I have had the wonderfully good fortune to stumble across a new fabric shop on Etsy. If you are an Etsy shopper, you probably know how the Etsy app will make suggestions of things you might like and shops that could be of interest to you. One day about three weeks ago, BrewStitched showed up in my feed of suggestions.
Opened in January, 2015, BrewStitched is a relatively new Etsy shop. I’ll tell you the first thing that caught my interest in this lovely shop. The owner, Sheryl, offers three themed, monthly fabric clubs. Customers can order the theme of the month in fat quarters, half yard cuts, or full yard cuts. I looked at these for a bit and, mainly because the pricing was really reasonable, decided to order the February FQ bundle.
The themes are posted for each month so that the buyer can order just those that look interesting or can subscribe for each month. February was themed as “solids”. I always need solids and figured there really wasn’t a color that I wouldn’t happily add to my stash. I am already looking forward to April for the Low Volume bundle. In addition to the five FQ’s, a small spool or coordinating Aurifil is included in the bundle. Icing on the cake! Take a look at this lovely bundle (which I must say, shipped incredibly fast).
These are Riley Blake cuts and the colors are luscious. The palette that Sheryl put together works beautifully.
I cut into the green and blue pieces in a hurry. They work well with some scraps I have and I spent an evening playing with the three pieces. I will post more about the project later but for now, take a peek.
I highly recommend you take a look at Sheryl’s shop. She has some lovely modern fabrics, including some Cotton and Steele, some Michael Miller and a selection of Art Gallery. I am all for supporting small businesses, especially those that are just starting out.
I finished the first of the two extra long twin bed quilts that I am making for Julia’s room in Downieville. It is simple and so cozy. Green (my favorite), purple and tan are the colors and most of the prints feature florals and hummingbirds, plus one abstract print of mountains. This is the perfect theme for a quilt that will live in a house along the river, in the mountains.
This quilt is a bit of a beast to photograph; with 10″ blocks, it finished at 70″ x 100″. You can see that I quilted straight lines along all seams, two inches in. I marked most of the lines with a chalk marker which made it very easy to quilt.
It is backed in a violet fabric with a scroll print. I bound it in the same fabric. It is a piece from Jo-Ann’s that Julia chose.
I have just enough of the backing left over to make a pillow case which will finish things off nicely. I am looking forward to taking the quilt up to Downieville. I will be up there this afternoon to work on the opportunity quilt for the guild. What is better than an afternoon of sewing? We have had spring-like weather here and my daffodils are all ready to bloom. It is a nice break but we need to get back to winter and a lot more rain. Hopefully soon!
What are you working on? Tell me in the comments!
Linking to Let’s Bee Social and Finish It Up Friday. Links to these sites, and more, are found at the top of the page under Link Ups.
In keeping with Valentine’s Day and all of the sweet projects that are posted this time of year, I want to share a gift I made for my parents’ 25th wedding anniversary. They celebrated 25 years back in 1980, several months before I turned 20. I haven’t done any embroidery for years and years. I remember making this piece and a few things for the boys’ room when they were babies but I don’t think I have done any since then.
This project was made from a kit that I purchased. After hanging on the wall for the past 35 years, it is a bit dusty. Last fall when Mom was recovering from her surgery, I looked at this which is still hanging in their bedroom. You know what? I am absolutely sure that I don’t remember how to do this!
I am sure I could still do a satin stitch, a running stitch and some french knots but the other stitches are no longer stored in my memory bank. Like the raised center of the upper flower – that looks pretty interesting but beats me how I did it. 😉
On the uppermost flower, toward the left, I rather like the petals with the vein running down the center. Again, no recollection of how that stitch works. And the center of that middle flower? Very pretty and again, no idea how to stitch that!
The stitching on the words is a bit herky-jerky when you see it up close. Overall though, this is a sweet tribute to my parent’s amazing marriage. They will celebrate their 61st anniversary this spring and I believe they are still each other’s very favorite Valentine.
Linking to A Quarter Inch From the Edge for Throwback Thursday for her February link up. There are others that will be posting about projects from the past so go ahead and check them out!
Last weekend we celebrated my mother-in-law’s birthday. Wanting to make her gift, I started browsing my pins on Pinterest. I have a board devoted to bags and totes and have long wanted a reason to play with those patterns. I thought it might be fun to make a tote for her and chose the Madras Plaid Summer Tote pattern from Noodlehead.
She and my father-in-law take lots of road trips throughout the year, sometimes camping and sometimes staying in hotels. When Julia and I were picking fabric and we saw this Route 66 novelty print and decided it was perfect! It screams, take me on a road trip, please?
The Noodlehead pattern is simple. While I didn’t time myself, I am quite certain it took less than an hour to put together. I like the exterior pocket for slipping smaller items into. As luck would have it, the fabric totally matched up when I placed the pocket. On her pattern, Anna uses bias tape to trim the upper edge of the pocket. When I saw the perfect (accidental) match, I left the trim off. If you haven’t made many bags, this tutorial is a great one to try. Check it out!
In keeping with our Road Trip theme for this birthday gift, I also chose a cookbook by America’s Test Kitchen titled, Cook’s Country Eats Local. My in-laws, my husband and I, are all huge fans of America’s Test Kitchen. This cookbook features recipes from the four regions of the US, Northeast, Midwest, South, and the West. The recipes look wonderful and I suspect my mother in law will enjoy trying these out. (Hopefully on occasions when we are over there for a meal!) I also selected the Cheryl Strayed book, Wild. An avid hiker, my MIL is sure to enjoy this.
If you give someone a book bag and books, one needs to include bookmarks, right? These were very fun to make with some scraps from her bag. The striped fabric was used to line the tote.
It was a fun celebration with family. Ray smoked a trip tip and roasted potatoes and I made peach pie for dessert. When our peach tree was going crazy last summer, I froze bags of sliced peaches. It was lovely to have fresh fruit for pie in January.
By the way, look at the selvage from this fabric. It is adorable. I know lots of you keep unique selvages. If any of you would like to add this one to your collection, let me know in the comments. I will happily mail it to you. There are two strips that show the little cars.
Linking to Freemotion by the River, Let’s Bee Social, and Finish it Up Friday. All links to these parties are listed at the top of the page, under Link Ups.
I am pretty crazy about listening to either music or podcasts. There are various times during each day that I turn on one or the other. Weather permitting, I try to walk most days and love to listen while I walk (honestly, it helps distract me so that I walk a bit longer!) When I am working on a project that doesn’t require a lot of focus or when I am cooking, I will turn on a podcast. These bits of my day add up to lots of opportunity to listen during the day. Fortunately for me, there are about a billion amazing podcasts available.
While there are many amazing podcasts that are related to crafting, sewing or quilting, these are (surprisingly) not ones that I listen to regularly. Most likely, this is due to the fact that I read blogs on those subjects rather obssessively. I love the blogs I read and think that the visual media normally included with a blog post is perfect for those topics. Instead, I subscribe to a variety of non-sewing related podcasts. I wanted to share a few of my favorites. Maybe you’ll try one and love it. Or, possibly you are already listening to some of these and can share your favorite episodes in the comments.
My all time favorite is This American Life. This well known podcast is hosted by Ira Glass and subscribed to by millions of listeners. For years, TAL has been recording essays on various topics that are part of life in America. Some of the episodes are politically based, some are hilarious bits of humor, many are just based on day to day life. They are creative and highly entertaining. Essays have been done on compulsive gambling, summer time, Santa, holiday traditions, the process involved in selling cars, the abuse of the disability insurance system, what is a sociopath, siblings, babysitting, inner city high schools in Chicago; the list is both endless and fascinating.
It has only been a couple of months since I began subscribing to 99% Invisible. This fantastic podcast is hosted by Roman Mars. The podcast explains the origins of things that you never really think about and are then surprised to hear how they came to be. Examples of recent podcasts are the origin of consumer credit and credit cards, the origin of the Monopoly game, how fortune cookies came to be (and why they are standard fare in American Chinese restaurants but you won’t find them in China), and what the ‘use by’ and ‘sell by’ dates really mean on our food. I love listening to Roman talk about such ordinary parts of life, explaining how they came to be. It is fascinating. Remember back in the 1980’s when pictures of kidnapped and missing children were printed on our milk cartons? There is an excellent podcast on how that bgane and whether or not it was effective. So very interesting.
OK – here is another one. I love listening to Note to Self, hosted by Manoush Zomorodi. Topics that Manoush covers are related in one way or another to technology. While I am not one to buy the latest and greatest gadgets and devices (case in point, my laptop weighs a ton. It is huge and several years old, but it basically works – so why replace it?) I do like knowing what is going on and how things work. Recent favorite episodes discussed how much is too much with regard to social media, whether multi tasking is actually helping us (it doesn’t help me – I tend to flit around and accomplish less if I don’t stay focused on a task), teens and sexting (that was a crazy good episode), video games and how they are developed and what the developers are trying to achieve (this one reminded me of the original behavioral psychology experiments with Pavlov’s dogs.) Another current episode talked to the people that coined the acronyms FOMO and JOMO. I had never heard of these and found it interesting to listen to them talking about the Fear of Missing Out (FOMO) vs the Joy of Missing Out (JOMO). I won’t go into detail here; it is better to listen to them. Are these acronyms that you have heard of? Am I totally off my game here? Anyway, all of the episodes are relatable, current, and important.
Just one more – I also like the podcast, Death Sex and Money. The title clearly describes the subject matter covered by Anna Sale on this podcast; important topics that aren’t always easy to discuss. I like this podcast and listen regularly though there have been a very few episodes that I skipped over. I am not into raunchy language and there are (just a few) episodes that were a little bit crass. Most of the topics are really interesting though. Some of my favorites include an episode about growing up and working as an undertaker in the family mortuary business, the story of a very young woman who adopted her sister’s six children, a heartwrenching interview with Jonathan Clark who lost his wife, Laurel, in the 2003 Columbia space shuttle explosion, and an interview with a ‘sex worker’ where they talk about why she does this sort of work, what it all means, and how it makes her feel.
There are many more podcasts out there but these are at the top of my list lately. They both enlighten and entertain me.It is the perfect way to balance my sewing time and listening time. Watching TV or movies while in the sewing room doesn’t really work for me; I find it too distracting. Listening to podcasts is perfect. There are lots of ways to access them and instructions are on each of the websites. I use a podcast app on my phone which makes it easy to access them when I want.
I would love suggestions for other podcasts. Be sure to let me know if you already listen to any of these and which episodes you’ve enjoyed!
Some months ago, I bought yardage to make two quilts for the twin beds up at the Downieville house. Currently those beds are just lovely, piled high with old blankets and sleeping bags. Ugh. I had been sketching and playing with different ideas for these quilts until I realized that I wanted the quilts to be finished. Done, not sketched. Usable, not being planned. Know what I mean?
I pulled the fabric and washed it all.
Then I added a few more scraps from my purples and greens.
Working swiftly, I cut piles of 10.5″ blocks. Here is where some planning would have come in handy! The fabrics are all 42″ wide so once I squared the fabric, I was able to cut three blocks and then ended up with a nine-inch piece. I should have made the blocks an inch smaller and I would have utilized the yardage far more efficiently. I now have a stack of 9″ scraps. My plan is to make the second quilt with smaller squares or to frame those 9″ blocks and bring them up to 10.5″. Not sure yet.
I laid them out on the spare bed and started sewing. I put very little thought into which square went where, obviously trying to not put any of the same side by side. It is seven blocks wide by 10 blocks high, so measures 70×100″. It is oversized because the beds are extra long twins and Julia said she wanted the quilts to be really big. (She must be pretty cold, sleeping downstairs!)
The colors look a bit washed out as the sun was so bright. I took this out at our gazebo on the pond. We have this pond on the edge of our property. The water level is steadily increasing with all of the welcome rain we have had. Winter is harsh and the berm along the edge is not very green at this time of year.
I have a simple purple print for the backing and binding. But first, I need to wash and prepare it. My plan is to get it sandwiched, quilted and bound in the next week. Then I will start the second one. At least one bed will look decent!
There is something to be said for a simple, get-it-done project.
Linking to Crazy Mom Quilts and Let’s Bee Social this week!
I just have to say that I am loving these monthly Pink Castle shipments of Art Gallery Fabrics! I recently received my second of a three month subscription that two of my boys gave me for my birthday. This collection is just as gorgeous as the first was.
This collection is called Millie Fleur and was designed by by Bari J. It is a very soft, feminine line with a gorgeous range of color.
My favorite of the whole line is this sweet print. I love the bees.
Second to the bees, I love these ripples. They remind me of the Lizzie House Pearl Bracelets line that is so popular.
At this point, I am going to have to finish a few projects before I even think about what I want to do with this bundle of lovely. While I absolutely love receiving these shipments, I still think that three months is plenty. I have numerous projects stacked up now. It wouldn’t make sense for me to receive these every month. I do still have one month to come and that is something to look forward to!
I am quiilting my row quilt this week. I started it over the weekend and had some issues with my top thread shredding. It made me so frustrated!! I set it aside and sent a frantic SOS to Janine at Quilts From the Little House. She sent me some tips and I will gently, cautiously approach my machine this afternoon. Please cross your fingers that my machine is much more cooperative.
I have just a small finish to share this morning. For RSC16, I am making two projects. The first is the pattern, Pretty Gemstones, created by Cynthia Brunz and recently published in the McCall’s Quilting magazine. The second project is still a bit undefined. However, I know that it will be based on “made fabric” as taught by Victoria Findlay Wolfe in her book, “Fifteen Minutes of Play”.
At this point, I am making four squares of each color for the Pretty Gemstones quilt. I completed the Icy Blue color for January.
On each corner you’ll notice a very pale green rectangle. That green is a Kaffe Fassett cotton, called Ecru. I totally don’t get the name because Ecru makes me think of an off white color. At any rate, it will be the background fabric. I bought the end of the bolt at my local LQS, which always gives me a sense of satisfaction. She gets rid of a small amount and I get 15% off. Win Win! I defintely have enough to complete the project throughout the year and not be in fear of being unable to match it. These blocks take no time at all to stitch up and the effect will be fun at the end of the year.
With the exception of the one darker blue block, I tried for pale blues with gray and light purple tones to them. I want this quilt to have a cool tone to it which means I may skip some of the colors during the year. Definitely orange and brown, as they are such a warm color. I will make four of each and then may have to go back and augment certain colors to complete the quilt.
The next project, using made fabric, needs a bit more definition. I have really enjoyed reading the Fifteen Minutes book. So much so that I have been through it twice already. I have done almost no improv work but she makes it so simple. I have been sewing scraps together like crazy.
The biggest hurdle for me is to make everything lay flat. She talks about this in the book and basically says to chop of the parts that ripple and reattach them elsewhere. I am getting better at it though.
I want this quilt to be really bold. I am thinking of creating fabric in the color of the month and then squaring it to about 13 or 14″. Maybe I will make HST’s with the improv pieces, using the same color for the other side of each one. I think using big, blocky HST’s might make a fun quilt, and there are endless ways to lay it out. I am still not quite sure though. So, I made two pieces of scrappy, icy blue fabric and will leave them be until I have a few more colors created.
In the next picture you can see a bit of rippling. I will slice it up a bit and reattach it so the piece calms down a bit.
Both of these RSC quilts are great fill in projects. I can pull out the bin and sew for a while without having to think too hard. Neither take lots of time and the results from both will be a lot of fun, with the added bonus of using up scrap.
One more thing – remember the baby bird quilt I made using orphan blocks that I had thrifted? I linked that post over to Muv’s Freemotion Mavericks linky party and this week she featured my project.I am flattered! Thanks Muv! I brought the quilt over to a local organization in our town, called Kare Crisis. Kare Crisis is a house that is open 24/7 and they will take care of any child ages 0-5 years if the parent is in need. They do not define the crises, rather it is up to the parent to decide. Sometimes it is just a matter of having a sick baby and the mom needs to go to work. Sometimes it is something far more serious. They also provide a safe place for supervised visitations. It is an awesome resource and the director, Lynne, was thrilled to have the quilt for babies to use.
Happy weekend everyone. It is raining hard this morning. After I run Julia over to school, I will spend some time in the sewing room. Hope you are doing the same, wherever you are. 🙂
I don’t have very many unfinished projects. Right now the count stands at four. There are two quilt tops that need basting, quilting and binding. Plus two WIP’s – my Tula Pink project using her 100 Modern Quilt Blocks book and a quilt that I am piecing with (mostly) American Jane fabrics. While this is quite reasonable compared to what I have read about quilters with lots of quilty UFO’s, I want to work toward finishing them all up. There are always projects swirling around in my head but I don’t want to start too many at once.
This week was derailed with a series of migraines but I was able to spend a little time sewing and I got several blocks done for the Tula Pink City Sampler quilt. I am using Floriography fabric for this project. Last year I won a gift certificate to Doe Street Fabrics and spent it on some 1/2 yard cuts of Floriography. I started to cut it up for the City Sampler project. The blocks finish out at 6″ so you can imagine that many of the pieces are small (1″ to 6″). Because each block is different from the next, it isn’t a project where I can cut a stack of anything ahead of time. I am cutting each block independent of the next. I soon found that I didn’t have enough variety in the 1/2 yard cuts that I bought.
As luck would have it, last November I found a jelly roll and charm pack of Floriography on sale at The Clever Quilt Shoppe. I bought them right away as it would give me small pieces of the full line and would be so much easier to cut from.
While spending last weekend up in Downieville, I was able to cut the pieces for eleven blocks. I’m not sure it even matters but I have been doing blocks from each section in no particular order. The book is organized with the blocks divided into sections such as triangles, squares, rectangles, etc.
I have stitched ten of the eleven prepared blocks so far. I love having a stack of blocks cut and ready to piece. Each block is actually quite simple to piece. More time is spent on planning which colors to use in the block and cutting the pieces. I made several errors with fabric choice when cutting the blocks and it wasn’t until they were up on the design wall that I could really see it. Not enough difference in value which causes the design to be lost. This fabric is busy and many of the prints are the same value. Even though I plan to sash the blocks when I make the quilt top, I need to start adding in a couple of solid fabrics to tone things down a bit and increase the change in value. After I take Julia to school today, I will make a quick stop at the store for some solids. When I cut the next set of blocks, I will incorporate the new fabrics in the mix. There are a few blocks that I will take apart and replace pieces with solids.
Overall, I am very happy with the blocks this far into the project. I am not sure I will do the full 100 blocks. I need to decide how big this quilt will be and how I plan to sash it. The blocks will be arranged in color groupings or it won’t “make sense” to me. The colors are what will define the layout. Look at the difference.
And with sashing and organization by color:
For an example of a horrible fabric choice with values in the same range, look at the green block, middle line on the far right. The flying geese are lost in a fog on that block. For that one, I probably won’t rip it apart – it will be quicker to just make a second one and ditch the first. Quilting is always a learning experience, and this quilt is all about color.
The weekend promises to be a fun one. My sister and her two girls are coming along with their husbands and boyfriends. We are going to dinner at a fundraiser for my parents’ church. Yay for family time. 🙂 I hope all of you have a nice weekend with family or friends and at least a little time to sew.
Linking to Sarah at Confessions of a Fabric Addict.
A few weeks before Christmas I wrote a post about this baby quilt top that I made using orphan blocks purchased at a little shop in town. I added some solid blocks and borders and created it in a matter of a couple of hours. This week it is a finish; a satisfying, bright, cheerful finish! It was a joy to put someone’s blocks to good use.
I spent quite a bit of time deciding how I wanted to quilt this. It was a perfect slate for practicing but I wanted to stay with a theme that a child would enjoy. As I tend to do, I turned to Lori Kennedy’s site, The Inbox Jaunt, for inspiration. Her site overflows with inspiration and tutorials for all sorts of motifs. Please take a look if you haven’t yet seen her site. You will surely find something that motivates you to play with some FMQ. At first I stitched turtles. Lots of turtles. They were cute but mine didn’t have enough personality. I tried kitties. Same thing. I liked them but I didn’t love them. A little more time spent found me stitching dragonflies and bumblebees, again, very cute but not what I wanted. Then I found her birds. I combined two tutorials. This one called Baby Birds and this one called Spring is in the Air. These were so much fun to stitch. Lori’s quilting is near perfection and as such, very precise. Mine… not so much. I like to sketch the design and go back and forth, filling in as I like.
I love them. I drew a wavy line for the branch and from there I just stitched. I think they are sweet simplicity.
This quilt is a busy one. There is a lot of color and movement with the layout of the HST blocks. Because I just had this incomplete set of blocks, it was difficult to piece it in a fashion that made sense. In an effort to keep it relatively calm and avoid having any child that plays with this quilt being overcome with dizziness, I kept the quilting simple on the main body of the quilt. I think this allows the baby birds to be a calming point of focus and the multicolored part of the quilt is less overwhelming. Before I started to quilt it I stitched in the ditch along the length and width of the rows of blocks. I wanted to be sure that the quilt was solid before I worked on the birds, especially since they are front and center on the quilt. After thread sketching the two birds and the branches, I worked on the plain blue squares. At first I was going to do simpler birds but it seemed like too much. Instead, a simple cross hatch worked out wonderfully.
I quilted the HST blocks along the seam lines. The purple border was fun. I played with Lori’s tutorial, Do the Twist and came up with this. My twist is elongated and filled the border quickly.
The green border was quilted with simple straight lines that I allowed to cross in each corner. No marking needed – nice and simple.
The backing and binding were from a piece of yardage I have had in my stash for over twenty years! I remember buying it at a WalMart when we lived in Pennsylvania so that dates it to anywhere between 1992-1994. It was in a clearance bin and I probably paid a few bucks for several yards. I love that I finally found a use for it and it looks perfect with this quilt. The quilting doesn’t really show on the busy print but the colors (particularly the shade of green) couldn’t be better.
The binding is machine stitched on both front and back so it should hold up for lots of laundering. I have not yet washed it and with the bright batiks used for the HST’s, I will put a lot of Color Catchers in with the wash. Crossing my fingers that nothing bleeds.
I am actually a bit sad to give this one away because of the birds but really, it will be better to have it loved by a child than sitting in my sewing room.
Linking to Freemotion by the River, Let’s Bee Social, Freemotion Mavericks, Confessions of a Fabric Addict and Finish it up Friday. All links can be found at the top of the page, under Link Ups.
