{Post 1,710} This Week’s Happenings

The way I keep track of what’s happening in my life is through my pictures. That seems odd, but when I start to write a blog post, I look at the last pictures I posted, then start from there.

It has been odd to be staying at home so much, but I love it (I do not love the reason, but there you go).

I went to my booth Tuesday to spruce up and put up a couple new small quilts. I added a goldfish print bag holder, some bowl cozies, and three mini quilts (which can be seen on my chicken wire screens).

I also took some pouches made with cork on the lower half. There are a few other pouches as well. I am surprised the antique mall is still open. It is certainly not essential. I made the trip over after calling the owner. She said no one had been in all day, but she was there doing paperwork. I wanted to have my new items there so that if customers came in, they would be available.

I continue to work on things at home. I only make things I would be happy to gift so that I am not overrun with items if/when I close my booth. There are 3 customer tops here as well as several (ok—maybe 8) of my own to machine quilt. Tomorrow I’ll work on straightening up my sewing room some more, then quilt at least one of the customer quilts. 

Yesterday was a day off from sewing for me. I decided to be a blessing and visit 7 church families in my area. Well, not really visit visit. I made two batches of cinnamon rolls and met people in their driveways after setting the cinnamon rolls on their porch or somewhere else so we could visit without contact and at least six feet apart. They all were healthy (as far as they know). While I love alone time, I did miss the contact. I can’t spread happiness, but I can pass out homemade cinnamon rolls. I wanted to check in with them in person to see if there were needs I could meet. 

I hope you are all well. Send me a message!

{Post 1,709} Potholder Pandemonium

From what I read and hear, crafters have the same blender mindset. What I mean is that every idea we come across just goes in the blender. It keeps circling back through my thoughts from time to time.

For example, I was squaring up a twin bed’s worth of quilt blocks lately. I had this mess. Instead of throwing it away (it was, after all, super thin slivers of scraps and muslin), I pushed it into a quart Mason jar on my cutting table.

The next day I recalled a Pinterest post about making trivets and pot holders from tiny shavings. So I started to make one. I had a customer picking up as well as dropping off quilts. She had been out of town for a couple months. I asked her if she was stopping at Hobby Lobby on her way to my house. A girl has to restock after being out of town! She was, and I asked her to get me this.

That led to the following pictures which are self explanatory. The quilting is less than an inch apart in all directions, horizontal, vertical, and on the diagonal both directions. The trivet/pot holder finishes at 6-1/2” square. I bound it just like I would a quilt.

Are you like me? Does a new, successful project just make you soooooo happy? This is a little library of all the fabrics in this new quilt. I love it. The soluble fabric rinses off after the quilting. It is magic, I tell you!

Stay well. It is so important to eat well (no junk), exercise, get enough rest, etc. Leave me a message

{Post 1,708} Quilts, Grandchildren, and More Quilts

I think I could sew 24/7 and never catch up with my wish list of personal quilts for my home and for gifts, let alone for my booth! With the stay-at-homing going on, I’ve sewn a lot recently. I will just put these out there with sizes.

There are two queen-sized customer quilts I cannot transfer from my phone to my iPad. My phone must be pouting.

This is the back of a baby quilt I machine quilted for a customer:

This is a 27” square patriotic paper-pieced quilt I am making for my booth. I want to make at least one more to keep.

This is a baby quilt I made for a friend in my church who had her precious little nipper this past Saturday.

I had 50 of these disappearing 4-patch blocks pieced when a friend from childhood asked me to make her a quilt. She loves the 1930 reproduction prints, so I made more blocks (over 50 more) and just finished piecing the top this AM. On to the pressing, quilting, labeling, and binding!!

This is another patriotic quilt I am making for my booth. It is all Thimbleberries prints. It still needs an inner and outer border and quilting. With the corona virus thing going on, I doubt my booth will even be open much longer, let along in time for 4th of July. I thought I was getting ahead by making these so early, but it might be for naught. Oh, well.

Now let’s have a look at some grand babies. Pictures only here.

I ordered a large 3-ring binder (with 4” tall ring holders) to make a “catalog” of my quilt pattern selections. I guess with so many things shut down now, it would be a good time to quilt up some samples. That would make it easier for my customers to select a pattern. Sounds good, but where is my motivation?

{Post 1,707} More Booth Work

I had a few more ideas for my booth. I get great satisfaction from making things myself. A few days ago I was at my favorite thrift store and saw a big piece of finished wood in the “$1 frame” box. It was not a frame, just a large piece of shaped and stained wood with some kind of acrylic finish on it. I went back yesterday to see if it was still there and made this sign for my booth last night...

I was looking at my most recent booth pictures, and I have some ideas for how to use it in my hutch. I hope it works.

There is also a need for more space for hand-painted signs that I have made. I am going to group most of the kitchen items on the hutch and move most of the signs to my shuttered door. I saw some pictures on Pinterest of people who hung framed pictures on shutters. I could not figure out how it was done, so I contacted someone who had them on her blog. She got back to me (after a couple weeks). It seems easy, but time will tell. Stay tuned.

I scrounged around in our garage and came up with enough wood to make three miniature pictures ledges to attach to the flat part of my shutter door (I think it was a closet door in a former life). When I bought it, someone had placed 5 screws in it haphazardly and at different angles. I am OCD. For real. I removed the screws, patched the holes, and painted the whole door last night. I am about to attach my picture ledges to the flat part. I’ll post later about how it goes. I’m a little nervous about drilling through the back and hitting just the part of the wood that I want. Here is the door freshly painted and one picture ledge before IT was painted. 

Just to get you salivating, I am sharing a picture of my favorite food on earth...homemade cinnamon rolls. I bakes 4 dozen for a fund-raiser last night. I kept six of them at home to share with my son and one of his friends.

Update: I attached my picture ledges by going through the front of the shelf. The screws were countersunk and painted over. There will be a picture in front of them anyway. Here is it, not quite dry, but assembled at the very least!

{Post 1,706} Ohio & Pennsylvania

I left my house Wednesday AM (Feb 5th) to head for my parents in OH. I was about 4 hours away when my Dad called and told me not to come, so I headed over to my sister’s. I spent parts of 3 days and 2 nights with them. Then I drove over to my daughter’s in PA. Well, I tried. I got stuck in this.

I got to within a couple miles of their house before I was just spinning in place on a hill. My son-in-law came and rescued me. I was right past a volunteer fire department parking lot, so I backed down the slight grade and turned in there. We got my car a couple days later. It was treacherous.

We’ve had a great visit. I have not taken many pictures. I’ve done lots of painting, cuddling, cooking, cleaning, dishwashing, and the usual shopping, errands, etc. 

I picked up a few good pieces at the Goodwill here to make over for my booth. I am eager to work on them.

While I have been here (on one day actually), I had 3 former customers ask me about quilting something for them as soon as I got home. Then I also had someone ask me to make them a twin quilt from soup to nuts. She is a woman who was my next-door neighbor growing up, and we were best friends for years. 

Here are a few pictures from my visit. The flower picture is the before of the walls in the first picture. It is a mobile home that we painted the bedroom of. We are going home Tuesday AM. Practically every minute has been planned out between now and then. We are singing a quartet (my husband, who arrived yesterday, my daughter, my SIL, and I) in the morning service tomorrow. That is fun and exciting. I love every single thing about the song we are singing.

{Post 1,705} What I’m Loving Now

As many of you know, I have recently started renting a booth at an antique mall. One of my friends gave me a quilt that was given to her husband years ago. She thought I might want to repair, revive, and sell it. She hated it. It was falling apart. It was incredibly heavy. So she gave it to me and told me that if I didn’t want to repair it to throw it away. Are you picking up on the fact that she wasn’t attached to it? At first, I wasn’t either. But I’ve been spending some time with it. There are many characteristics of old quilts that I love. I love the way the fabric “acts”. I unstitched the crazy 1960/1970’s sheet that was used for backing and wrapped haphazardly around to the front for a binding of sorts. One can see how much the border fabric still showing has faded with age. Here is a picture with a line showing the part that was under the “binding” that is brighter than the rest. The heart is showing the holes where the yarn was removed.

There was a super thick and compressed batting as well as a cotton blanket tied between this lovely quilt top and the hideous backing (sheet). Once I removed the ties, the top started to fall apart. I think the ties were holding some of the seams together.

Above is the only picture I have of it before I started working on it. It was tied with “safety orange” and white yarn. When I cut off all the ties, little holes remained in the fabric. I am hoping that most of them just go away when it is washed after I quilt it. I am pretty sure I am going to keep this. It will remind me of my dear friend who donated it, and I’m frankly becoming attached.  I have repaired all the seams that just came unsewn. Now I am replacing fan blades that are shredded.

So many questions go through my mind when I am repairing an old quilt like this. How can one fan blade be completely shredded when the ones on both sides of it are like new? 

Here are some blades I replaced with 1930’s reproduction fabric which I had purchased for making a new quilt. This first one was near the top border and was an odd shape. You can see in the second picture that I removed the tattered one to use for a pattern. Although most of the blade was gone, it fit perfectly.

Two were replaced next to each other here. The left one was shredded nearly down the center of the piece. I used the blue one on the right for my pattern for cutting all the new blades. Fabric tends to stick to fabric, so I just lay it on my new piece and trim around it.

The heart shape is around where I inserted the two new pieces. They match the other fabrics well, huh? I think so.

I love piddling around and doing this meticulous work. For some reason, it never seems like a chore. It is like restoring an old friend.

In this next picture, I am showing how I closely pin the seams that just had a break in the hand stitching and came apart. One of the other things that fascinate me about this fabric is how it can be so strong and yet be so soft. It barely ravels at all, even when these seams have been broken for quite a while.

Now that all the straight seams and curved seams have been repaired, I am going block by block to see if each fan blade is maintaining its integrity. If one looks weak or has a hole, I am replacing it. 

I won’t be sewing much for the next few days at home. I am leaving Wednesday AM to head to Ohio then Pennsylvania. I will visit my parents and sister in Ohio for a couple days, then spend a couple weeks with my daughter and her family in PA. I need to prepare projects for the time I’m there. 

I am taking my Featherweight to sew some new things for my booth. I want to make bag holders for grocery bag storage (I don’t know how people live without one or more of these), bowl cozies (my main item for now), and a baby quilt I will need for a baby shower on March 1. I have the backing fabric for the baby quilt, so I need to pull colors from that for the front. I will likely piece that first, then work on the other items as I have time. My girl wants me to help her paint their huge bedroom, bathroom, and closet while I’m there. I usually go to bed way after and get up way before them, so I plan to take things to keep my little fingers busy.

{Post 1,704} Color Red Runs

I have bought a number of quilt tops to quilt, bind, and sell. There was a heart top that I thought would be perfect in my booth for Valentine’s Day. Someone saw it (unquilted) at my house, and she offered to buy it once I had it quilted and bound. Well, I decided to wash it for her as well. Better me than her. The reds ran. Here are the color catcher sheets after the first and second loads. When I saw them red as crimson after the first wash, I immediately threw in two more sheets, removed the first ones, and washed it again. It was STILL pink when I pulled it out the second time.

I could not figure out why the dye had run with a 1/4” frame around the heart. I looked up (on Pinterest, of course) how to get the dye out. I filled our bathtub with hot water, boiled some pots of water, and added Dawn dish detergent and donned thick rubber gloves. I swished my quilt through it, and a lot more dye came out, making the water pink. 

It was rare, but it had snowed here unexpectedly this AM. At the time of the quilt anxiety, it was far from AM. Plus, we were having guests for supper, and I had to make dessert and supper yet. But my quilt needed me. My husband was reluctant to have me go out because it appeared that the roads were bad.

I called a local store to see if they carried a product called Carbona Color Run Remover. They did. I bought two boxes and went directly to the laundromat with my still-wet quilt. I ran it through their washer (which is much more aggressive then mine and uses quite a bit more water). When it came out, still wet, I noticed that the “bleed” pattern matched the fabric of the heart pattern right above it. Then it dawned on me...the person who pieced it did not cut off the extra red when she did the flipped-corner technique. Because it was wet, the red showed through the thinner white fabric used as a background. Oh, me! I was so upset previously. So I threw caution to the wind and just dried it in our dryer at home.

Here are some pictures of before and after. I think I still see some pink, but hopefully it is just in my memory.

What do you think? Do you see pink in the bottom picture, where the quilt is completely dry?