June and July Sewing. Travel and Home projects

 Wow, time sure goes by fast!  The end of May and all of June flew by - helped along by a very fun trip to Washington and Tennessee for two weeks.  We started out by heading up to Washington to visit DD4 and her family.  They had moved to a different house, so it was fun to see that and meet their cute chicken family in the back yard!  

Or maybe I should call it the back field!  Lots of room for their dog to run and play, too!  We had a nice but short visit there, then headed to the airport for our flight to Tennessee!  We had lots of fun celebrating while there, my Mom had a birthday, our granddaughter had a birthday, and we celebrated our oldest grandson's graduation from High School!

I brought a quilt with fruits and vegies for Mom as a birthday gift!

Four generations!  So glad we got to take this picture!  Jovi is 13 now, getting so grownup!

I also got to see my sister's grandkids, so that was fun!  We had a wonderful visit, it was so nice to relax and let my daughter spoil us!  We got to visit some of the sites in the area, went to Andrew Jackson's Hermitage, and Carnton House - wish we could have taken pictures inside those historic homes.  There was an old sewing machine in Carnton House which I had never seen before.  It looked to be one of these - 

This is a Wheeler and Wilson machine - so interesting, I was wishing I could get a picture or closer look, but just have to go by my memory as no photo's allowed inside!  

We also got to see some wildlife - check out the cute little face peeking out of the crotch of the tree!  Who knew that groundhogs can climb?  I don't know who was more surprised, him or me!

We also got to go to McKay's bookstore!  All I can say is Wow!  They had a huge selection of used books, more quilting books than I had ever seen in one spot - good thing I'm not collecting too many more of those or I would to have had to buy another suitcase to come home with!  We did buy enough to fill up a large priority box to mail back home.  So fun!

Well we've been home for a full month now.  I did finish two quilts that I can't show you because they will be in a future Island Batik catalog.  I've also been working on wedding gowns, bridesmaid's dresses and gowns for mothers of brides and grooms!  Lots of summer weddings this year!  

We spent a lovely aftrnoon at the beach.

We've been working out in the yard and taking care of our plants.

We tore a yucky storage unit out in the corner of our garage!  Sooo many nasty spider nests in there - we'll finish the rest of this wall and put in open shelving that's easier to keep clean.  So much better!

Best of all, last week we finally got around to replacing the flooring in our kitchen!  Out with the "nostalgia" and in with the new!

Ah, so much nicer!  I think I'm getting a little old for these projects, though - I could hardly walk after an 8 hour day of laying the new flooring down.  We probably shouldn't have pushed to get so much done at once, but I am so happy with the results that it was worth a couple days of very sore legs.  So now I have the rest of the month to work on sewing projects.

This was a fun little pouch that caught my eye!  This is the mini Bilby pouch by CocotteandcoCreations.  It's a great pattern, this one is teeny, just big enough to store my AirPods case!  It will be nice to attach to a clip in my travel bag so I don't have to search them out in the bottom of the pocket.  

I've got some quilting projects ready to work on, one is a remake of my Daisy Garland Pattern in new fabrics, can't wait to get that going!  And I plan to get back to working on the Alice's Wonderland quilt as well.  Hope you are finding time for your projects, too!

May Sewing

 May is slipping by fast, and I haven't done a whole lot of quilting this month, but I have hemmed a few bridesmaids' dresses and worked on a lovely prom dress!  It seems like since I retired from the quilt shop my schedule hasn't been as consistent and I haven't spent as much time as I would like making quilts!  That said, I did manage to get the borders on this one.

I wasn't sure I liked it for a while, but it's really starting to grow on me!  I have picked out some fabrics to use for the backing, so need to sew them together and I'll be ready for quilting.  It's been a while since I did any free-motion quilting, so I hope I haven't lost my muscle memory! 

I've been doing quite a bit of compute work, revamping some of my patterns.  I've written quite a few that I only sold through the quilt shop, so have been making new covers for them to spruce them up and get them in my Etsy shop as well as on QuiltWoman.com.  This one is All Wrapped Up - an easy panel quilt pattern.  I really think it's cute using the Holly Jolly Pattern by Northcott!   

I hope you are being more productive than I am!  

Good as New

 One of the interesting projects that I take on from time to time is repairing quilts, sometimes they are old quilts that need some love to give them a few extra years and sometimes they are new quilts that have had something happen to.  This month I had two newer quilts that needed repair work!

Quilt number one was this gorgeous Kaffe Fasset quilt that had been quilted with a large tuck in the border.  The quilt owner took out the quilting in the area, sewed a seam to take in the tuck and brought it to me to hand sew the area in the seam that was still open and re-quilt it.  If you look closely at this picture you can see the pins and hand basting.

This was a pretty straightforward process, it was nice that the quilting was a fan motif, so was fairly forgiving if I got off the lines a little! I think she'll be happy with the repairs.

The second quilt was a bit more involved.  A puppy had chewed off the corner of this quilt - the nice thing is that this is a quilt I made and I still had fabric left for the repair!  This is my Lover's Kiss quilt that I donated to the Fire department for an auction.  I had sewn a label on the back with my information, so she was able to contact me to do the repair (another good reason to add a label to all your quilts!)  I had already repaired a different corner that was barely chewed off, but this one was a bit more extensive.  I started by trimming off the corner on a diagonal.  I measured the amount needed and cut a 4 1/2 square for the repair, then cut that in half diagonally to make the triangle needed.

Then I sewed the triangle to the back of the quilt, sewing through all the layers.  I detached about an inch or so of the binding to get it out of the way, but will need to go further back in order to sew the new section of binding on.

I did the same with the top fabric, taking care to match the seam so the repair is not too obvious.  I then used a triangle of fusible batting and pressed it between the two layers.  I really love the fusible batting for these kind of repairs as it keeps the batting perfectly in place, making the rest of the repair so much easier.

After binding I added a touch of quilting - as you can see the finished repair is hardly noticeable!  Look closely and you can see the tiny corner I replaced right behind it. I'm  definitely hanging on to the rest of the scraps from this quilt as this is the second repair I've made in the six months she's had it!  Hopefully her puppy will be out of the chewing stage soon and I won't need to fix it again, but I'll be prepared if I do!

I have finished two more blocks in my Alice's Wonderland Sampler, and hope to finish the template section this week!  On to English Paper Piecing - lots of handwork in my future, it looks like!