Larger Tree Skirt

I'm sure it is no surprise that I've been working on another tree skirt - after all, I mentioned recently that I was going to make a larger one. And here it is:

I'm really happy with how it's come together. It measures 60" at the widest point. When I laid it out it seemed huge, but it's the size lovely people have been asking for, so I'm happy to oblige.

I'm in the middle of quilting at the moment, hopefully it won't be too long and I'll be ready to get busy binding. 

I realised I never did share a completed picture of the 21" mini-tree-skirt I made recently - so here it is. These little ones are super fun to make - I'm going to have fun making some more soon.

In stolen moments I'm also continuing to hand quilt on the wholecloth and finishing up the applique on my current Lily Rosenberry block - I will never run out of fun things to do in the sewing room! Chatter soon! xox

Projects - New and Super Old

This week I started putting another new project together - I have a few things on the go right now, and I'm not sad about it!

I am just loving those glitzy fabrics! The yellow/mustard one is also being used in the Lily Rosenberry quilt, and I'm super pleased I bought quite a bit of it. The Christmas fabrics are also recent purchases - I don't have many holiday prints, so it's fun to put them into use.

And this block is made with an adorable panel with floral wreaths - I bought way too many of them as I fell in love! Yum! Hopefully I can fill you in next week and share what I'm putting together.

This past week hasn't provided much stitching time, we had some super messy chores to take care of. Our ducted r/c air conditioning died a few days ago and we're getting ready to have a new system installed (ouch $$) so we needed to clean out the attic. I don't think either of us realised how much stuff we'd dragged up there to deal with another day. Wow!

Over last weekend, we hauled everything down, sorted/tossed out/donated and gifted a whole bunch of stuff, and now the attic is pretty much empty. The air conditioning techs can have free rein, and our new system will be installed before our weather starts getting too warm.

I don't know if I've ever told you about my first Baltimore applique quilt being half finished and stored up in the attic, well ... it was ... but it's gone now. I tossed it out. It's not a project I want to spend any time or $$ working on anymore, I'm way beyond it, and 20+ years in storage had done it no favours. It actually feels like a bit of a weight lifted from me.

I also found the original People Quilts up there. They are just trashed - filthy and fading, and all the lace that was around the edges has deteriorated away. I took a quick photo before I threw them out. They wouldn't last a wash, and they are too yukky to keep.

I can confidently say that my quiltmaking skills have improved in the last 26 years! Mary's quilt using the leftover fabric is much nicer - I have a little more experience under my belt now.

I'm going to leave off here - I still have so much I'd like to get through before I head to bed tonight. Wouldn't it be great if we could just find a few extra hours in each day - a couple of hours just to ourselves to get our own things done. A girl can dream! :-)

A Quilting Ninny ...

This week in the Ladies Lounge, I would define myself as a quilting ninny! I flitted from project to project and enjoyed all of them equally! It's so much fun when there are no looming quilting deadlines!

I made a quilted mat for one of our lovely friends using some of the waste triangles created when I made the table runners a few weeks ago. It came out really cute too.

Whoops, I've given you a couple of blurry pictures there - that will teach me to try and take pictures with my Ipad haha! Anyway, I wanted to share the quilting as it looked from the back, I was really happy with it and will definitely use that design again.

Because of my finish in the quilting hoop last week, I put the wholecloth back in place and got some hand quilting done in quiet moments:

This wholecloth is definitely not going to be finished anytime soon, but it's so nice to know at least I'm inching toward the finish line. I had always thought this would be a quilt I'd make for Amy's wedding, but I realised a few years ago that it wasn't really something that worked with her decorating plans, and it would be hard for her to look after, so instead ultimately it'll go on my bed. I know there are many other quilts that will work so much better for her, and not be so time consuming to make.

I also finished the small tree skirt/table topper I shared last week, and this weekend I'll get busy writing the pattern.

A couple of my quilting ladies are keen for the pattern, so it'll be fun to see others putting it together too. I'll love to see the different fabric combinations they come up with.

And last of all for today, I prepped my sixth applique block for the Lily Rosenberry quilt:

Quite a number of the green fabrics I used were from the lovely collection gifted to me by Pam Holland not so long ago. The dark green three leaf piece in the lower center was from one of the Smithsonian collections from the late 90's. I adored those fabrics and collected as many of them as I could at the time. They're like gold dust now!

Tonight I'm going to put a few more stitches in the wholecloth quilt and relax my way into the weekend. What do you all have planned? Chatter soon!

I love a finish!

This week I finished hand quilting Mary's quilt, and I'm super happy with it!

It's so very soft and snuggly, and I hope it will be a treasure to my sweet grandbaby. Right now it's in the wash, I'm rinsing away the last of the blue marking lines. 

Last week I showed you the feedsack print I was thinking of using for the binding - I certainly did make use of it, and I think it looks quite pretty. My feedsacks are precious to me, and I could never seem to cut into them, but I figured if a quilt for a granddaughter wasn't a good enough reason to start using them, there never would be a better one.

So today I got back to some things I started earlier in the year and then put aside. I often have people contact me via my Etsy store to see if my tree skirt pattern comes in different sizes - so I'm making some smaller and some larger and getting ready to work on the patterns. Here is the one I started today:

This one finishes at 21" from point to point, and next I'll make a smaller one. These are destined to be table toppers, but could easily be tree skirts for little trees too. I'll bind this topper with a stripe fabric from the green and blue fabric collection. It's from deep stash - Hooty Hoot and the Kangaroo. I have a bunch of it, so it's nice to have it out of the fabric closet for a bit :-)

Last of all, I just got some super backing fabric, it's for an upcoming project:

Kaffe Fassett's Millefiore pattern - isn't it just lovely? Not sure when I'll get to the project it's destined for, but it's on the list. After all ... you just can't rush art!

Well, that's it from me for now - I'll chatter really soon! xox

Getting close!

This week I've been driving myself crazy checking out benchtop samples/visiting tile stores/checking in with our cabinetmaker trying to make decisions about what I'd like to do in my kitchen. It's actually really hard for me to make these relatively permanent decisions - but I'm slowly getting there. I won't bore you with photos yet, but I promise I'll share when I have something interesting.

What this has meant however, is that I didn't allow myself much quilting time, but I'm getting close to a finish on the hand quilting. I feel sure I'll have it done by Friday next week.

I think I have about one third of the final pieced border to go. Yay!

This afternoon I did some rummaging in my feedsack collection, and this is the piece that I'm considering using for the binding:

I'll have to be careful cutting the strips, this piece has quite a few stains and tears. But the stripe is so pretty and I just love plaids and stripes for bindings. 

The feedsacks have such a lovely soft texture and they're just delightful to work with. My collection is very small, so it's my plan to buy more when I'm able to travel to the USA again sometime.

Well, that's all I have to report for this week, hopefully I'll have a much more newsy and interesting post next week. Thank you for stopping by! xox

Thank you!

A big thank you to Maxine for her inspired help toward a quilting design for little Miss Mary's quilt. It was like a little lightbulb switched on in my brain. I had already looked at a heart template but dismissed it as too small, so I drew up a larger heart on Corel Draw and continued the grid behind it and presto, I'm happy. I have the best visitors to my blog, thank you so much!

I'm on the home stretch now with the borders, I'm looking forward to getting the binding on this quilt and putting it in use.

I also finished the second of the twisted hearts blocks, still the same machine quilting design, but I'm getting so much more comfortable with my machine:

Lovely Janet asked about the quilting design I used on the tangled hearts, whether there is a stencil or a name for the design. I don't know about a stencil, but I an tell you that the little circles are generally called pebbles, and the circles with shadows - I call them peacock feathers, but they may also be called paisley or something like that. I think there would be lots of online tutorials about how to quilt them, they are super fun to do and great for filling spaces. Hope this helps!

Last of all for today, in baking adventures for the week, I made a lemon ricotta tart for the sweet ladies that come to quilting:

Ohhh nom nom nom. It was good! I pinned the recipe to my Pinterest board. It was actually an orange tart, but I changed it to suit my abundance of lemons right now. There is a little sliver left over, so I may just indulge and have it with coffee for afternoon tea today.

Thank you all for stopping by, and I'll chatter again next week! xox

Yellow is such a joyful colour!

A couple of weeks ago I quilted a really happy scrap project for one of the lovely ladies that comes to quilting. I don't quilt much for others anymore, only relatively small projects for close friends. I didn't remember to take a picture at the time, but grabbed a couple of happy snaps when it came out for show and tell yesterday:

Isn't that yellow such a happy colour, and looking at all the different scrap fabrics kept me interested the whole time. I would love to make up this quilt myself someday. I'll add it to my ever growing list!

The moment I saw the plain yellow fabric, I knew I was going to put feathers in there. There was no debating it :-)

It's funny that I was so decisive with that project, because progress on Mary's cot quilt has stalled completely:

I have no inspiration whatsoever about how to quilt that plain white border. I've put stitches in there and pulled them out. I've also drawn quilting designs three times and spritzed them away. Ugh, hopefully I'll have a lightbulb moment soon.

I'm currently machine quilting on the second tangled hearts block I finished appliqueing:

My machine is behaving itself, and if I'm lucky I'll get it finished tonight. Tomorrow I can bury the threads and bind it.

I do have some chores to do tomorrow though, we're getting ready to do a kitchen 'refresh' and I'm organising new benchtops, tiles and handles for the cabinets. I've been tile shopping today, and it's so overwhelming. I'll check out some other stores, and see what feels right. There's nothing to show at the moment, but I promise I'll share photos when I can!

Thank you for all the lovely comments you've been leaving, it's super fun to read them. Hope you all have a great weekend, I'll chatter soon! xox

Friday already?

Wow, are days disappearing more quickly at the moment? Maybe they are but just in my house? Who knows, but I can tell you with certainty that I didn't get much done this week!

This is as far as I got with my two tangled hearts blocks:

Yes, there's only one block in the picture. Exactly. I'm about half way through sewing the binding down now. But when I think about it, these blocks are quite a bit of work - I hand stitched all the applique pieces down - that took a while, then I machine quilted it quite heavily - also somewhat time consuming. Anyway, it's not a lot of eye candy for you.

Slowly I'm getting better at machine quilting - I was having tension issues at the start. I also began quilting with a shiny thread but had to unpick it all as it was making my machine crazy. One thing I really find hard is deciding what quilting designs to use to fill areas, it'll be great to practice a few more fillers and get comfortable using them. Such a close up picture really is warts and all, so maybe don't look too carefully lol!

And here is one of my favourite distractions:

Amy has been working a little bit, so the Grandma Gang has been pressed into service, and we have the babysitting schedule all worked out! Today was my turn in the rotation! <3 <3

Last of all for today, Carol in Texas asked last week what the background fabric in my hearts blocks was. I have to tell you that there is nothing to identify the fabric on the small piece I have left, but I took a screenshot from the online store where I got it from:

I realise it's probably not really helpful given that you're in the USA - Spotlight is a large craft/haby store here in Australia, so maybe they have a similar thing at one of your large chain stores over there? Happy fabric hunting!

Anyway, I am going to leave off here, baby minding has me worn out today, so I'll chatter soon! xox