St Patrick's Table Runner

Since my last blog post, I have finished 2 large quilts and several small projects.  It seems like I either take the time to quilt in my spare moments during the day or to post pictures.  Either way, it is super fun to constantly be working on things.

Yesterday, I went and spent 6 hours at my best friends house and we whipped up a fun St. Patrick's day table runner.  We copied the idea from a post I saw on instagram from the quilt shop Pines and Needles.  Their kit is super super cute, but we already had some St. Patrick's fabric so we made up our own dimensions and sewed away.  I got all the fabric at JoAnn's except the green stem which I found in my stash.

I think it turned out super cute.  I loved the size on her table.  I love the darker black with golden horseshoes fabric.  Each block in the 4 patches end up being 4 inches before being sewn together.  Final dimension of our project is 31 1/2 by 14 inches.

I had two shamrocks left over so I sewed four blocks together from the scraps and threw them in my box.   I will have to think over what I want to do with the leftovers.  I can't decide if I just want to have a tiny table runner or if I want to make them into a larger wall hanging quilt.  Something will be decided this coming week.

Hope you enjoyed.

Coral, Blue and Orange mini quilt

Let's be honest.  While I typing up this post, I have 13 scheduled posts and about 15 more pictures worth of posts I need to finish.  But, this is so far, one of the most recent quilt I have made.  I purchased the fabric for this quilt as one of my few fabric purchases at a local quilt shop in the past 4 years in Spring of 2017.  However, I didn't pull it out to work on until Oct 2017. 

1st.  I have wanted to purchase new fabric for a LONG time.  However, I was determined that I couldn't buy anymore fabric until I finished the stash of unfinished quilts and at least 1/4 of all the fabric in my storage room.  When I purchased this fabric, it was to refreshing and greatly cherished.  Even though I just picked out some matching fat quarters I thought would be great together, I was very aware that I was being conscious of my budget and yet thoroughly enjoying the chance to buy something that would forever make my heart happy. 

2nd.  I have been wanting to make fun quilts that are not holiday themed for a LONG time.  However, that was the fabric I originally purchased so I plugged away at using it.  When it comes to summer, except my 4th of July quilts, I really don't have any other quilt to really put up, so it was time to remedy that situation. 

3rd.  Since I started sewing, I have always wanted to make a quilt with circles or round points in the quilt top.  They are just so beautiful to me.  This quilt really did satisfy that need. 

4th. On my list of things I still want to do is make a yellow and grey themed quilt, take a break from Hawaiian fabric for a little while and make all the mini's in ..... book.  That is the book that I used to make this quilt.

Isn't it just so pretty!!!  I can't get enough of it.  I really really love the border fabric I found to compliment the other colors and I used it as the center small square on all the blocks to pull it into the quilt itself.  I LOVE big borders.  Hence the huge turqoise border. 

When I brought it by one day to show my best friend, I knew that she really loved it.  I was concerned that I would have enough fabric to make a whole new quilt and I needed a couple Christmas presents.  So, I made 6 blocks but split it up into a set of 3 blocks for this table runner for my best friend and 3 pillow covers for me, my husbands aunt and my own aunt.  I drove out to my best friends new house which is now an 1 1/2 away from my home as they recently moved and dropped it off before Thanksgiving.  I was slightly proud of myself for not waiting until the last moment this year!!!  Hurrah!!   I think that I might have just enough fabric left over to make myself a table runner here in the next couple months.  That will be a fun fun project!!

I have found that I really really enjoy white borders with white binding lately to really help the other colors and shapes of the quilts really pop.  This one made me super happy.  

 Hope you enjoyed!!

Valentines Day quilts #2

As I was typing up my post about my best friends Valentines quilts, I started thinking about how we both purchase fabric at the same time that year.  I purchased a couple panels, a charm pack and a couple yards of fabric for backing and binding.  My panels also sat in a pile of unfinished projects for many years.  As I was pulling out my Valentines quilts this year to decorate, I was realizing that it is one of my largest collection of quilts.  Christmas, Fall, Halloween and the 4th of July certainly compare in the sheer volume of fabrics that are fun to buy, sew with and finished projects.  But, I think I secretly love Valentines Day the most.  Why?  Because I love bright colors.  Anything pink as well.  I am a sucker for pink.  When my husband and I were first married, I wore mostly pink.  I have tamed down so much now that I usually wear black or white with an under color.  Life just changes a person I guess.

Here are a few of the panels that I put up that I just love.  Sandy Gervais did a lot of the fabric lines that I got these panels from.  At the time it was a cheap, easy way to get a quilt up.  I now prefer actually sewing and piecing a quilt even if it means that I have a month during the year that is not as full in my quilt area as other months.

I seriously love the fabric on the edge of the 2nd panel.  I love the print, the color and how it really makes the two little love birds color just pop.

I started following canoeridgecreations on instagram a couple years ago.  I have loved watching all her posts.  She posted a free tutorial online that I immediately just grabbed right up and sewed up one day.  It is such a nice, little, easy to sew mini-quilt.  I used lots of scraps that I have.  (Mostly stuff from my daugher infant room that I swear I now know I bought 5x's too much fabric for but even with everything I make from it, the pile never gets smaller!!!)  This is absolutely one of my favorite quilts I have ever made.  I stipple stitched in the heard area and did a straight stitch through the white to finish off the machine quilting.

Picture taking is not my favorite thing.  I am not that good at it.  The lighting is often off and the pictures are often crooked.  Sorry.  These posts are a journal for me, so while I take plenty of time to create what I love, I spend...not as much time on the picture taking. Haha!!

Many years ago I started making a long table runner to my piano to put underneath all the stuff I keep on there to teach piano.  I now have one for every month and it is soooo fun!!!  Then I started making a few table runner's for fun because they are so easy and quick to pull together and finish.  I put the second posted on my kids books bookshelf.  I made the first table runner the a Sandy Gervais line of fabric.  The second one I made from the fabric I decorated my daughters infant room with.

Do you see my chatbooks??  When I realized in 2016 that I couldn't keep up with this blog let alone a blog about my family and their lives, I knew that I needed to do something that would help me keep up with journaling.  It is important to me that I keep track of our lives in some fashion.  It helps give me a sense of purpose.  Honestly, chatbooks are so incredibly cheap and easy.  When I either add up to 60 photos manually or through my instagram account, it automatically prints.  I have 3 days to check it out and make sure that the cover photo is what I want and edit pages I might want to take out or keep.  My kids LOVE reading them.  I find them all over the living room as they relive moments in their lives.  Best decision I made in a long time.  If you haven't hear of them, check them out.

Back to the post at hand, not only do I have quilts to hang, table runner to lay across things in my home, but Valentine's Day was the second holiday I really created pillow covers for.  Back in 2014, I posted a post about a dresden Christmas Quilt I was making.  I am shortly going to post a finished picture of that quilt, but I absolutely love dresdens!!!  But they just take so long to cut and iron on that I decided that I couldn't handle making a full quilt of them for Valentines Day.  So, I made a 16in pillow cover with a dresden.  Of all the pillow covers I have made it is definitely my 3rd favorite.  (Wait until you see my new Halloween one late next week!!!  Oh, and my fall one...or my embroidered/quilted spring one.  Yep, I can't wait to post the millions of pillow covers I made this Christmas.)  As it was actually the first dresden I ever completed, I take a lot of pride in it...even if the middle circle was a complete fisco and not a real circle anymore when you look closely.

I have been collecting red fabrics with gorgeous prints for many many years.  I have yet to make a fun quilt with them, but I did make this pillow cover three times for 2 other people and myself this past Christmas and I just love this one!!  I didn't use a white background to applique it on, I used a muslin. I think it just made it have such a warm color that I wonder why I use white so much.

Whoo blurry!!!  I will try and take a better picture of this pillow cover soon.  This was a leftover block from my pieced-block-panel quilt.  Not my favorite at all, but worth a mention.

Ya, clearly this pillow cover is not on a 12in pillow form.  But I couldn't find my other 12in pillow form so I put it on the 10in until the other one reappears.

Couple all those with the two I made a long time ago....

and I am near complete with my Valentines Quilts.  You can find the last two here and here in other posts in the blog before.  True to form, now you can finally see a finished project because in the original post it was just the top.  These were both some of my first experiments doing machine quilting on my domestic machine.  But the chocolate/pink quilt was my first quilt quilted with a darning foot.  I will never go back to taking everything to a long arm quilter.  It is so much fun to do it myself.  I have the intention this year of branching out and perfecting some more stitches because I default to the stipple stitch nearly everytime.  

And to say thanks for reading, here is the bottom of one of the panel quilts made into it's own mini-quilt!!

Hope you enjoyed!!

Valentines Day quilts

My best friends birthday is Feb. 3.  Every year I try and made something for her birthday.  It is a really fun task.  Back in Jan 2015, I went by her house to have a sewing day with her.  One year when we were first married we had gone fabric shopping and had each purchased from Valentines fabric.  I had worked through half of mine.  She had got a top partially done and had been putting the top up to decorate for a couple years, but had never got it quilted and bound. So we finished all the tops of both a mini-quilt and also a table runner for her kitchen.  I took the quilts home that night and over the course of the next few days, I finished quilting and binding them.  They turned out so fun!!

We made the table runner from my favorite table runner pattern, little charmers II.  I linked a google search site I found the pattern.  I am not a affiliated with them.  It is super easy and just made with a 5 in charm packet. 

There were three small interior block pieces left over when we finished the quilt.  So I surprised her with a second extra table runner when I dropped them off for her birthday.  I loved the colors of valentines day.  I loved the fabric prints that people make for Valentines day.  I wish I could remember the fabric lines of these quilts so I could post their names, but they came from a line in either 2008 or 2009.

Hope you enjoyed. 

A quilt's story from its beginning in the 1960's to its completion in 2017

When we moved into our home, we were faced with the challenge of cleaning out the rest of the house that didn't get finished before we bought the home.  My grandma's sewing room was one of those rooms.  Not only was it full of all her many years of fabric, house decor and general storage, the room had been built with 2 foot wall to wall, ceiling to floor cabinets.  They were perfect for a older couple that didn't have a need for a 3rd bedroom.  However, we were moving in with two young children and needed that room as a bedroom with a closet.  I wish beyond all wishes that I had had the time to back up the photos we took those 6 weeks on our computer, but we didn't.  It was a hard time of life.  I had an emergency c-section 2 weeks before we closed on the house and only had enough money to live in our rental for one more month before paying our mortgage payment.  So, we remodeled the house, moved everything out of the house that was left from my grandparents passing, worked full-time between all our jobs and moved in the day before Christmas Eve.  It was insane.  But when our computer crashed it was a very very sad day full of heartbreak.  We lost all my newborn sons pictures and the before and after pictures of all the work we had put into our home.  Oh well.  Time has slowly healed that heartbreak.

But, back to the post at hand.  When I was cleaning out the cupboards, I found a stack of handsewn quilt blocks. Each of the blocks were like little English paperpiecing hexes, but they were not sewn onto a card that popped out.  They were cut out in the shape of a hexagon and then hand sewn together. 

(The cardboard hexagon she used was slightly out of shape.  Yikes.)

The hand-stitching on the center of one of the flowers.

It was an insane amount of work and something like 80 blocks worth!!!  After consulting with my aunt, we believe that they were started by my great-grandma and that my grandma continued to work on them.  (I am really frustrated because I can't find the picture I took of all the blocks when I found them.)

I still have a bag of 20 unfinished blocks and varying pieces.  Some of the stacks that were cut out and meant to go together are still pinned together with a rusted pin.

Oh how I love the colors and pattern on this unfinished strip.  Someday maybe I will stitch up one more flower just so I can make something with this fabric strip.

So I laid out the blocks and tried to decide if I could square them off to sew them together.  Unfortunately, I just couldn't find a way to do it.  Because the hexagon wasn't square and when I ironed them they were all so different in their seam allowances, they were just so difficult to square off.  So, I put the blocks into my fabric stash and there they stayed for the next 3 years.

One day during my #faricdestash in 2016, I pulled the blocks out to revisit them.  I was thinking the best way to use them would be to iron/applique them onto a white block.  Which is what I did.  I used so many yards of my favorite plain white fabric from Collecting Threads.  But then I had a stack of 60 finished blocks on my hand.  They weren't the kind of blocks that I would use on a bed for myself but I wasn't sure what to do with them.  So, into the unfinished stack they went yet again. 

Fall of 2015, my aunt asked me to make her a set of table runners, one for each month to put on her couch table.  I was thinking, what better thing could I make her than a table runner that incorporated the blocks from her own mom.  So I pulled out all the more orange ones, because it is her favorite color, and use three blocks to make a table runner.  I don't have a picture of the one I made her, but I loved how it turned out so I made myself two to put on my piano and my bookshelf.  The red border is a replica fabric I found at my local quilt shop. 

I definitely went through a phase in 2015-16 with quilts bound in solid white.  I love how clean it looks and how it makes the colors that are in the quilt/table runner itself really pop.

It was then that I finally decided what to do with the rest of the blocks.  I spent 3 weeks going to various quilt stores and searching online until I found the perfect purple print to compliment the various prints in the original quilt.  I sashed all the blocks together and got it machine quilted in one afternoon.  It is one of the first quilts that I have ever made that I finished the top, got it quilted and bound and hung up on the day I made it.  I love it so much.  I took close ups at the time of my absolute favorite prints on the quilt.

When I finished I still had blocks left over.  So I made a couple pillow covers.  One day in the next two weeks I will head over to my aunts and add a post with all her pillow covers and her table runners I have made, but here is the fall one I made for myself. 

Seriously, I LOVE the print on the outer fabric of this flower. 💚💚

There is something so incredibly special working with an unfinished project that was made with time and love.  It was worth every second I spent on this quilt.  I cherish it each time I am organizing my quilts and I get to hold it and examine it.  I love spring when I pull it out and see it hanging on my wall.  I wish I could have consulted with her about what her original plan was with the quilt, but at least it isn't stuck in a cupboard never to be seen again.

Hope you enjoyed. 

2 yards, 1 charm pack and 5 projects later

I follow a lot of quilters on Instagram these days.  I thoroughly enjoy the amazing things that they create.  One of the many things that I enjoy are the days in Jan where they post their #quiltmystash posts.  A couple years ago, I determined I couldn't make anything new for myself if I didn't finish previously purchased quilt projects first.  As a result, I cut my fabric purchases to pretty much 3 maybe 4 each year the past 3 years.  The problem is that sometimes you buy fabric that is not necessarily intended for a specific quilt.  This quilt is made from those kinds of fabrics.  I bought this fabric online from Hancock's of Paducah back in 2008 or 2009.  The line was called City Bloom by Bernartez Kitty Yoshida.  I purchased 1 yard of my 2 favorite flower fabric in the line and a charm pack. 

I purchased the charm pack of this fabric because I simply I loved the fabric.  I whipped up a mini quilt this past week from the small 20 piece charm pack.  I wish I still had the details on the line of fabric or anything!!!  But I don't.  Nevertheless, I love it and it was fun and easy to make.  I can't wait to put it out this summer.

A close up

The process...goes something like this.

When I found the fabric in my drawer a month ago, I moved it to my sewing desk.  Then it fell out while I was making Christmas presents so I moved it to the top of another stack...and I did this easily 5 more times.  So, the day that I pulled out the fabric it was such a relief to finally be working on something that I kept pushing around.  Generally speaking, I lay all my fabric out in big enough sections that I can see them all together while I am decided what to do with them.  Then I spend a significant amount of time on Google searching, scrolling and saving pictures of various quilts.  When my kids won't let me have anymore time to myself just scrolling, I usually put it away for an hour or so.  At that point, if there is something that stuck out to me, I will go find that picture and decide if it is "the one."  Then I try and lay out the fabric one more time in that order to see if I really like it.  I just sew away at that point afterwards.  Great fun.  This view of my kitchen table really represents my life.  From the random quilt books, to the computer open on the side for my youngest to work on his online preschool, to the breaks I take each day to play games with my kids, to the mess of fabric.  I want to see people actually post pictures of their sewing room in progress.  I doubt that it is as clean as I picture in my mind.  I try and clean up for a few minutes everyday, but because my fabric is stored in my storage room two rooms away from my sewing desk, it is near impossible to keep it super clean.

Laying it out

After I finished, I couldn't help myself.  I took all the really small pieces that I cut off the corners of the quilt and I actually sewed them together.  After squaring them all off to a mere 1 1/4in, I sewed them up to make a pillow cover.  Honestly, I would have loved to make this a square overall.  However, I wasn't about to cut 40 more squares of fabric that wasn't left overs.  So I will probably always regret that, but sometimes you just have to decide if it's worth it or not.  I decided it wasn't.  So, there you have it.

The finished pillow cover....definitely NOT my favorite thing I have ever made.  But I am posting a picture of it anyways.  I needed to be able to make it bigger I think.  I also don't like the border with it because the pieces are so small and the border make them look all pixilated.  But,  regardless, I enjoy it when I put it out this summer.

While I was typing up info on the picture, I was realizing that I also had 3 other projects that I made from this fabric.  Hence, the title of the post.  When my daughter was an infant I made a baby blanket with my absolute fabric from this line of fabric.

Then one day I decided to make a bright, floral butterfly quilt with random fabrics from my stash.  Honestly, I don't care for how it turned out.  But, I love each of the blocks individually.  Yes, the close up are to show all the mistakes I didn't catch when I was piecing the quilt together.  Ugh.  I don't know how I missed them, but I did.

Then in true nature of my sewing, I didn't find the bigger pieces of scraps I had at that time.  I took the extras from the butterfly quilt and made a mini-table runner.  Also...not my favorite scrap item, but it is still fun and bright.

All together without the baby quilt:

I had fun sewing up 5 different projects from my stash over a period of 9 years.  I guess that is what makes a fabric stash fun!!!  Hope you enjoyed.