Christmas, here and gone

This year my Christmas was a little bit different, I worked Dec. 23-25 so it was a bit quite quieter than usual.  Just wanted to share a couple little gift bags that I made before then, but didn't get to post.

The first bag is made from leftovers from my Starry Eyed Quilt.  It holds a DVD perfectly.

This little one is just the perfect size to hold a couple little nail polishes.  I made it for my sister.

I made both of these from Jeni's pattern for drawstring bags.  I had to buy it, because I just love making these.  Can't get enough!

I hope everyone had a wonderful, joyful Christmas full of love!

Quilterrific!

I have finished FMQ on my Starry Eyed quilt.  I'm so close to being done as I have sewn on the binding, but I decided that I wanted to hand stitch this one on that back and that takes me aaages.  So, hopefully I can finish it before the end of the year!

I'm saving a picture of the whole thing until I'm done with the binding.  I feel like this time around the stippling went far better than my last quilt.  And I don't think there is a single pucker--this is very exciting for me!!!  

Halfway point

I've quilted half so far, it's going quite well! Hopefully I can finish it tomorrow. And I think I'll keep it out past Christmas. It can be my winter quilt!
Hopefully everyone is having good luck finishing their Christmas sewing!

Fun Stuff

So I've been "slaving" away on my Starry Eyed quilt for long enough, I thought I'd do a few little fun projects.  There's something wonderful about starting and finishing something on the same day!!

First off, I did the top for a table topper destined to be a wedding gifts for friends of mine.  Although I'm sure it's not original, I did come up with the design myself.  I like it, so I'm hoping they intended couple will too!

I picked up these two fabrics at a quilt shop that is sort of close to where I live.  I love that green!!  It was hard to capture the true colour--I'd say it's a bit richer than it looks here.  Now I just need to find the appropriate backing and binding for it.

After this, I decided that I needed to hop on the bandwagon, so to speak, and make a drawstring bag from Jeni's tutorial over at In Color Order.  It was so easy, quick, and turned out lovely.  I believe that I now must buy her pattern for the many sized bags.  I'm thinking Christmas gift wrapping...

Since it was my first time making something like this, I steered clear of my oh-so-favourite fabrics in case things went wrong--which they almost did!  I actually sewed the bag shut.  Oh mylanta did I feel dumb.  But, that's what stitch rippers are for.  Other than my little mishap, it actually went really well.

I used the moda tie from my hometown FQ bundle and it worked smashingly.  In order to get more they'll either have to start selling it alone, or I'll have to start buying more FQ bundles. Hmmm.  Anyways, I hope everyone is having a wonderful time getting ready for Christmas!

I'm off to quilt the pants off of my Starry Eyed Sandwich!

Linked to Manic Monday at SewHappyGeek and Finish it up Friday with crazymomquilts:

Pay it Forward

I've finished hand quilting the stars!  Now, to FMQ the rest of this thing!

So, I've been lucky enough to be included in Vicki @ Hitch and Thread's Pay it Forward Handmade Movement.

It sounded like a fun thing to do, so I decided to participate. The concept is easy. If you find a Pay It Forward post AND you blog too AND you are one of the first three commenter's on the blog post that tells you about Pay It Forward, the blog owner will make something especially for you.


Here are the details:

1. Important! You have to have a blog.

2. I will make a little something for the first 3 blog owners who comment on this post. It will be a surprise and I will make it and send it to you some time during the next 365 days after you have commented.  (just don't expect it for Christmas!)

3. Make sure you let me know your email address, or that you arent a no-reply blogger so that I can get your contact details.

4. To get a handmade present from me, you have to play too! This means YOU pledge to send a little handmade something to 3 readers of your blog. It doesn't matter what you give, as long as it is handmade by you!

5. Once you comment here, you need to post about your Pay It Forward on your blog(within 48hrs) to keep the fun going! *you can just copy the rules from me and please include the Pay It Forward badge in your post. Also, feel free to join the Flickr group to see what else is being sent!

6. Follow my blog - I'd like that but you don't have to :)


To finish the post, my sewing buddies:

Sampler[ish]

Also, WIP Wednesday.  Although there's nowhere to link this month, I figured that I may as well do it since I did make progress.

A few days ago I made a disappearing 9-patch quilt top from a flannel layer cake I have from Connecting Threads.  They only send as many pieces as there are fabrics in the line, so I didn't have enough to make a good top.

So, I decided to just make it  a  baby quilt and sewed it in half with some batting and flipped it inside out and...ta-da!  Insta-quilt.  It will go to friends of mine who had a baby girl.

Front!

Back!

I did all of the large squares in the same pattern, with a walking foot.  So, because pictures are fun and words are not coming very well to me at the time, I will show close ups of my quilting.  Most are just ones I've seen here and there, but I did get H20 from the Free Motion Quilting Project.

This one is hard to see, but there are little figure 8s,
except where I screwed up!

I did hand quilt two more stars after finishing the quilt.  The two rows of rectangles have two flowers in each patch, each flower is different.  I thought that if I was to take pictures of them things would have gone far too far.

It was really good practice to try out different styles and just do some FMQ.  Fortunately it is acceptable enough to give away so I don't need to make a new quilt!

I'll be linking up to Sew & Tell with amylouwho and Finish it up Friday over at crazymomquilts.

Handy

Today I saw a marked increase in my ability as far as hand quilting. It only took me about 35 min a star instead of an hour. But now my poor finger hurts. I do wear a thimble, but if I put one on my index I lack the control I need. So I only did two. But I made spiced pecans :-).

Just a thought. I love reading blogs. I follow quite a few, but I read every single one. It takes me a long time some days (Wednesday!) but I enjoy it. So, to all you quilty bloggers, thanks!

Small Blog Meet

I missed last month, so I'm going to cheat a bit and do for October and November.  Starting shift work has  taken a lot of adjusting on my part.  And I'm still trying to get myself in order.  Anyways, I suppose I'll say something about myself.

I'm 23, I am a registered nurse, I have a boyfriend I love more than anything, two boxers that I love sometimes (other times I clean up garbage they tear apart and spread around), and a cat that lives in the heated barn because she supposed to grow up to kill mice and stresses out my dogs.  I live on a farm in rural Saskatchewan, and I love to quilt!

Despite the fact that I'm going to include two months, it's not like I have a million things done.  So here goes!

Click on it to see it in full sized glory.

I saw someone else do this, so I agree that a collage is a great way to go.  Don't let it fool you though, there is one pillow, two quilts, and an ironing board cover on there, not the nine finishes it would lead you to hope for.  The corresponding posts for all of these can be found under the heading finishes on the right hand bar of my blog.  I would link to them all but I think that the picture took all of my creative energy.

Thanks for stopping by, I hope you like what you see.  Be sure to check out the great stuff everyone else is making with the links at the top of the post!

One down...

It took me an hour. Which means the next nine stars should take about nine hours.
If I didn't like how it looked so much I'd call it quits and just FMQ the whole thing.

WIP Wednesday

This is more of a *YAY I got fabric in the mail* type post but there is something in progress.  I promise.  So, first off, the goods:

Hooray for Hometown!  Since I'm a real grown-up now and I have a job and everything, I bought the incredible FQ bundle.  I'm not sure what my plan is, but I did do a Cyber Monday purchase from Fat Quarter Shop (25% off everything until Thurs!) that included the Swoon quilt pattern.  It's a possibility.

Also arriving, Curio!  Ever since I saw this I knew I wanted some.  There's a few patterns on Moda Bake Shop that I'm wanting to try.  So, we'll see what happens.  It may not happen for a while!

As for actual WIP, Starry Eyed is getting there.  She's all sandwiched up, and I've done a bit of stitching with the walking foot to start before I get into hand quilting around the stars.  It will definitely be the biggest project I've tackled.

I almost ran out of safety pins by the time I got to the outer quilt blocks, so it's a tad thin for basting.  Hopefully this won't mess with things.

So this will probably be my WIP for a while as I'm slower than a cucumber doing calculus at hand quilting.  So, check out what everyone else is doing!!

WIP Wednesday

I had big plans for today.  But I suck at coming off night shifts and being productive.  So, here is the preceding week's productiveness.

This is an extra star block that I made.  My purpose was to do a practice round of my intended quilting to see how it turned out.  And I like it, so I'm sticking with it.  Every star in the quilt will have the same treatment in red, and then the rest I'll fill in by machine.  I thought about doing more by hand, but I really would like to finish this before christmas.

That practice round became this:

It's not amazing, but it was my first shot at making a pillow.  The cover is a smidgen on the small side, but I'm cool with that.

Then, I have finally assembled by Starry Eyed quilt top:

At the time, I didn't realize how blurry the picture was or else I'd have taken another.  I'm loving it, and the BF is pumped at how big it is.

So, for the present, it waits.  Maybe tomorrow I will sandwich the crap out of it.  But, I kid not, that will have to happen in another person's house.  I honestly don't have a patch of floor big enough without removing my whole dining room/piano.  So, to grandmother's house I go.  For real.

Anywho, check out the sweet other stuff other people wax eloquent about on Wednesdays:

Seeing Stars

Just a quick thanks to everyone who offered advice on my FMQ dilemma.  I went to the quilting shop and had someone show me.  And I think a few people mentioned what was wrong, I had the foot on wrong; the little random sticky outy thingy (which is apparently not random at all) was all bent and not lifting the foot up when I was sewing.  So, now I just need to find a good tension.  Anyhow, I've been working away:

This is the extra star that I made to test out my quilting.  I think it's a win.  So, even though it took me for.ever. I will be doing this to all of the stars in the quilt.  To make things a bit unique!  This particular one has been made into a pillow!

I wanted it to be snug so that the pillow would be full, but I think that I slightly overdid it.  Oh well, still looks fab in my mind.

FMQ

I've mentioned it a few times here and there, and maybe I'll say more about it some day, but I did recently get a new sewing machine.  It's a Janome Sewist 625E (order of those three may or may not be right).  Anyways, it has what I wanted and was something I could afford as a recent graduate (read had some money from my loan left to unwisely blow on something).  So anyhow, I have discovered its shortcoming.  It sucks for FMQ.  Even with the foot pressure set to 0, I literally have to use all of my strength to pull the quilt sandwich through.  Even just a little practice piece.

At first I thought it was going great, I did the teardrop pattern on the right.  Then, I happened to turn over the fabric to see how the bobbin thread was doing.

Yah, definitely not going to work.  So I put down the presser foot.  and this problem was fix, but I literally worked up a sweat trying to pull it through.  I tried pretty much every single variation of FMQ styles that I could think/google and nothing came without great effort.

It's hard to tell in that pic, but the stitches are teeny tiny because cannot pull the thing through fast enough.  The edges are the worst.  The best I could come up with was:

It took way too much effort to get it, and the edges were still very hard, and I couldn't imagine doing it for a whole quilt.

So, all of that whining to say, I am not going to retire my old machine.  It actually FMQs like a charm, just didn't really do anything else quite as well.  So, I will quilt everything with my old machine and piece everything with my new one.  Never thought I could swing a two machine deal, but I find myself without choice.  And now I don't feel like I'm abandoning my old girl.  I have to admit, ever since Toy Story, I still feel a little bad about giving up on still working "toys".  Not bad enough to keep them though ;-).

The bonus, I'm quilt a fan of that last design, it's based off of things I've seen.  I'm sure someone has done it before, but I sort of came up with it myself.

And since I missed WIP Wednesday, again, I will only say that I am fast approaching a Starry Eyed Quilt top!

WIP Wednesday

Well, it seems that whenever I work this will not be a terribly exciting post.  Oh well, maybe after a few years I'll get into the swing of things...

I finished the snapshots quilt:

The binding is a solid indigo/navy and the backing is something I picked up at Fabricland for cheap.  It's on the couch now, joining my Fandango quilt for time spent reading and cuddling!

I'm still working on finishing up the star blocks so I can join the whole kit and caboodle together.  All I need to do is add the borders to the blocks.  This is of my Starry Eyed Quilt:

I am actually planning a new start soon here.  Now that I have one out of the way! Rotary cutter here I come.

Head on over to Lee's page to see what other, wonderful WIPs everyone has got going!

Picturesque

I was going to title this 'picture perfect' to indicate that I'd finished my snapshots quilt, but the whole perfect thing would be a bit of a, well, lie.  Don't get me wrong, I'm very happy with how it turned out!  Just, I can look at the things I do realistically without feeling bad about them.

As evidenced here, I picked a solid indigo for the binding that came from Connecting Threads.

Here is the back, I like how the quilting turned out.  Makes me happy.  I just did it with a walking foot.

Aaand the front.

I did the binding by machine.  I love how quick it is!  I don't have any navy thread, so I figured the white would look sharp on the blue.  And it does!  But it also really shows any 'mishaps.'  Oh well!  I am really pleased with the whole thing.  It is a much smaller quilt than I thought.  And if I were to ever redo it (which I doubt I will--so many great patterns out there!), I would have put a border around the finished top.  Oh well!

Oops!

Well, I'm not sure if I have an excuse.  But I just got off of working nights, so I missed both the small blog meet and WIP Wednesday.  I think that I can still get in on the small blog meet, but I don't really have much to show.  Which is okay, I can't see myself being able to churn out many projects a month.  But I would like to!

Anyways, I'm getting closer to a finish:

I'm just getting quilting on my snapshots quilt, I'm going with a diagonal grid.  No sure if I'm going to do it small (every square corner to corner) or not.  I'll see how I like it when I get done less.  I've used a large scale white and tan plaid for the back...you can sort of kind of see it.

I finished making the stars for my Starry Eyed quilt.  Just need to put on the borders and then I'll be done all of the blocks for the quilt.

I think I may just finish this before Christmas!