February tangents

I think I would have fewer tangents if it weren't for Project Quilting.  Thankfully the season is only 6 challenges long, so I will have less distractions soon.  (But I have a way of distracting myself with other projects so I don't know if anything will actually improve.)  Anyway, here is something Bigger Than a Breadbox.  I was just going to focus on all the projects I had already started, but then I saw this while scrolling through Facebook, and thought it'd be easy enough to make a small doll quilt.  I have lots of 5" squares, picked a few and off I went.  The actual quilting isn't my best - the back is quite wrinkly - but I think it's pretty cute.  A non-pink heart for Valentine's Day (although I was tempted by some pink and purple .. that may have to happen later). 

While basting the blue heart above, I also basted this project too - I finished the top for this table runner before Christmas and now it is all done! It was made from scraps from a quilt that is .. sadly in the UFO pile.  All the blocks are done, but it hasn't turned into a top yet.  It is on the list to finish for Christmas this year, and hopefully a second Christmas quilt as well - I have a stack of fabric but haven't settled on a pattern yet.

I've kept up with my Harry Potter quilt until now.  Ron here was a little late (typical) and Luna is still in pieces.  Her glasses look quite intimidating, so it keeps getting pushed aside.  I won't let myself go too much farther without picking up the UFOs and turning them into completed projects.  This one is slated for a friend's baby due at the beginning of April so I can't wait much longer!

Speaking of Harry Potter... one of the challenges from Project Quilting this season was Pixel Play and I had been eyeing this beautiful Hedwig from the second QAL.  Even though I didn't start it until Thursday (and the deadline is always Sunday) I eeked it out just in time.  I turned the 12" block into a pillowcase for my friend's birthday and she loved it.

Not a great picture, but my Unicorn mini quilt top is complete.  I've got the backing and binding ready, but I haven't been super confident with my basting skills lately so it keeps getting set aside.  It is so pretty though, and I had a lot of fun making economy blocks.  I may have to hop onto a round of Finish-A-Long so I can be motivated to get more things completed!

Aside from quilting and sewing I've been reading and DRAWING!  Look!  Oh it feels good to be drawing again.  This is Salty, and I'm loving how he's turning out.

And finally, the longest running project on the list - the last of the Squared Away Twilt blocks were completed! (Can't call this one Squared Away because it wasn't originally included.)  I ended up doing a second blue pinwheel to bring my total block count to 48.  That is a LOT of blocks!  Trina finished hers up as well and we both got them in the mail.

All of our blocks.  I'm still playing with the layout, and leaning towards a grey sashing with cornerstones.  And that border.  Did some math - I need over 300 2.5" squares to make a double-wide border.  Good thing I've got over 400 cut then!  It's going to take a lot of time to get this finished, and with a July deadline I better not put it off for much longer.

February's list

Quilting
1 - Squared Away: the last 4 blocks are DONE!! Hooray! I did the final two sets - dark green and purple, and got everything boxed up and into the mail for Mindy. I was apparently so excited to get them done and out the door, I didn't even take pictures of the last block. Ha! I just got her last two blocks a couple of days ago, so as soon as I get the doll quilts done and on their way, I can lay out this quilt and start putting the full top together. Hooray!

2 - Night Sky: 5 more blocks made, and section 2 of the quilt put together. So the entire top section is now done, and it's 60 inches across. The plan is to make it 80 inches long - right now, it's at 33. I was running out of the gray in the top center spinner, so in the bottom left Hunter Star, I used the gray scraps from SM's apron from last year's theater costume. It will be fun for her to have that memory incorporated into her quilt.

3 - Letter blocks: one so far, for a new mini quilt project. I got this quilting book called Spelling Bee by Lori Holt and it literally is the instructions to make every letter of the alphabet, both upper and lower case, plus a bunch of punctuation marks and some fun extra bonus blocks. The globe was the one that got me to buy the book. I have so. many. ideas. of what to do with the letters.

4 - 15 doll quilts to be sent to A Doll Like Me: the two TA and I made a year ago, the star one that JE started in January, AND 12 more made this month by our church activity group. My part of the 13 made in the past 60 days:

• organized all the adults for the evening activity, plus some other adults helped with the fabric 
• cut 230 squares, other people brought more and we had probably around 1000
• made the "Made by kids for kids" labels
• after the activity, I finished 4 of the quilts at home
• made 7 quilt sandwiches, 6 to go but I ran out of pins

Another woman from church, who donated some of the fabric, has agreed to do the bindings. Bless her forever!


Other sewing
1 -  two more scripture tote bags ... I made the ten in January for the church activity girls and had a little fabric left over. So I made two more for my girls who didn't have bags for church items. For our family, the "quiet" materials are sketchbooks and writing utensils (pens, pencils, markers, etc).

2 - more service sewing, this time for Days For Girls. My church's women's organization is part of an interfaith group that makes fabric reusable menstruation products to be taken to developing countries, where the women and girls don't have hygiene items during their cycles. The original intention was to give girls these products so they don't have to miss school during their period, but I'm sure it's spread further than that. Our local group is getting a shipment ready to send to Senegal this spring and I went to a Saturday sewing day this month. I have a schedule conflict for the Saturday in March, so I brought home 25 shields to finish here, and a friend will take them back. They're done and ready to go.

SM goes with me - she and her friend JM put snaps on one of the pieces, and they're knocking out quite a few service hours!


Mending: 8

January in Connecticut

I'm finally sewing a lot again! Hooray! I missed it. Now I need to get back into blogging too, so things get their own posts throughout the month instead of a big photo dump at intervals.

Clothing
1 - circle skirt for SM - I watched the video from Made Everyday and used her instructions. It was pretty intimidating at first because of the curve, and sewing directly to the elastic. And ... yeah, don't look too closely at that part. Good thing her shirt covers the top! But it's sufficiently twirly for her, so she's happy.

2 - peasant top for RG - tutorial from Things of Cloth. It's the same pattern that SM is wearing in the above picture, that I made last spring (yep, these are two different shirts in the pictures!). Now RG has one as well, but she's worn it only the one time. ???? Maybe because she has deemed it a spring shirt? Or maybe it will end up in SM's drawer. The peasant top I made for SM last year has been worn SO much that it's becoming very, very thin.

Quilts
8 blocks for 3 different quilts ... 4 for Squared Away - I'm FINALLY getting back to it! Just two more colors left - dark green and dark purple.

JE and TA wanted to try their hand at machine sewing, and they worked with me on 2 blocks each. I did all the cutting (I don't trust kids yet with the rotary cutter - I gashed my own finger with it a few months ago), and I helped them with the machine. JE learned chain-stitching, which she thought was nifty.

JE made two of these star blocks with her own selection of fabric, to be put into a doll quilt. She did the chain piecing for all the half-square-triangles (HST), and was excited to put them all together into one star.

TA has plans for her own twin-sized quilt for her bed, which obviously I've not made yet ... happy to have her assistance! She did two blocks as well. We're using the house block pattern from Intrepid Thread.


Crafting
1 - Ten canvas tote bags for a church activity. The 10 girls in my group decorated them with fabric markers, and hot-gluing ribbon and fabric flowers and "jewel" sparkle thingies to them. Yes, I could have bought them. But buying 10 would have cost $45, and the fabric cost only $15. I had the time to make them, and I have other ideas for blowing my budget money this year.

2 - While I had the craft supplies out, JK found some leftover fabric circle flower things kicking around, and decided one needed to be a hair clip. Sure, why not!

3. Edge stitching on a large piece of fleece to make into a throw blanket for the TV couch.

Mending: 5

January in Canada

I've got to admit, Trina had a good idea last year.  I liked her monthly reports.  I didn't post too often last year because I was working so much on one quilt that still isn't finished.  Other bloggers post progress on projects and honestly it is just as much about the journey as it is the completed object.

So far this year I've been sewing pretty much constantly, with a drawing added in there for good measure.  My house may suffer for it, but it isn't like I can keep up with the mess anyway so I might as well have fun.

Project Quilting mystery quilt along, 

that I totally tweaked and made my own.

Project Quilting challenge -

a baby quilt for a friend made in just a week.

I got further on the Twilt 

(or Twin Quilts - the Squared Away BOM from last year).

I'm going to make a scrappy border for it

so LOTS of 2.5" squares for that.

Made a replacement block for the Twilt - 

I just didn't like the original blue one.

Now that we both approve, I need to make a second one.

  

NEW PROJECT!  Sew Fresh Quilts is making a Harry Potter quilt!

It is more exact that I've ever had to be, but super fun.

I'll just be doing the first four blocks instead of the whole thing. 

(See, this is something that I wouldn't have posted about before,

since it isn't a complete project, just a block.)

And since there's time for something between the HP blocks,

I started a mini quilt with economy blocks, because I think they're fun.  

I plan on donating it to A Doll Like Me like last year.

May journal

SEWING
Quilts, crafts, and clothes. Covered it all this month.

1. X is for X block in the Squared Away Block of the Month. The X was March's block, and I also did April's block. Green done, yellow done. Still working on pink for May.

2. Four more blocks for the Night Sky quilt. I'm trying to get section 2 done of the quilt, but it's not quite coming together yet. I wanted to do more on this project, but at least I hit the minimum.

3. Two pairs of shorts, one of TA and the other for JK. More coming.

The purple speckles was from the remnant bin at Hobby Lobby. The ice cream cones are from Made EveryDay, the Boardwalk Delight line.

I think I resolved my Shorts conundrum. I have the Kid Shorts pattern from Made Everyday but it only goes to a size 10. SM is way out of that now. I was trying to figure out how to size it up, and I probably still could. But I discovered that Oliver+S has a FREE!!! Sunny Day Shorts pattern online, so I printed it off. They're made differently - Kid Shorts does not have a separate waistband, Sunny Days Shorts does. They're put together differently, even though they look pretty much the same when they're done. And hey, I don't know that SM will even fit into a 12 anymore - I've been buying her 14/16 at the store, and even went to the Juniors section when we were shopping for a dress for her last week. So we'll see. But at least I have one more size up after the Kid Shorts 10.

4. On Sunday night this week, I got a sewing bug, and in just a little while, I made a swim cover for JK. Adam asked how this dress is different from any other dress ... it's not. It's regular fabric. But the top is too loose to be modest so we'll call it a swim cover. JK found the bow in my basket of random items and asked me to add it.

She's ready for the pool! Bring on the summer!

5. I started ... another ... WIP ... a fabric pennant garland for summer camp. I'm going to our church's youth camp with SM as one of the adult chaperones, and this is girly in that campsites are "decorated" somehow. So enter a pennant garland. This is just getting started so no photos yet.

It has the typical triangles but also flowers scattered randomly in between. I made a bunch of flowers as a hand-sewing project (and one was even swiped by JK - she had me stitch it to a hair tie). The gathering stitch would be MUCH faster on the machine, but I wanted a hand project to carry around and knocked out over 20 of them just while sitting in a women's church conference. This particular version of a pennant/flower garland is from the book Sewing Bits and Pieces by Sandi Henderson - I got it from the library for a different project, but this looked cute too.

This has been a great way to clear out blues that quite frankly, I'm not going to ever use in a quilt because the fabric is too rough, doesn't go with anything else, or I just don't like it. Putting those fabrics in a garland that's going to get the crap beat out of it by being outside!


THE HOUSE
We have a baaaaaaaack-splaaaaaaaaash!

This was the last major piece of our kitchen puzzle, and kind of on a whim, we just got it done. I wanted glass tiles in some shade of blue. When I was running errands at Home Depot once, I went through their entire in-store selection and really wasn't happy with it. It's mostly brown-toned, which doesn't not work with our gray/black counter at all. I found a couple of things and took samples home but nope. So we tried Lowe's and hooray! They had a lot of blues! We brought home a bunch, and the all-white that Adam liked and grabbed at the last second was the winner. The blues didn't look right with the counter - that was a hard match. The white/gray was also the cheapest - score!

I went to a Saturday night book club and when I got home, Adam had most of it up. (I need to leave him unsupervised more often.) I just had to come through behind him for the wipe-down of the extra mortar. (Typical. He makes a mess, I clean it up.) It still needs the grout and to be polished off, but the tiles are up! Hooray!

X is for X-block

I got behind on the Squared Away quilt block of the month challenge after just January and February. Now that it's May, I did March and April, and this is where X has arrived for the Alphabet Challenge - a quilt block!

March's color was green to celebrate the start of spring ... which did not arrive in my state until April, so this was wishful thinking.

April was yellow:

I like the sunshine! I needed some of that in April, because spring didn't come until the END of the month!

May's Squared Away block is still under construction. I made a whole bunch of HSTs, but then didn't like them. The white scrap fabric that I used is really flimsy. Now that Mindy and I have decided to give the twin quilts to our daughters who are "twinsies" (Cupcake and JK are very close in age, and were best friends last summer), I don't know that this fabric will hold up very well. Also, the pink in the HSTs didn't go with any of the other pinks I have - I didn't coordinate that well at all. So I need to start over on the May block, but had to put the quilts on pause to make summer shorts for the girls.

February journal

1. Squared Away block of the month: 4 blocks. I finished two more blocks for light blue-January that had already been started. I did just two purple blocks for February, and Mindy and I will each get one of them. So Mindy and I each have a set of blocks that looks like this, so far:

2. Valentine's hearts in plastic canvas and yarn: my little girls wanted Valentine's decorations, and one of them found a few random sheets of plastic canvas that have been kicking around for forever. No more. It's all been cut into hearts, and yarn or ribbon looped through them to hang in the windows. TA and JK took turns stitching and we made a bunch of them. JK keeps calling it "knitting" and I keep correcting her to "embroidery." (There is no knitting in our house - I tried and it didn't take.) Happy Valentine's Day!

3. Night Sky quilt: only two more 10-inch blocks (the center one was January's block), but I finished what will be the top row of the quilt! Next target is to finish the entire second section.

4. Clothing: SM came home one day with costume instructions for the school play, and I had all of a week and a half to figure it out. And we were traveling for 5 of those 10 days. Thanks for the advance notice, School, that you don't have a costume shop and I had to take care of it. She's a "fairy tale peasant," in the chorus of Into the Woods. So I knocked out her peasant top using some white fabric from my quilting pile (I think it used to be a bedsheet) and these directions from Things of Cloth. It only took me a couple of hours, I was surprised but pleased it went that fast. The skirt is in the works, and I also need to make an apron. I'll do pictures of the whole costume together when it's done.

I'm glad that this got me kicked into gear on making clothing - the target is 12 items for the year, and here's two right together.

5. A Doll Like Me doll quilt drive: I committed to 6, and the first one is done. The traveling and the theater costume took cuts in line for my time.

I meant to do T and U for the Alphabet Challenge before going to V for Valentines ... I know what I'm doing for them but other things have obviously taken priority.

For March, it's time to make dresses and skirts for Easter, because it's April 1 this year. I've made Easter outfits only once before. Last summer, my mom found a close-out sale of a fabric store in Idaho and FaceTimed me (in Connecticut) while walking around the store choosing fabric. Best fabric shopping ever! The catch was, you had to buy what was left on the bolt. (I also got major yardage of flannel to use for quilt backs, and the whole load cost me only 50 bucks. And they were coming here on vacation anyway, so we didn't have to ship it!) I ended up with 8 yards of this lightweight cotton that's perfect for skirts and dresses. I'm going to try to use it ALL. I have the Carousel Dress pattern traced off and trimmed for either TA or JK.

January journal

I'm going to try to keep a monthly log here of the sewing, quilting, and household projects I'm working on, so I can keep myself moving forward and keep track of what I'm actually doing.

I made a Year Ten sewing/house/project list a couple of years ago for my 10th year of being home to raise my kids. I didn't get very far with it because there was a lot going on with homeschooling and just life. It occurs to me that 2018 is Year Ten of this blog (!!!!) and it's gone through a lot of changes. My life has gone through a lot of changes just in the past 10 months, including putting my kids into public school. So I have a lot more time at home to do things that are NOT fighting about doing math. (Don't worry - there's still plenty of fighting about math. And science. But it's in a much more condensed time of day.)

My overall sewing goal for this year is to sew at least 2 1/2 hours per week and make one article of clothing per month. With 5 girls and me, this should mean we each get two new handmade items this year! The main sewing focus is quilts.

SEWING
- clothing item ... Well, let's start with what I did NOT do this month ... I have fabric pulled and a tutorial up on my phone, but just didn't get to it.

- 5 more blocks on the Christmas log cabin for a total of 12. I was working on this at New Years, then thought - wait. I have my kids' quilts to finish. Why am I working on this now? So this has now been deliberately set aside (as opposed to ignoring it while other things are more interesting) until I finish Night Sky, Extreme Reader, and T's Town.

- 2 hours of stitching on my DC embroidered map. This is taking a LONG time, but I'm okay with that. I'm trying to get the entire bottom section done so I'm not shredding the pattern any further by leaning on it to work on higher sections.

- 2 zipper bags for a total of 9, at least 4 more to go. These are birthday presents for cousins. I'm out of interfacing so need to go to the store before I can finish this project.

- 5 blocks on SM's Night Sky quilt. Most of them were little 4-inchers, and one 10-inch. I almost think that the little ones shouldn't "count" for the block tally but really, they take as much or more time than the big ones! Large pieces of fabric are a lot easier to work with than tiny ones! I got the first section of five finished. February's target is to get section 2 done. Adam says I should take out the solar system colored section, but I was going to put little pieces of it in other sections too so it's not a one-off. Any feedback?

- 2 blocks for the Squared Away BOM (Block Of the Month). I saw this and thought it looked easy and kind of fun to make just a couple of blocks a month over the course of a year, and then get a quilt at the end! Mindy and I are going to make twin quilts - I made TWO of this block, and will give one of them to her and keep the other for myself. This particular BOM is intended to use up scraps, so they give a color every month - January was light blue, and this was the suggested block. I have another set of two with different light blue fabrics but they're not done yet. February is supposed to be purple, and the new block will be posted on Saturday.

Before it was sewn together and yes, I have two of them done. It's supposed to be 10 and a half inches square at the end, so there's a seam allowance around the outer edge. Mine was exactly 10 inches when I was finished, so somewhere in there, I'm doing my seams a shade more than a quarter-inch. I thought I was doing a correct quarter-inch seam, but apparently not if I'm losing a full half-inch. 

I decided my background will be white-on-white. I'm not sure where this fabric came from because I only had a little bit of it. Someone was cleaning out their fabric and giving me the little pieces. 

THE HOUSE
I also have a goal to do one project per month on the house. It could be sewing, but not necessarily - there's a lot of painting on the list. Adam did a lot of electrical work this month with fixing the 3-way wiring in a bunch of light switches. Whoever did them before we moved in had it all kinds of monkeyed up. That was his project. I suppose I could count it because it was a project done for the house. But no.

My project was cleaning cleaning cleaning the homeschool area of the playroom, and opening it up to be an art/activity area. The kids now do their homework in the kitchen or at the computer desk in the living room where I can keep an eye on them, so having a study area downstairs is no longer necessary. We have a couple of years worth of paper piled up, multiple boxes with random game and puzzle pieces in them, and a crazy number of books that aren't read anymore. It wasn't a decorating scheme or paint job, but it certainly needed to be done and ... I'm still working on it.

OTHER CRAFTINESS
At church, I do all the weeknight activities for the girls ages 8-11. (LDS: Activity Days) We had a meeting with all the families of kids turning 8 this year to introduce them to the programming and get them excited to come. This was a gift for the kids my friend Megan and I did - painted wood frames and blinged them up, with a little sign of the sections of the Faith in God award program. We even made two for the boys.