2013 Show and Tell

Happy New Year!  Another year finished, and it is time for the annual "what did you make this year?" show and tell.

This year, I didn't do a lot of quilting.  I was busy working on remodeling a "handyman special" property, which was quite a challenge since it required me to learn how to be a handyman.

I did manage to make a few small quilts though.

The snowbird quilt was the most recent finish.

The red and white one was made at the same time as the snowbird.

In September, I finished some simple curtains for my bedroom and the guest room.  The photo shows the guest room curtains.  I've read about the trick of having big curtains to make the windows look bigger, but my walls are really small, and big windows like that would dwarf the room and make it look smaller.   I got new curtain rods after this photo was taken.  The willow is a stencil on the walls that were made by the person who lived here before me.

Tulip Pillow made at Viking Sewing Event

I made this pillow cover at a class at Joann's in the summer.

I finished Blushing Bride in January. I am still debating whether to add some more embroidery to it.

There are a couple of quilts that I have been working on recently. The end of the year trunk show really serves as a motivator.  I didn't finish these in 2013, but they are well on the way.

This is another red and white quilt so I can have a collection. It doesn't have a name yet. When this is finished, I will have two red and white quilts!   It started out as a copy of a quilt I found on Pinterest, but I lost the pin amongst my millions I have on the board, and decided to wing it on my own. So many choices! Should I add sashing? Border? Red or white? They all changed the look of the quilt, and were all perfectly acceptable choices. In the end, I decided to not to add a sashing or a border and leave it as is.

I think that the main difference between my quilt and the one I found was that the original quilt is bigger, and my white triangles are proportionately bigger. They are small, and I was afraid they would all get lost in the seam allowance.  This makes it look completely different from the original, but it looks okay and I decided to keep going with it.  I could always make another one that looks closer to the original. I am going to add at least one more row of echo quilting before binding it.  I decided that I'd rather not skip the extra row of quilting just to have another finish in 2013.

This is the Daisy quilt I am making from a kit. It is all put together and sandwiched.  It needs quilting.  I was going to free motion quilt the red and white one so I could test out that feature on my new machine, but I wound up doing straight line quilting on it to keep it simple.

I hope you have enjoyed my 2013 Show and Tell.  I hope you have a wonderful New Year, full of happy memories, good health, peace and relaxation, a large circle of loved ones, lots of money and even more time to do the things you want to do!

Curtains!

Since coming back from my sewing lull, my brain has been brimming with new ideas and projects to start.  One of those ideas is to make curtains for several rooms, but specifically for my guest bedroom.  This room used to be an office, and had sheer curtains, but now that it will be used as a guest bedroom, it needs more privacy.  I bought some outdoor fabric that I think will work great as curtains.  It is the same thickness as my dining room curtains - it lets the light through, but you can't see through it.

I wanted something that would fun, interesting, and gender neutral.  I will have to keep the bedding calm and plain (maybe solid?) to avoid overwhelming the tiny room.

Blind Hem Stitch by Machine

When I had the demo for the new sewing machine, one of the things she showed me was the blind hem stitch.  I've actually had several demos for machines and they almost always showed off the blind hem stitch.  I remember thinking, "hey, why are you showing me this stitch - I have that on my old machine!"  They really didn't spend as much time showing off the fancy stitches.  But the interesting thing is, that even though my old machine had this stitch, I didn't really know how to use it. The fact that they use this stitch in every sewing demonstration shows that many people like this feature, even though they don't use it.

I realized as I was holding the curtain fabric on my lap, that these curtains would give me a great chance to try out the blind hem stitch.  I had to look up some youtube videos for blind hem stitch, so I would remember how to use it. Another video showed that you could fold the fabric down as usual and pin it, then stitch it down.  The trick is in knowing how to fold the fabric and this one shows the fold more clearly.



The curtains aren't finished - I got distracted by another idea, okay maybe more than one.  I will show the finished curtains to you when they are done.