We just finished up a week or so of bitterly cold weather. We don’t often drop into the teens here but yikes it was cold. No snow (which disappointed me). Lots of rain but then this is Washington, so it is to be expected.
With the super cold weather, our heater was just keeping the house warm. My sewing room has never gotten much heat and it was pretty chilly up there. But I braved the cold and sewed anyway. Nothing an extra sweatshirt couldn’t take care of!
I finished up the quilt top for the twin bed in the grand kid guest room. It is going to be so cute! Yesterday I pre-washed the backing fabric because it is a deep pink color and I was concerned it might bleed into the white background. Now I can sew one seam to make it large enough and do some spray basting. For quilting, I am thinking an edge to edge over the white background and some sort of meandering motif in the patchwork heart. I am excited for this one – it will look so cute in the girls’ room. (Hmmm, if I ever have more grand children, are the girls going to think it is unfair to have to share ‘their room’ with cousins???)
A few weeks ago Ray and I (mostly Ray and only a little me) painted the kid room. That pepto bismol pink was so awful. In the summertime when the sun came through that window, it cast a deep pink glow over the hallway. The room had so much pink and ugly dark gray curtains! I bought some off white paint and found these sweet polka dot curtains on Facebook Marketplace. What a difference this made. When the heart quilt is done, it will replace the patchwork that you see above. I love the twin bed frame. Ray made it for Julia when she was about four or five years old. It weighs 500 billion pounds and should we have an earthquake we will all run in there and hide out under the bed. We will be perfectly safe there.
Always thinking of my girls, I saw this (undressed) doll at a thrift shop for a dollar. I went to get my stack of doll clothes patterns to make something for her and remembered I donated all of them. Why did I do that??? Anyway, I had a pattern for pants and drew a little pattern for the shirt. It closes with velcro in the back and looks pretty cute (if I do say so myself). She needs a bit of hair styling but I am thinking H and A can take care of that when they come over.
Quite a while ago, I participated in the annual Rainbow Scrap Challenge project. These projects are hosted by Angela at So Scrappy. Below are some projects I made with RSC blocks. In case you are unfamiliar, and I cannot imagine anyone is, Angela picks a color each month. The quilter makes blocks with that color and at the end of the year assembles a rainbow themed, scrappy quilt.
This year my goal is to use up my bin of strips. It is stuffed to the brim. The only thing I won’t use are binding strip leftovers. These are rolled up and measured. Maybe I can use them as a scrappy binding at the end of the year? As for what blocks I plan to make with these, that remains to be determined. Right now, I am just joining strips and ‘making fabric’.
This week I joined all of the green strips. Most of these pieces of made fabric are seven inches tall. The length is determined by the size of the strips I used. Hard to tell from this picture but the bulk of this measures about 30″ wide and 21″ tall. So it is a good chunk. The green has been dealt with for now. If one of the monthly colors doesn’t exist in the strips bin, I will just skip it. I have a few books for inspiration when I think about how to use the strips. Sunday Morning Quilts, No Scrap Left Behind, and 15 Minutes of Play are my favorites for this sort of thing. I am sure I will find inspiration within one of these books and decide how to use the strips. Thank you to Sandra of MMMQuilts for this idea. I saw her working on something similar on Instagram and decided to follow suit.
That sums up my work in the sewing room this week. Good start to the year, for sure.
My son texted this picture to me last week. He was picking A up from preschool. She was covered in mud! She goes to a farm based preschool and they play outdoors no matter the weather (which makes sense around here or the kids would never be outside.) When the school year began, parents were warned not to send the kids to school wearing anything special. These kids play hard and are allowed to make mud, dig holes, whatever. There is a really cool area called The Mud Kitchen which has all sorts of utensils, bowls and pans to ‘cook’ with. She clearly had a great day. I love the expression on her face. “Mud? What mud?”
Linking up with Angela at So Scrappy.