Been too long since I blogged!

Wow!  I can't believe it has been so long since I made an entry for my blog.  One problems is I am still trying to decide what camera to buy since I lost my old one and I still have an old phone that is not hooked to WiFi.  I know, I am a bit outdated but with the computer right on my dinning room table I just don't see the need for a new phone.   Anyway, I am still sewing up a storm and enjoying every minute of retirement.

Some of my time is spent visiting my daughter and son who both live in TN and this year I started my garden from seeds.  It was a learning process and I hope next year it will be even better since I had problems with getting the plants hardened off prior to planting.  The weather was not real cooperative added to the fact I should not have taken vacation in May right before time to plan.

I have been improving my knitting skills and and expanded my horizons to making doll sweaters, which are very tedious!  Not sure I will make any more of them, but the hats are quick and do turn out real cute.  I also have been knitting chemo caps with some ladies at our church so I am learning new stitches to use with the hats.

Pillowcase Dress

Here is another little dress made from a vintage pillowcase and some leftover fabric. The flower arrangement are yoyos and some vintage buttons. I love making these dresses they take very little fabric and the ideas are endless to decorate them.

Pillows

I've been doing some more creating the last couple days before I start another quilt. I have to let my mind rest and create something besides quilts from time to time so here is what I came up with.

I had a vintage dresser scarf that had holes and stains on one half of it so I cut it in half and made this pillow using two pieces of upholstery fabric. The back is a very pretty piece of upholstery fabric that matches the colors in the dresser scarf.

And of course I had to make another owl, these little fellows just call my name when I'm looking through my fabric stash.

I made my sister-in-law this cowboy jack-o-lantern pillow. The embroidery is called twilling which consists of connected knots. It is similar to the old style candle wicking, but much easier than doing all those individual french knots.

For Christmas I made her a western table runner. I love the pattern I used for this table runner, it can be increased or decreased for different lengths and it is a quilt as you go so when you have it sewn together the only thing left to do is the binding around the edge. Its so fast and easy!

I found some vintage embroidered pillow cases that were in good condition except for some fraying and holes at the very tops of them. I really wanted to use them since the embroidery was so pretty so I re-purposed them into cute little girls dresses.

I am way behind and have not spent much time blogging lately. But I have been busy creating so here are a few of the projects I have completed in the past few months.

 This is a Queen size blue jean quilt and when you get this folded up it is VERY heavy. It was a bit tricky to get this monster quilted using my regular sewing machine.  My client loved it and was very happy with it.

  My next project was a t-shirt quilt for a lady who runs marathons for breast cancer. I love the flannel she picked for the back and binding, I loved working with it.

My current project is another t-shirt quilt. This one is for a guy using his college football t-shirts and I've added a couple pictures to this one and a block with his number and name.  I am ready to do the quilting on this one now.

I decided to learn something new for 2013!  I am learning to knit by watching you-tube videos and from the book Knitting for Dummies.  So far I am feeling quite good about my progress.

These scarves are the reason I decided to learn, I wanted one in several colors and didn't want to pay the $25.00 for them so I bought the yarn for 4.00 each and made them.

This is my first knitted scarf!

Heritage Quilt

It's done!!!  A commissioned heritage quilt with the names of the original family members who immigrated to the United States. 

I've been working on this quilt for what seems like ages, I had to design the whole quilt first on graft paper for proper placing of the flags, pictures and lettering.  Then digitized my drawings of the countries, and set up the lettering in my embroidery software.  I learned a lot by doing this quilt, seems each quilt I do is a learning experience with several mistakes that I have to rip out and do over again.   I will be giving the quilt to her on Monday and asking to be able to show it in the upcoming quilt show in October.  

This was my first quilt to be basted and partially quilted on my friends long-arm quilting machine.  I learned how to roll the top, the batting and the back onto each of the separate rollers and get them all even which took a few tries since there is a seem down the middle of the backing fabric that needed to be right down the middle of the quilt back.  It was a bit intimidating at first to stand in front of the huge machine and guide it over the quilt!  Now I love it and can't wait to do the quilting on the next project!

Here are the yellow flying geese in the upper corner and I like how well they show up against the dark blue background. The borders of this quilt gave me a bit of a headache because the first time I sewed them on I only measured the top and the bottom of the quilt then cut them according to the average of the two.  Well, as I was basting the quilt and I got to the bottom there was a very ugly pleat appearing in the lower right corner!  Ouch, I could not have that on a quilt I was being paid for!!  So back home I went, and took out all the basting stitches and took both boarders off the quilt.  I remeasured the top, middle, and bottom averaging the three measurements, then re-cut and resewed the boarders back on.  Loaded the quilt back onto the quilt machine (I was actually getting better at it by this time!) basted it again AND YAHOO the boarders were a perfect fit with no ugly pleat!!    

Here is a closeup of the star quilting in the boarder which I did on my regular machine.  I don't have enough confidence to do anything this complicated on the big quilt machine yet. I took a stencil of different size stars and chalked the stars individually around the boarder and quilted each one individually, then I went back and made all the curlies between the stars.  A little tedious, but I love the way it turned out.