Weekend Stitching

Decided to try and blog more and in order for me to do that, I need to be able to post off-the-cuff instead of feeling like I need to have something worthy to say which never happens.  Lol

On Friday, I finished all my outdoor yard work. Yay!

Then Saturday morning we woke up to cool breezes. Relief!  Then it started raining! Yay! That meant no outdoor watering and it became the perfect weekend for no-guilt stitching and eating chili.

I love Sue Spargo's projects and recently watched a lady stitching herself this needle roll. Oh no! The itch just wouldn't go away. Those cute little labels, the little wool circles, and those stitches...those awesome, jewel-like stitches. That's was it. I just had to make one for myself too! I'd thank her here but I don't know her name.

They look so pretty and remind me of little pieces of candy but much more healthy. And the needle roll is going to be oh so wonderful because now I can have a home for one of each type of needle right in its place while the 'overstock ones' can be safely tucked away in their appropriate tubes.

Sharing your quilts -- do you? And why you should!

Today, tomorrow, and Saturday is my local guild's quilt show -- Clark County Quilters. I have been a member for a number of years, and I must admit that it has been a wonderful experience. Although I would have never gone and ultimately joined if not for my friend, Terry Knott. She encouraged, persuaded, and helped me step into an unknown and mostly uncomfortable zone. I tend to be on the shy side unless I know someone and then you can't shut me up even if you want to!  LOL Anyway being thrust into a big guild like CCQ can be intimidating unless you have a person in your life like I do named Terry. She walked me around and showed me the ropes...sometimes showing me the ropes multiple times before I remembered everything.

Guilds are wonderful resources, and I highly encourage you to look for your local guild. Not only can you meet wonderful men and women that share the love of quilting and art as much as you, but you will be inspired and encouraged and wowed by all of the wonderful things that members are doing and making.

Running a guild is a tremendous job and I have watched first-hand how much hard work current and past presidents put in to making a guild a success. It really does take an army of volunteers to make a guild successful, and we just happen to have pretty awesome members that volunteer umpteen hours of their time to run it. Each year the guild goes to an incredible amount of work to put on a show that really rivals some of the big shows. Again, all this work is done by volunteers.

I am so proud to see the number of quilts displayed at our show. We really have quite a selection from the youth section, to first time entries, vintage quilts, all the way through exquisite applique, pieced, art and modern. I know of no where else where you can get exposed to so many variations of quiltmaking than at a show, which brings me to the title of this post....sharing your quilts.

If you make quilts, please share them. I am my own biggest critic and can point out every area in every one of my quilts that are less than perfect. All of these things in my mind make my quilts non-show worthy. However, if none of us ever allows our quilts to be seen and viewed, shows will cease to exist and that would be a terrible thing. I view quilts as art and love that each and every one is made by human hands.

I took lots of pictures but don't want to post them until after the show so that I don't spoil someone from seeing a ribbon on their quilt.

The quilt above is my quilt I entered. I was tickled that my Piecing through the Decades received a Best Hand Quilting ribbon and an Honorable Mention ribbon. This quilt is what I call my life quilt. I started it back when templates were made with cardboard and drawn onto the fabric, cut with scissors, and hand pieced. I entered a class but was only able to take three classes before we moved out of state. I have no idea of who the pattern designer was for the blocks because we made our templates during the first class and cut up the paper to glue it onto the cardboard. The next 25 years was spent finishing the center blocks and growing and learning what to do with them. It shows exactly where I was in my growth and as I learned new skills, this quilt grew. I learned to be free and do borders so I designed the borders. I learned precision paper piecing and made the stars, I watched and learned techniques from teachers at The Quilt Show, and the quilt top was finished.

Next I pondered. Do I machine quilt or hand quilt. Because all of the center blocks were done by hand and I love the look of hand quilting, I decided to start a new journey and started hand quilting. I learned that I was not able to hand quilt in a hoop. I located a frame and started again. I learned you cannot move a quilt frame around like a hoop, so I learned to quilt with my thumb and finger so I could quilt in any direction. I found hand quilting therapeutic and relaxing. I finished the quilting and bound the quilt. I love it and see myself in many different ages through it. The quilt belongs to my husband who has given me the most fulfilling life I could have ever imagined.

Entering a quilt into a show takes courage. Courage to allow others to see it, judge it, feel the emotion  you've put into it, and gives you a great push to start the journey again.

Showing your quilts is giving back to all of the quilters who came before us and helping grow the next generation of quilters.

Friday Finishes

My quilted tablecloth is finished, and it is my first 2015 finish. I'm so pleased with how it turned out. I must admit to be wonderfully surprised and thrilled at how soft became after washing. It was pretty stiff feeling before but the bamboo batting really softened after the soak to remove my markings and a run through the washer.

Vintage linen collectors or hand-quilting purists may not be pleased with my finished project and that's okay. We all must do what brings us the most joy. I hand quilted using the big stitch method with Aurifil 12 weight thread in areas that were visible. The thicker thread really stands out perfectly, which is what I was going after. I also practiced my free motion stitching and machine stitched in areas that are not visible from the front but needed more quilting to hold the quilt together and keep the batting from shifting/separating from repeated use. I'm planning on loving/using this tablecloth for many, many years. It will become a December tradition to pull it out and grace the table with it. I may just have to extend that length of use through out January because it looks so pretty on the table.

I hope that seeing this project from the beginning to the end has encouraged you to breathe new life into one of your own favorite linens or rescue one from a antique shop. They are not difficult to find.

Additional photos are included below. Click on the photo to see a larger version.

In this first photo, you can see the border area I mentioned when I first started (bottom left corner). The manufacturer stamped the cloth just a bit off which made the cream border not as wide on that one end. To fix this, I would have had to cut down the border all the way around. I decided against doing that because I wanted to keep as much of the cream border as possible. I'm so glad I did because I stitched funky trees in it, and I just love how it looks.

Lap Quilting & Manic Monday

If days of the week had energy levels, I think Mondays would win hands down. Mondays always seem to bring out the most busy, hectic, frenziness of me and my customers. Everything is always a rush on Mondays!

I made very good progress on the outer most center section this weekend. Here's a view from my lap of how it's coming along. The diagonal quilting stitches looked really nice but adding the other diagonal side takes it from nice to perfect.

On Saturday, I spent the day at Pioneer Quilts where it was Meet the Teachers' Day. They moved into a historic house called the Broetje House in Milwaukie, Oregon, a few months back and are in the process of a lengthy renovation to bring the electricity up to code so that classes can be taught. The house was built by John F. and John H Broetje in 1890, and it really is a special place. I can't wait until summer so that I can tour the gardens, which is complete with a water tower, two garden gazebos and 100 year old Sequoia Redwoods. Linda has already done an amazing job in a short time.

I brought all of my hexagon projects so that prospective students could see and touch the items that I will be teaching at the shop. I positioned myself in the breezeway so I was able to greet each guest as they arrived. The lighting was perfect and allowed for me to quilt the tablecloth while people were coming and going. Little did I know how much interest I would generate by working on the tablecloth. I am pretty sure I made a few linen converts and more than a couple vintage tablecloths will be put back into use soon. For those who think handwork is not their cup of tea, I recommend starting with something small and playing around with big stitches.  You may just surprise yourself with how much you enjoy the process!

My purchase of the day was Sue Spargo's book Creative Stitching.



I've been eyeing this book ever since Sue finished it. I decided a while back though that I would not buy a book that I could not review prior to the purchase. I've never found it locally to look at until this weekend. It is a great size at 7-1/2 inches tall by 6 inches wide and is spiral bound which I really appreciate. The entire book represents 50 of Sue's favorite hand stitches that can easily transform a pretty top into a exquisite top. It includes great pictures and step by step instructions. It will be a book that will get used and loved for years.

How is your Manic Monday coming along? I'd better get back to the two new customer logos that need out the door!

Slow stitching and the mystery of the disappearing needle

I finished big stitching the center of the tablecloth last night, and I must admit to being really pleased with the look and feel of it. The big stitches in red thread have such a nice look to it. The center area is a snowflake which was stitched first and then followed up with the grid stitching. I did have to pick out a few stitched lines of the grid and redo them to ease in a bit of excess fabric but it was worth the extra effort. It lays nice and flat and really calls out to be touched.

To aid my marking, I tried a new-to-me stencil from a company called fulllinestencil and I must admit to being quite stricken in a good way to it. It's similar to screen print where what you want to be inked is open and the rest of it is blacked out. You use a chalk called Quilt Pounce to slide across the stencil to mark your stencil. Don't do an up and down pouncing movement or you will end up with a face full of chalk dust and no nice line on your cloth. Just rub smoothly across the stencil and it works perfectly.

Unfortunately, my tablecloth material did not like holding on to the chalk so any touching of the fabric rubbed the chalk right off and left me with nothing to follow. Disappointed but not daunted, I pulled out my go-to marking product -- Crayola Fine Line Ultra-Clean Washable Markers. I used the orange marker and marked right on top of the chalk line. It didn't take too long and the nice thing is that I was able to mark a very fine line on top of the chalk...finer than I would have marked had I just started off with the marker from the beginning. I'll report on the stencils again once I have more experience using them on 100 percent cotton fabric.

Slow stitching is so therapeutic. I'm pretty sure my heart rate goes down and my breathing slows as I take each stitch into the cloth. My goal was to finish the center so I could share my progress with you, but I did take a wrong turn that stopped everything for about an hour. 

I'll paint a picture of what happened. Here I am happily stitching away in my Lazy Boy chair. Dillan, my baby dog, is situated in between my legs and underneath the tablecloth (it's terrible keeping him off of anything that resembles a quilt because obviously everyone knows that ALL quilts belong to HIM). I had just run out of thread and threaded my needle, which by the way is not a small needle (#20 Tulip Chenille needle). My knot was popped inside of the batting when I did something I should not have and reached for an object. At exactly that same moment my needle magically disappeared into thin air. Now I know what you must be thinking because I have already thought it. The needle must have slipped off and fallen on your lap, chair, tablecloth, floor...yada, yada, yada. 

When a needle is dropped, everything stops until said needle is found and safely back where it needs to be. Dillan was grudgingly and under very loud protest put into his crate. All lights were turned on and with flashlight in hand, I searched and searched and searched for the missing needle. For the first time ever I could not find the needle. I am thinking to myself -- how could such a big needle hide from me. I ran my hand down each side of the chair hoping to actually poke myself and locate it. The floor was scoured back and forth with flashlight hoping to catch a glimmer of the shiny needle. The tablecloth was searched repeatedly and even squeezed multiple times because needles do not just disappear in thin air.

Finally and as a last resort I pulled out the vacuum cleaner. Surely, I would be able to find it now, but to no avail. By the time I was done vacuuming, my eyes were blurry and sleep was calling. As I fell to sleep I just knew that the morning light would bring closure to the hidden needle. 

However, this morning the needle remains a mystery. I even removed the back off my chair thinking it had to...just had to have been wedged there somewhere, but to my disappointment, no needle was found.

Has this ever happened to you? I'm considering all possibilities now!  Could it be that my arm movement last night broke through the space-time continuum! Who knows where it landed but let's hope a quilter finds it and puts it to good use.