far I think it looks like it's supposed to, but I may need to get to the 10th row or thereabouts to get a good feel for the pattern.

I almost had another finish for the weekend. I worked on a table runner from the WIP pile, and got halfway through sewing on the binding. So that one will be finished this week I'm sure.  It will look familiar to the Erwin's in the audience, since it's a matching table runner to the two I sent out as Yule presents.  This one of course is for me!  :-) No pics of this one yet, as it was still attached to the sewing machine this morning and not available for photo op.  It's super cute though, so I'll make sure to grab a shot when I finish it up.

While I'm bragging about finished projects, I didn't get a chance to Sew and Tell the Coffee Carafe Cozy that I made for Dave's birthday. We use a french press at home for our coffee brewing needs, and the only complaint is that it gets cold so fast in that glass carafe.  So I made him a cozy that velcros onto the carafe, over the metal struts and under the handle. And yes that is space invaders on the trim, the entire back side is space invaders. It's kinda reversible, and sometimes Dave puts the space invaders on the outside for fun. :-D

 

That's about it from me today. Anybody else get some projects finished up this weekend? You can Sew and Tell here.  The invitation is open for those of you who choose not to create with fabric/fiber. :-) We're equal opportunity crafters here.

-Jennie

Fall harvests

Well in spite of the frost a couple of weeks ago, my tomatoes are finally ripening. :-D
The row cover protected them from the cold, and the wind, and we've had just enough warm sunny weather to ripen a couple dozen nice fruits.   So, I spent the weekend canning, a rainbow of deliciousness.  I did something fun this time and canned red tomatoes together, and canned yellow tomatoes together and one small jar of Green Zebra tomatoes.  The Green Zebras don't look so hot. That nice sunny yellow and light green stripe that they get when ripe, all that disappeared in the canner, so they look like unripe blotchy green tomatoes. lol

Red, Yellow and Green goodness

I still have a small pile of tomatoes on the counter. Not sure what we'll do with them, it's still being discussed.  We've got plenty of jars,  (Thanks Mom!!) so we may roast and can another batch of basil-less sauce for me.  (The zygote has decided basil is nasty and not to be eaten, seen or smelled, and is willing to upchuck food in order to enforce that opinion.  This is very annoying as I've had an awesome year for basil production.)

Dave has finished the chair he was making for Rowen.  We took some birthday money that Grandma DeeDee sent for him, and we bought some wood and a few hand tools and Dave made him a chair, just his size!  We got some stain, so that still needs to go on, but it looks pretty good.

As the days darken and the garden bounty wanes, I'm once again drawn to my sewing room.   I have a massive window quilt that was supposed to be finished earlier in the spring, and is still patiently waiting to be finished with the hand quilting. I have a vest for Rowen made out of fleece, with a zipper and hoodie.  I ordered the zipper this weekend, and I've sewn as far as I can go without it.   While I'm waiting on the zipper, I have started tree pants for the yule tree I'm determined to have this year.  (Tree pants, because not all trees like to wear skirts. hahaha)  I'm making crimson stars on a cream flowered background.  I've not done any stars yet, this will be my first attempt, I'm following the Happy Zombie sew along to help me through the bumps. Thankfully her pattern is a square tree pants, because round things are yet another aspect of quilting I've not got to. :-D  I'll try to put together a star or two and post the results in a day or two. Wish me luck!

Crimson stars on the cream/flowers.

National Sewing Month Wrap Up

Yes indeed, September was National Sewing Month. So, I'll show off some home-made goodies.

Here is the new curtain I made for the bathroom.  This is a window that used to be covered with just the blue checked fabric, donated by my mother and tacked to the wall.   I thought to myself, "Self, we can do better than that."  So, I designed this little piece to cover the window and use the donated fabric, plus some remnants that were languishing in the fabric pile.    The bottom third is unquilted, because in the summer the bottom of this window is often open for airflow. So, I wanted to keep that part of the window covering light enough to allow for that.  The butterflies are my first attempt with iron on embellishment.  Not bad. I'll probably never do it again. :giggle:  I'll spare you the list of goof-ups, you can see them yourself if you look. :-D  All in all, I'm rather pleased with how it turned out.

Mom made Rowen the cutest little train bag to hold all of his Thomas the Train pieces and cars.  Utterly adorable. Super sturdy, and he loves it already.  Thanks Mom!

The two of us are headed to the AQS show in Des Moines this weekend.  She's headed that way right now, and I'll be joining her this Friday.  Can't wait! It's so much fun to see all the new quilts and buy pretty materials from the vendors. A weekend with my mom is icing on the cake.

I've almost got an apron done for my cousin in Texas - Hi JoBeth! - all I'm lacking is the final bit of rick-rack.  This was my first time working with rick-rack and I totally messed it up.  Not enough to redo it, just enough that I had to go back and re-read everything and look at all the pictures to figure out what I really need to do with this stuff.  C'est la vie. But, I have to say, I hate it when patterns tell you to buy 2 packages of something, and that's NOT enough.  Have packages of rick-rack gotten smaller in the past few years? What's the deal with that?

I got in some more diaper fabric from my buying co-op, so as soon as I get all the existing diapers inventoried I'll be starting on new baby diapers.  :-D  If you do a lot of sewing, and you haven't looked into fabric buying co-ops you absolutely should. They are wonderful.  Warning: they are also enablers, if you have trouble saying no to good buys, DON'T JOIN.  lol

I hope your September was full of sewing, and your October is too!