2013 Show and Tell

Happy New Year!  Another year finished, and it is time for the annual "what did you make this year?" show and tell.

This year, I didn't do a lot of quilting.  I was busy working on remodeling a "handyman special" property, which was quite a challenge since it required me to learn how to be a handyman.

I did manage to make a few small quilts though.

The snowbird quilt was the most recent finish.

The red and white one was made at the same time as the snowbird.

In September, I finished some simple curtains for my bedroom and the guest room.  The photo shows the guest room curtains.  I've read about the trick of having big curtains to make the windows look bigger, but my walls are really small, and big windows like that would dwarf the room and make it look smaller.   I got new curtain rods after this photo was taken.  The willow is a stencil on the walls that were made by the person who lived here before me.

Tulip Pillow made at Viking Sewing Event

I made this pillow cover at a class at Joann's in the summer.

I finished Blushing Bride in January. I am still debating whether to add some more embroidery to it.

There are a couple of quilts that I have been working on recently. The end of the year trunk show really serves as a motivator.  I didn't finish these in 2013, but they are well on the way.

This is another red and white quilt so I can have a collection. It doesn't have a name yet. When this is finished, I will have two red and white quilts!   It started out as a copy of a quilt I found on Pinterest, but I lost the pin amongst my millions I have on the board, and decided to wing it on my own. So many choices! Should I add sashing? Border? Red or white? They all changed the look of the quilt, and were all perfectly acceptable choices. In the end, I decided to not to add a sashing or a border and leave it as is.

I think that the main difference between my quilt and the one I found was that the original quilt is bigger, and my white triangles are proportionately bigger. They are small, and I was afraid they would all get lost in the seam allowance.  This makes it look completely different from the original, but it looks okay and I decided to keep going with it.  I could always make another one that looks closer to the original. I am going to add at least one more row of echo quilting before binding it.  I decided that I'd rather not skip the extra row of quilting just to have another finish in 2013.

This is the Daisy quilt I am making from a kit. It is all put together and sandwiched.  It needs quilting.  I was going to free motion quilt the red and white one so I could test out that feature on my new machine, but I wound up doing straight line quilting on it to keep it simple.

I hope you have enjoyed my 2013 Show and Tell.  I hope you have a wonderful New Year, full of happy memories, good health, peace and relaxation, a large circle of loved ones, lots of money and even more time to do the things you want to do!

Please Help Me With Blushing Bride

I have finished binding the Blushing Bride quilt.  Normally, at this point, I would present the finished quilt - Ta Da, and move on to the next one.

But I am not sure I am quite finished with this one.  Here's what it looks like right now.  Choice A is to leave it as is and call it done.

As you may recall, my feed dogs on my sewing machine fell asleep, so I needed to manually move the quilt while quilting it.  Some of the quilting stitches have bad tension which is obvious on the back. It is minor though so it really wouldn't cause difficulty to leave it as it is.   Also when I was hand stitching the binding, a couple of the stitches showed up on the front. Yes, I could have fixed those, but I decided that since I was going to quilt by hand anyway, I may as well leave them in.  Plus, I am not sure if those big white spaces are okay as they are.  (It is a small quilt so big is a relative term). I thought of some ideas to fill up the spaces. I am planning to do whatever I do by hand.

Choice B: I could add hearts or roses  in the empty spaces. I've roughly drawn this out in Paint to see what that would look like. Hopefully the finished product will be a bit neater, although with the whimsical butterflies, I am not aiming for perfection.

Choice C: Another option is to add some straight quilting lines in different colors.  I could add zig zags to add interest or simply make straight quilting lines. I'm not sure I know how to handle the horizontal borders in this scenario.

Choice D: I could add some more words and butterflies to fill up the space and quilt them.

What do you think? What would be the best way to quilt and finish this quilt?

In case you were wondering about the bulletin board, here is what it looks like today. Blushing Bride needs to blush because she is the biggest quilt on the wall and is covering up a whole quilt as well as parts of several quilts because of that.

We're Buying a New House!

Before I get to the big news, I want to let you know that my sewing machine is now working again.  I opened the machine from the bottom (the part you aren't supposed to touch if you don't want to lose your warranty) and used a toothbrush to clean out the lint turned the wheel back and forth and whatever was jamming it up is now unjammed.  I was able to sew the binding on my Bridal Wishes quilt, and am now sewing down the other side by hand.  If you recall, I embroidered words on it like "love", "friend", and "joy".  Well I just noticed that "ecstasy" is right in the middle of the quilt.  I apparently was right to use Blushing Bride as name for it then!

On to the big news, my sister has a neighbor who wants to sell her house, and was selling it for a very low price.  She wanted to make sure the house was properly fixed up so the value of her own house doesn't go down.  I have always wanted to buy houses to sell or rent, but didn't think that I would be able to make much money on it since I don't have the manpower or skills to do much of the work. The timing isn't good for me, but I thought that if it was that good a deal, I could make it work.   I would have preferred to take my time to see other houses in the market to find current market values and make sure that this house is appropriately priced for the condition it is in, etc., but my sister already signed the contract!  We are now trying to work out a partnership agreement.   It is going to be a wild ride investing with her and I am sure I am going to learn a lot along the way.

New Year's Quilting

When I posted my end of the year post, I thought I should try to sneak in another finish, like I've done in other years, but I didn't think I would have time.  I decided to go ahead and work on finishing anyway, since it could be a nice early finish to begin the new year with.

I brought down my quilt that was closest to completion, my wedding wishes - I called it Blushing Bride according to the labels.  If you recall, it was supposed to be a simple pink and white modern quilt, but I got carried away and added words to it.  Then I added butterflies in the sashing.  I had planned on adding some roses between the butterflies, but when I looked at it again, it doesn't seem to need anything else.  I decided to go ahead and finish it off, and if I wanted to add the roses later, I could always quilt them in after it was bound.

The batting had been added when I did the embroidery, but not the back (to keep me from having to worry about keeping the embroidery neat in the back).  I added a back, and started to quilt it in the ditch.  Just a few seams should hold it just fine.  The feed dogs moved up and down but did not move the fabric forward.  I managed to pull the quilt through - free motion in the ditch using a walking foot maneuver.  Then I trimmed the quilt down and cut out the binding fabric. One of my favorite parts of quilting is trimming away the excess batting and backing to see what the quilt really looks like.

I tried to clean the machine, hoping that would do the trick.  I can push the feed dogs back and forth, but they won't go on their own.  Getting it fixed would be $79, and my machine cost $200 to buy it 24 years ago, so I am not sure that it would be worth it.  So for now, I am going to take the machine apart and try to fix it myself, and look for a new machine. Does you know how to fix this?

 Until then, I will probably try to keep some forward momentum going on quilting by doing some handwork - applique on the Moondance quilt and/or applique and embroidery on the African crazy quilt.  Hopefully I will have some progress to show you soon.

Slave to My Machines

I've been playing Machine Master here on the High Road. To keep the house running, I've been working on keeping my machines well orchestrated. The clothes washer and dryer have to continuously be working. No slacking off! It's never ending. As soon as it is finished with one load, there is another load miraculously waiting for it. The dishwasher has to do its share.

Of course, the scanner must always be working on scanning some pictures. It is an obedient servant. It even asks "Would you like to scan another picture?" It seems like a polite question at the beginning of the day, but at the end of the day, I distinctly sense an attitude in the question. It's halfway through box two! Remember the good old days when I only found about 10 pictures worth taking a year? Thank goodness I don't have to scan recent pictures, where the average is about 10 pictures a day!

The lawn mower and the vacuum cleaner also have to be kept supplied. The unfortunate part of all this, of course, is that someone had to be there to supervise, and keep supplied the washer and the dryer and the dishwasher and the scanner and especially the lawnmower and vacuum cleaner.

Which gives me no time for cleaning - I still want to clean the garage and the basement before the summer is up. And do some painting jobs. But that's manual labor, and I'm too busy supervising my machines.

Hopefully, one of these days, I can get the sewing machine into action. It is a machine, after all, and it's got lots of work to do!

Scanfest Decisions

We (well mostly I) have been continuing the Great Scanfest 2009. We're past the halfway mark on the first box. Luckily, we can scan 4 pictures at a time. The daughter made a great decision early on to scan each and every photo. There are some - the blurry ones, the ones of old friends we no longer keep in touch with, the ones of things we don't care about, etc.- that I thought we could skip, but I now agree that this way we don't have to worry about which ones have been scanned and which ones haven't. It does save on the decision making, so it probably makes the process go much faster. The problem is the free double prints we have a lot of. It is fine when the prints are next to each other so only one has to be scanned, but you know, they almost never are right next to each other. Which means I scanned this blurry photo twice. The other one was turned the right way, but this one hasn't been.

The tagging decisions are harder to come by. I had a trial version of Adobe which did a great job of categorizing location, person, event, date, etc, but with tagging all those things get jumbled together. I thought keeping them separate would make them easier to find, so I thought "Location: Washington, D.C." would work better than Washington, or Washington D.C., or D.C. The kid thinks that is too much work. I think it is fine to tag it whichever, and we can move them to the right place as a group, so it isn't really an issue right now.

In the meantime, I am still working on the Blushing Bride quilt. I am really liking the variegated thread I have chosen to use. I am anxious to get on to the next quilt - hopefully making another coins quilt, but simple this time around.

I am also shopping to take advantage of all those great back to school sales.

Love Words

Remember a few posts back when I said I could make a quilt out of each of my coins ideas? That makes me laugh. Here are just some of the words I am adding to my blushing bride quilt. Emotional comforts you would wish for a newly married couple. I chose a casual font, my favorite, Bradley. I figured it would be more forgiving with my rudimentary stitching skills. I found that it was easier to see if I used the computer monitor as my light source. Just choose select all so that the background is black, made it much easier to see, although not very comfortable physically.

I've made more progress than this, but it does have an old fashioned, depression era quality to it, as Paula mentioned. Note that the thread has several needles in it. I found that it took me longer to thread the needle than to do the stitching, especially in nighttime lighting, so when the sun came out, and threading was easier, I took advantage of the opportunity and threaded several needles. Oh look the words are upside down. I guess I pressed the rotate button the wrong way. Yeah, I'm sure it is the lighting.

Without a Lesson Plan

There is a lesson I am supposed to learn as I make the pink and white mini quilt. I think things would go much smoothly for me if I knew what the lesson is.

Is this lesson about going with the flow, and entertaining all my ideas? If so, I want to add a pieced border, and some applique, maybe even some embellishments.

Or is this a lesson about simplicity, allowing the charm of the simple pink and white quilt show without all the fancy do-dads and contraptions. If so, then the pieced border, the applique and the embellishments have to stay home. Then it is ready to quilt.

Not knowing the lesson, I am trying to keep it simple, especially since that is my weakness. I tend to do things the long way and the hard way. I will, however, give in to my ideas, and hand quilt it, with some words in the white spaces - words of love, since Michele said it was a blushing bride, and some butterflies.

Darn it, now that I've taken a picture with the border, that looks good all over again, especially with lots of white around it.

Stop White Discrimination!

White is such a clean color. One that people like me have to stay away from, because by simply looking at it I might cause a stain to appear on it. But I've seen so many beautiful quilts, especially recently, that have a nice big expanse of white. It serves as such a wonderful backdrop for today's pretty colors.

I have decided to stop discriminating against whites. After all, I can now say, "I have a white quilt."

Pandora's Box

There are two Pandora boxes in my house. The first one houses my cash. When the box is opened, even a tiny crack, to purchase some necessary item, the rest of the money springs forth and gets spent. What's a couple of dollars here and there to buy some embellishments and a blouse or two. It is closed now, but I foresee a couple of times when I will have to open it, and I am dreading unlocking it.

The other one is not a physical one, but it has to do with quilting. It is a new project box. The box has been closed most of the year, although I have been caught looking at it longingly with key in hand several times. I didn't have any time to do much quilting, and it seemed to make sense to try to work on UFOs and WIPs instead of starting new quilts which have little chance of being finished.

Then I went to a male blogger's site who is participating in a coins quilt project. I can make a small coins quilt, right? I went to the flicker site, and was immediately overwhelmed. Should I make a stacked coins or should I alternate? Squares or rectangles? Single color or scrap? What color or theme? Cornerstones or simple sashing? Plain or pieced border? Oh my goodness, I want to make one of each of them!

I did cut up some pink scraps for my rail fence leaders and enders and thought I could use some of them for a coins quilt. It really isn't starting a new project if I'm continuing with another project, is it? Even if I am not alternating it with a work in progress? The important thing is that I plan on finishing it, right? And I plan to work on a UFO after, right?

I think Pandora should have picked a better guardian to safeguard her boxes.