Weekend Stitching

We had another long weekend thanks to New Year's Day. I don't know how I'm going to adjust to working five days a week again after the last three weeks. It has been a wonderful and relaxing holiday season for me.

Thursday night, the clamp for my floor frame broke. I'm very unhappy about this as I've only had the frame four months. I contacted the manufacturer and they will fix the clamp if I send it back, so it will go in the mail on Monday but I have no idea when I'll be able to get it back. This means no HAED stitching, as I stitch those two handed to keep the threads from slipping under the weave. So i dug into my WIP pile and worked on Magnificent Wizard by Dimensions.

Before

After

 I was also able to work on a couple more AOTH blocks. Block 5 is now finished. Block 1 still needs the satin stitching, which is not going as smoothly on the scrollwork as I had hoped. I am persevering with the idea that it will improve with practice.

Block 5 - AOTH

Block 1 - AOTH

After cutting up all the fat quarters that I pulled for the new baby quilt, I counted them up and approximated a layout in EQ7. The estimated final size for this quilt is about 45" x 33" or more or less crib size. Perfect!

I have about half of my charm squares stitched together.

Ideally, I will get this quilt top put together by the end of the week. (Haha, right. Sure.) As I was telling my sister in law today, the holidays were downright relaxing compared to what is planned for this month and next. Two baby showers, a birthday party, tax guy appointments, dentist trips, eye exams, Dagorhir practice, and I'm joining the sewing group at church. It definitely won't be boring.

New Baby in the Family

I just received an invite to a baby shower for one of Jack's cousins. This means another quilt needs to be done in record time. I have about a month. I'm also guessing that they are going to have a girl, because the invitation was pink,

After assessing the pile of UFO's and WIP's, I determined that I didn't have one already started that would work. Most of those have intended homes already and some I want to keep. Since I only have a month, I needed something simple and easy. Additionally, I needed to pull from my stash as much as possible, because I am extending my Stitch from Stash participation to my quilting stash (exact details of this to follow in a later post).

I spent the morning poking around online, raiding my stash, and eventually came up with a solution.

Sophie Car Seat Quilt at Moda Bakeshop

 This quilt pattern is available for free at the Moda Bakeshop, is designed to work with charm packs, and meets my requirements for easy, fast, and stash capable. I wasn't sure I would be able to find sashing fabric in my stash as I don't keep background/backing fabric around, but sure enough, I found some plain white.

 It is a small quilt (25" x 30") so I'll have to make it bigger than the pattern suggests. My usual method is to cut up all of my selected fabric and see how much I can get out of what I have, so no predictions on finished size. Not very well planned, I know, but those of us that are stash-busting can't be too picky.

Fabric selections for new quilt

While digging through my stash I did realize that there are a lot of fabrics in there that I don't know where they came from and may never use. Calico prints and old fashioned florals. There may be a large destashing project coming up in the future. I'm going to start working with the sewing group at my church to make quilts for God's Helping Hands and they may be able to use some of those fabrics.

First Day Finishes

Oddly enough, although today was they day I had planned to start all my new projects, I got a good dose of those on Christmas Vacation and today, I felt like working on some abandoned ones. What better way to start the new year than cross a couple things off my list? First Day Finishes in 2015.

First up was my test block for the AOTH Quilt.

I don't have the materials to turn this into a whole quilt but I don't like wasting effort and time, i.e. relegating it to the orphan block box and moving on . I debated a wall hanging and added a border and corners towards that end, but eventually decided that I had put too much red in the border and abandoned the mini quilt until today. That is when I decided to fold the corners in envelope style and use it to house one of my many cross stitch projects. It is large enough to house an 11x11 qsnap, making it just perfect for travelling or simply keeping the dust off of whatever I am working on.

Next up was my ranger hood. I mean really, this should have been done a couple months ago. The issue was the neckline was too large for the hood. You know how sometimes you have to let a project marinate for a while before it presents a solution? Well I finally got it figured out an finished, Here's a new photo but it pretty much looks the same as it did before I put the hood on.

Lots of time left today and tomorrow. I think I'll tackle another AOTH quilt block. I'm trying to talk myself into doing block #1 but I have no idea how the satin stitching on those tight curves will turn out.

On the Last Day of Christmas Vacation

...which was yesterday...

...I thought we could use a recap.

This Christmas vacation, I started three new projects, worked on two WIPs, spent a day with my favorite niece, a day with my in-laws, started learning some new-to-me technology, slept in, relaxed, ate too much junk food, cleaned up my sewing room (please note I didn't say it was clean, just that I had cleaned it up) and generally had a nice relaxing time that seemed to fly by far to quickly.

So how did my "December Plan" go? Here it is, as published on Dec 1.

1. My two main cross stitch projects this month will be: The Castle and Penguin Family. Results: Major progress on Penguin Family, minimal progress on The Castle. 

Before

Before

After

2. My two quilts I will work on this month are: Sunset Kona and Hugs and Kisses. Results: No work done on Hugs and Kisses (actually, I did piece the backing and purchase batting). Kona Sunset has about 60% of the top pieced. 

No Change

Before

After

3. I will plan on finishing the green hood and starting Jack's brown ranger hood. - No Change. Funny how the month just seems to get away from me,.

4. My lunchtime cross stitch projects at work will continue to be the Christmas ornaments. I don't know how many of these I will finish before Christmas, but I have eight done and four more in progress. I also need to get these made into ornaments. Results - Completed! (mostly). I finished 10 of my planned 16. The rest will have to wait until next year. All ornaments should have been delivered to their new homes by now.

Before

After

After

5. On a more personal note, my December "Get Healthy" goal is to get some exercise every day, even if only for fifteen or twenty minutes. I've always been wishy-washy about whether or not to post these non-crafty goals since its not really relevant to the blog topic but I think it will hold me a little more accountable. So far, so good. I was able to exercise today. Results - Nope. Totally didn't happen. Part of this is that my living room always has laundry all over it, so there isn't really anywhere to exercise. I'll have to address this in the future, but in the meantime, I did make an effort to drink more water every day and have been averaging a couple liters a day!

6. I want to finish a book I just started on the Roman Empire. It is called Ancient Rome: The Rise and Fall of an Empire by Simon Baker. This directly relates to my Nanowrimo idea for next November, and I have a lot of research to do before I can start plotting. I'd like to work on this a little bit every day. Once I finish the book, I will start drafting a plot outline. Results - Will not finish the book in time. It turned out to be a little drier than I had anticipated. On the flip side, I did start a new trilogy called "Merlin's Spiral." Excellent books, highly recommend them. I'm about a tenth of the way through the third book. 

Now onto the new stuff. I started A Light in the Dark. It mostly looks like a blob of brown now, but I'm only about 700 stitches in. There are seven different colors in that little blob of brown.

I started Affairs of the Heart. Here is block #2, completed thanks to Jack stuffing my stocking with beautiful variegated threads to do the embroidery. Where is block #1 you may ask? Well, I was a little intimidated by all the scroll work in block #1, so I tackled block #2 first. I also have some work done on block #5. 

I started World Travel Bookshelf as well. All twenty or so stitches!

I still have a couple days of December left, so I'll see how far I get before making my January Plan.

Embroidery Machine Magic

I finally! started playing with my new machine today. (For those of you that don't know, this was sitting in my living room a month before Christmas because Jack had to ask my advice on it, and I wasn't allowed to touch it until Christmas.) And as it turns out, there is a pretty steep learning curve and a wide assortment of supplies that are needed but don't come with the machine. Like stabilizer and thread.

Here are my preliminary results.

One color

Four colors

I love that kitten, he came with the preloaded embroidery templates and he looks just a little bit cranky. The only thing missing is a mouse tugging on his tail.

My new sewing machine needs a name. Maybe I should go the Asgard route and name it The Daniel Jackson or The O'Neill. Now that I think about it, I haven't named my regular sewing machine or my serger yet either. It might be time for a mass christening.

The next step is to purchase an embroidery pattern that I think I will use and see if I can transfer it to the machine.