Orange Peels and Pebbles--the "Who Cares" Project

Current Project: Petal Burst Table Topper from Sedef Imer's book Quilt Petite.

Hangup #1: I didn't really like my combination of fabrics (which you can't see here) 100%. But I had already cut them out and spent lots of time sewing the interfacing on the back. One of the fabrics is a script text print. Another is this farm print. Not sure they go together. Who cares.

Hangup #2: Drawing the guide lines for placing the appliqué was a little daunting to me. Who cares. I did it anyway, and it was no problem.

Hangup #3: Blanket-stitching all 42 little pieces of appliqué was a new skill. Slow and steady wins the race. No one said it had to be perfect. Who cares if it's a little wonky.

Hangup #4: Free-motion quilting is my nemesis, the thing that could just ruin this project for me. No one said it had to be perfect, and it's definitely not. There are puckers on the back, but who cares. No one will look back there. It's imperfect, but finished, and I feel like I conquered that thing I was most afraid of.

All that's left is to bind it. It's interesting what a love/hate relationship you have with some projects. This one definitely has had both sides of the coin. But who will know...an imperfect finished project is better than a perfect unfinished one.

She Thought She Would Stay Forever

Summer came with her bags packed, and she thought she would stay forever. She did come with beautiful and tasty gifts. But she should have known it would have to come to an end. A sweet end, no doubt, but an end no less. All the most glorious clothes do grow old and moth-eaten. She came to remind us of that.

This scrappy quilt top was a summer project I made up to use some extra HSTs. I didn't have much of a plan except to add enough sashing to make each square measure 5 inches (or so), then just to randomly put them all together. There was not much thought involved, and it got rid of some scraps. Win.

Summer is turning into golden glory. She has been beautiful, but she is old and tired and ready to go to sleep for another winter. But first she must make her blazing exit.

Glow and Gloom

Now is the time to dance.

The harvest is almost gathered in.

I watched these pinecones bud and mature over the summer. Now they make me think of Christmas, especially paired with the holly berries we find close beside them.

I am hunkering down with this quilt, beginning to hand quilt it now.

I am done hand basting. Once I got the hang of it, it went quickly. I hope it is worth the extra time I put into it.

I am not an expert hand quilter. I sat down tonight and started on it. It goes pretty quickly too once you get the motion down.

I enjoy listening to my son read aloud to me every day. He is improving so quickly.

This particular page really got to me, where it says that "school must be safe because so many children went there." This was the day after tragedy struck a school very near my hometown, and a child lost his life because of someone's senseless violent anger. My mother's heart breaks for what happened. We can't shelter them everywhere all the time, but I am glad to have my kids close to me.

The clouds are rolling in, and with the sun they cast their autumn glow and gloom on the world below them.

Now is the time to dance.

We are safe and warm and fed. Thank you, God.

Fall is Falling

A friend recently asked me what my favorite season was. Unequivocally, spring. No doubt about it. I love new life, longer days, warmer temperatures, the end of the school year. It thrills me.

Fall is hard for me to embrace. It is beautiful, but in a sad sort of way. It is like a last dying breath, a short-lived blaze of glory before everything goes to sleep. Oh, I know that spring will come again. The seeds fall into the ground and wait for their day. Hope buries itself in the earth, and we have to wait for a resurrection. There is a sort of pain in my soul every year when September comes around. I don't like it when things die.

This September has been a typical gorgeous curtain call. The actors are taking their final bows, and the play is over. And they are very flamboyant about it all, hanging on to the applause until the very last possible moment.

The last flowers of the season.

Seattle September Skies

These colors are breathtaking.

The light is golden, and the shadows are getting longer.

Green and gold

Leaves barely hanging on to the branches

This maple tree will shortly turn into blaze of red.

September is the season for spiders. We watched this one catch his supper, actually another spider!

There is a house being built just down the road. I love hearing all the machinery and construction noise. And the smells of a new house...one of my very favorite things. It has nothing to do with September, except this year.

Around here, September means chanterelles! My husband foraged these, and we ate them. Everything about them is sensual--the color, the smell of the dirt, the delicate gills, the smell of them cooking (to me they smell like clean clothes!), the texture in your mouth. Heavenly!

And of course a September quilting project, while I can still take pictures outside. This is the backing to my Churned quilt, jelly roll race style. No math involved.

Farewell, summer! We will see you again next year!

Delightful Friday--Churn Dash and Eggrolls

It felt so good to come to the end of this day, the end of the first week of school for me and many of my friends. It was a good week. We worked hard. My piano studio is the fullest it's ever been, and I have added my own kids to the roster as well. That makes 19-20 kids! I am so grateful for each one that walks through my door. Making and teaching music is the joy of my life!

I think the highlight of my sewing week was letting the Boxcar Tote cat "out of the bag." Ha ha. It is a funny story--I was listening to a recent Modern Sewciety podcast and happened to hear Stephanie joke about wanting someone to send her a Boxcar Tote. I thought, "How cool would it be to actually make her one and send it to her?" So I did! And she received it and loves it. I love surprising people! I feel like I made a new friend in doing so.

Sewing time is a little scarce now that school is in session. But I sneak a little here and there. The Churn Dash quilt top is nearly finished.

Churn Dash blocks completed!

Cute mess of dog ears

Block layout of the wonky Churn Dash quilt

Of course no project is complete without a roadblock or two. I had to reorder the gray Essex Linen. When I cut out the remaining pieces, I still came up short. Sheesh. So I ordered it again because I want to add one more row to this top. It will end up a little bigger now. I am going for a square top.

This has nothing to do with quilts, but it does have something to do with Friday. A little while back my husband discovered these $1.29 egg rolls at Safeway. Often we will take a kid there and have a little time together. It's close to home, doesn't cost much, and they love it. Sometimes we talk, and sometimes we just sit there and enjoy our snack, no words necessary.

It is a rare occasion that I am at the store by myself. Well, today I was, and I sneaked an egg roll (no, I didn't steal it) and ate it all up as I sat in the parking lot. I didn't have to share it. It was absolutely delightful. It even dribbled all over my shirt, and I didn't care. It was so good. Three cheers for mama moments. Just what I needed this afternoon after a full teaching day. Thank you, Lord, for simple pleasures.

Farmer's Wife 1930's, Sewing Along, and Slow Sewing

     I splurged a little yesterday and bought the recently published Farmer's Wife 1930's Sampler Quilt to add to my shelf. Then this morning one of the first things I saw on Instagram was a new sew along to go with the book! I will say that sew alongs keep me going. They provide such inspiration and connection with the sewing community, as well as the drive I need to keep sewing a little at a time. I also own the previous book Farmer's Wife 1920's Sampler Quilt and have had fun with it, especially reading the letters that these farmers' wives wrote about what it is like to be married to such men. What a different life they lived compared to ours with all our fast-paced modern-day demands. They had demands too, and I admire their creativity and use of what they had to work with.

  I have also been sewing through Lori Holt's (Bee In My Bonnet) Farm Girl Vintage, a series of easier blocks than Farmer's Wife, all based on the stitch-and-flip method. Some argue that there is more waste with this technique, but because I make extra blocks out of the unused but useable pieces, there hasn't been a whole lot relegated to the scrap jar. I am so happy with the blocks, and I am almost done sewing through the patterns. My color scheme is different than what is in the book: pastels and linen. Who says chicks can't be pink? Here are some of the recent blocks I have finished:

 Spring Star and Summer Star

 Simple Star

 Scrappy Maple Leaf

 Pie Cherries

 Pinwheels

My jumping off fabrics were Lulu Roses by Tanya Whelan, with linen as my background. I love that I can then use white tone on tones as part of my color scheme! I added other pieces from my scrap collection, some thrifted and some purchased new. The linen is a bit shifty to work with, but not too bad. It is actually pretty forgiving.

I recently came across some articles on the Slow Sewing movement. Here's a blog: The Slow Stitching Movement. There are actual books and lecture tours on this phenomenon, I believe. It is intriguing me. I love the idea of just sitting down a few minutes a day and stitching something, maybe by machine, maybe by hand, but with no deadline in mind. Ahhh, I like that! So sew along to get motivated, sit and stitch with no deadline--two ways to do it. Both good!

 

Adventures in English Paper Piecing

What has 6 sides and such an addictive draw that they will cause you to sit for hours cutting, pasting, basting, and stitching them by the score? No, it’s not the mending pile! These little cuties can travel with you wherever you go, take up very little space in your purse, and require only a few supplies to keep you stitching them by the hundreds. And when you put them all together, they make a most beautiful pieces of handwork. I speak of English Paper Pieced Hexagons. A little research on the web reveals that these little shapes have enticed quilters for hundreds of years. One of the most popular quilt blocks made from the beloved “Hexie” is called Grandmother’s Flower Garden, concentric rounds of pieced hexes made into individual “flowers.” I have two such quilts in my own house, one an antique, the other made a few years ago as a gift from Grandma to my daughter. The second one I mention is made from pieces of dresses my mom sewed for me when I was a child. Hexies look great scrappy! No real color theory needs to be involved if that’s not your thing. And they are a great stash-buster. If you don’t want to do a huge project, they are equally adorable appliquéd onto small projects like pouches or handbags, maybe a bookmark or baby bib. Just the right amount of cute.

I love a good story. If any quilt could tell a story, which I believe they all do, the EPP Hexie quilts are full of all kinds of tales simply because they can travel to so many places from beginning to end. I can’t really say that about projects made sitting at my machine with my back hunched over, snipping and clipping in the same position hour after hour. I love that too, just in a different way.

Let me see…if I rifle through my stash of EPP hexagons, I could tell lots of stories. They have traveled so many places: from car to train to plane, from native U.S. soil to Eastern Europe, from countless music lessons to a 3-hour glucose screening (I passed). They even made it through a car crash (so did I, but with more scrapes and bruises then they did). My husband teases me about what I could possibly be doing with the hundreds (in his estimation) of pieces I have cut and basted. I don’t know, but I have surely enjoyed every minute.

I have carried around an EPP kit in my purse for years now. In my little pouch I have a few simple supplies: paper templates (printed off at home), needles, spool of thread, washable glue stick, small scissors, and small scraps of fabric. That’s it! It fits perfectly in my purse so that wherever I go, I have something to keep my hands busy.

I love the slowness of such handwork. No deadline. No stress or rush. Very little picking out mistakes! Just quiet repetitive motion. Calm. Stories woven into cloth in the gentlest of ways. Memories rekindled. Prayers for those we know and love.

Life is hectic and fast-paced. That is not something we can always change. We live in a time when you can even make “quick quilts” if you want to. That is perfect when lack of time calls for such a thing. But here we are in the lazy days of summer. I have relished the slowness summer brings. Time to sit back and enjoy the calm, the last few days before this baby in my belly makes his or her grand entrance into our home. Dreaming about who this person is, holding a newborn again, what kind of gift this new child will be to our family. I think God puts this need to slow down inside every woman at this particular time for a very good reason. We need time to reflect and prepare for this impending life changing event.

That’s what I’ve been doing!

Mini Quilts and Machine Binding

After a sewing marathon yesterday, I finally finished those three wall hangings to be sent to Ukraine. It is impossible to get a decent picture after dark, and unfortunately the quilts are now forever out of my hands and over the ocean somewhere. So I did the best I could do.

 I do not normally do modern colors like that, but I really loved them after I was done. Maybe more in my future? I don't know. That plaid one just really hit a soft spot with me.

My favorite part of the project was the scrappy binding. I had not tried that before, but I loved it. It used up almost all the scraps leftover from the quilting, and it took just a little more time. I think it was worth it.

I have had a dread of machine binding for a while. Give me enough time, and binding by hand is just fine. But time was not on my side yesterday. I think I figured out the secret to acceptable machine binding.

First, you might want to leave a little bit extra around the edge when you are trimming away the extra batting. You will get a firmer edge that way.

Sew the binding onto the wrong side of the quilt (counter-intuitive, I know), matching raw edges. I use a double fold binding, by the way.

Press open the seam you just made to make things nice and flat. Be careful if you are not using cotton batting. You may have a mess if the iron touches it.

Then flip the binding over to the front, just over the line of stitching you just made. I had to actually turn my binding under once because at 3", it was too wide. I should have cut it narrower. Anyway, the key is to diligently use your guide lines on your machine's throat plate, going slowly enough that you absolutely control the width of binding feeding through. A blind-stitch foot or edge stitch foot is really handy here and will enable you to concentrate on keeping the right edge of binding aligned with your machine's guide line.

So you are now ready to sew the next line of stitching on the right side of your quilt. You want your needle to be going into the binding just over the left edge. Adjust your needle appropriately.  If you keep your eye on those guide lines (my binding here was at the 3/8" line), you will end up with all the binding attached and straight lines on the front and the back. Pretty! And there is no guesswork involved as in previous attempts when I would get to the end, turn it over, and discover that there were ugly holes where I missed stitches. No more!

So follow your guide lines!

I did not mention corners--that's another topic. And there should be lots of pictures. I don't have those right now, but maybe soon...

And if anyone out there has suggestions on decent lighting for late night photo shoots, please share!