Happy New Year!

Here's one more christmas sewing project- a little table topper that I made for my mom. I used a layer cake, and made two toppers- one for my sister and one for my mom. Very simple project, but they came out nice.



I drew a diagonal line from corner to corner on half the squares, then paired light to dark squares. The squares were stacked on top of each other- good sides facing- and stitched on either side of the diagonal line. Then I cut them apart on the line, and ended up with 2 squares made of light & dark triangles. The layout was kind of figured out by wiggling them around on the floor, then sewn together and quilted.

I'm really getting into the free motion quilting with my sapphire- the stitching is a little easier, and I feel like I have a better idea of how to move around the material. Still haven't done anything bigger than a twin sized quilt, but it feels more natural now. :-)

And finally a few foggy pictures from my quiet new years in virginia. I hope everyone had a wonderful new years holiday!

An Autumn Table Runner

This is what I did this weekend. The quilt block design is from the Jelly Roll Quilts book.





It's for my mom. Lots of autumn-y colors to go with the gourds she picked at our farm. Last year's decorative gourds got tossed next to fence by a compost pile (We're insanely well organized, you see) and they kind of decomposed, and dropped their seeds, and grew these. Of course we got tons of these inedible gourds while the zucchini were attacked by borers, the eggplants hated the cold, and so on.




And a teensy peek at a christmas present that I finished- I know I'm going to have NO sewing time this November, so I've started christmas sewing already. I'm being a realist... rather unlike my usual method.



Finally, I had to share this site that I found through another blog.

Lula Lu

A whole site devoted to A cup bras. Oooooh. You have no idea how hard it is to find cute bras that actually fit! Seriously, I have to go to the kids department in stores to buy bras usually, unless I want to spend $$$ at Nordstrom- and even there the selection is rather iffy. This site carries non-underwire styles (and underwired too, although I still can't fathom why you need one in a true A or smaller bra!), in really, really gorgeous styles. I bought two, and they came this week, and I love them. Sigh. I've kept myself so far from ordering more, but it's hard. ;-)

swirly loops

For BeeBee and Karen: Ice Cream Ball, pint size. You'll have to find your own army of kids to kick it around on the deck for 15 minutes, though. ;-) Perhaps you could send some of the thunderstorms back up here though? The tree pollen is driving everyone nuts, we need a bit of rain to wash it away, please!

I practiced some more free motion quilting on a "craft sized" (so says the batting bag) scrap quilt. Here's the front:





The back is from the Farmer's Market line. I loooooove the back of this quilt, it's so crinkly and the dahlias are so pink and wonderful. I used more than an entire spool of thread on this - Gutermann 100% cotton again, with a new size 80 needle, and didn't have a single broken thread. Hooray!


You know what strikes fear into my heart? Finangeling a king sized quilt through my machine. This is 50 blocks short of king sized:


I've sort of just figured out how to wrestle with this wimpy craft sized one! I suppose I should try a twin sized one next. Here's another view. That's a a lot of squares... this thing is going to be a beast to put together.

cozy quilt

It's all done, and crinkly from the drier! My headache never really went away, but it was worse if I sat still and thought about it, so I just kept plugging away on the quilt until it was finished. I've had my Sapphire 830 since December, but I'd never tried free motion quilting on it. I decided I might as well give it a go with this quilt, especially as Tom isn't even 2 yet, so it's not like he's going to complain about imperfect quilting. So I put on the special foot, set the machine into the little "hop" mode it does for free motion quilting, and had a go at it. My finished quilt is only 33"x37", so it was a good size to practice on.

The backing is a nice rocketship print quilting cotton, which I turned around to the front as a binding as well.


I've been saving "boy" scraps in a bin for a while now, so there were lots of strips to use. Here is the quilt before washing & drying:







And this is after washing, although the wrinklyness might not be all that obvious in the photo.




It took me a while to sort out how to hold the quilt to make nice curved shapes. I kept losing grip of it, and it would tug, and I'd get sharp edges in the stitching.


I got a bit better as I went along and figured out how to hold it more carefully.


Here it is waiting for the edges to be trimmed and the back turned up as a binding



All finished and wrinkly


This is Tom's easter present, so now I get to pet it on the sofa for a week or so before I have to give it up.

one finished tree skirt

tree skirt
Originally uploaded by wck

Now I need to actually buy a tree and decorate it! In the meantime, Declan's been giving it a few test runs to break it in.

This is loosely from a vintage McCall pattern, 7225. It has a half-circle shaped tree skirt pattern, I went with that rather than draft my own circle shape. I used an ancient, icky mauve color poly-ish boucle as batting to quilt it. Sooooo glad to have it out of my stash, and it made a great batting. This is one of the first things I've ever free motion quilted, and it was lots of fun. My Viking does a wonderful job of keeping the stitches about the same size as you quilt, so long as you don't jerk the material around. I just did some totally freehand meandering swirls around it, and ended up with something with a nice body to it.

So there it is- I really didn't need a new tree skirt, but I only put Santa ornaments on my tree so I kind of wanted a skirt with some Santas as well!