And Now, For Something Completely Different

So, I am sewing here. It is very off and on, based on my energy level and my desire to sew. When I get revved up about something, though, I can feel the ol' creative mojo and that excites me. Sometimes I am not sure where it is.

On the Sew Mama Sew blog, they are celebrating 6 weeks of softies. I love looking at softies, but making them, eh...my grand kids don't really need any more, so I have been just looking and resisting making any. Until I went to one of the featured artist pages and started noodling around. I found...Felt Food!!

My youngest grandson loves to play kitchen and has lots of plastic food and stuff, but this felt stuff is amazing. The creativity and detail of some of this is so cool and it's just so doggone much fun to make. So I decided to start making some and see how much I could do towards his birthday gift. He is getting some felt food. Here is what I have so far:

 Breakfast is the most important meal of the day...Bacon, eggs and strawberries.

My sesame seeded bun

 Hamburger, with grill lines as requested by my daughter. There is no end to the creativity on this stuff. Your imagination is the limit.

With a few side items.

Woven corn on the cob

A whole plate of side items

Enough to share with his brother

 Now i am working on some veggies. Gotta have balance in the diet. I have several more to make.

 And, again at my daughter's request, a doughnut with icing and sprinkles. He is apparently intrigued with these, even though he has never had a real one.

This was yesterday's food makings

And, the raw materials. I had some on hand to start with, from  Pearl Soho. I bought some at Michael's and then, I needed a few colors they didn't have so I ordered some larger pieces on line, made by National Nonwovens. If you have little ones, or just want a wee bit of fun, check it out and make some. Just Google "felt food" and you will be amazed at all the tutorials that come up. This has been the most fun week ever. Thanks, Sew Mama Sew for the great ideas.

A Friday Finish...My Cat Weave Quilt

I am happy to say that I found the energy to get this cute little quilt finished over the last two weeks.

 The day was sunny so I went out in the yard and I found my little patch of Crocus was in bloom.

 There is nothing that says spring to me like the first crocus. We live down in a bit of a hollow, so the daffodils are not blooming down here yet. They are next.

 I love the way the weaving of the strips looks on this quilt. It is all Lizzy House Catnap fabrics. I adore Lizzy House fabrics. The white is Kona white.

 The quilting is stitched in the ditch for the woven strips and then hubby had the idea for the swirls in the white squares for contrast and interest.

 I used the rest of the half yard pieces for the backing. This quilt finished at about 49 inches square. The binding is also leftover strips from the weave. I went with the red and brown to frame it up.

 Some of the cutest fabric ever. I love this big print. I love the back of the quilt as much as the front.

I hope you have a great Friday the 13th and a wonderful weekend. Linking up to TGIFF at Quilt Matters.  
Also linking up to Confessions of a Fabric Addict.
This is one of my Quarter 1 finishes from this list. Linking up with Adrienne at On the Windy Side for the 2015 FAL.

What Makes Your Heart Sing?

My eldest daughter (the knitter) came over Saturday. She came to help me clean and organize my sewing room. Let me just tell you, if you are struggling to do this, enlist the help of someone who is not emotionally invested in your stuff. It really helps. When it came to keep or toss, she asked me, "Does it make your heart sing? If not, get rid of it." That was so very helpful to me. We filled a big black trash bag full of stuff. Here are the after pictures:

 Look how neat it all is! No clutter piles. We went through every pile of stuff and either found it a home or got rid of it. She asked me how long it's been since the ironing board was folded up. Haha!

 My cutting area hasn't been this clean in a long time. She made me move stuff that wasn't used for cutting, to de-clutter the surface.

 We moved all of the stuff that was just tossed over here due to pure laziness on my part. Any horizontal surface can be a victim of this with me.

 She dusted this area and removed some items to make it more useful to me.

 And with every area, she asked me "What is this for? What do you do here?" That's a great approach to organization people. I told her the narrow box with the safety pins needed to stay here. I toss pins in it as I quilt and the narrow box keeps it steady. The other end holds the feet for the machine. She kept it, but cleared out some bobbins, which now have their own small basket and found another one of my boxes to hold threads I am currently using, as well as my thread snipping scissors. I love this.

 And now, all my containers of threads live in this basket, which was formerly full of so many different things that made no sense at all.

And under here, some project boxes and my DMC floss. That's all that is there for now. It used to house 10 years of Quilters Newsletter Magazines. I am assigned the task of going through them to see if I want to keep any of them. I have special notebooks to put the ones I want to keep in. Truthfully, there are probably less than 12 issues that will stay. The rest will either be donated, given away, or recycled. I feel lighter already. If any of my readers are looking for a specific issue, let me know. These date from mid to late 1990's to early 2000's.

My final project for the big clean up is to go through all my scraps and organize them. I think this will be by color in the wire drawers I have. The small scraps will be filed in my bins. I can do this a bit at a time over the next couple of weeks as I feel able. Small projects.

This room is so clean, it makes my heart sing! And now I feel ready to be creative again. Thanks M. You make my heart sing too. :)

A Friday Finish: A Flea on a Hot Brick

So, I do have what I think is a very cute Friday finish for you today, But first, I want to explain about the flea on a hot brick in the title. If you are familiar with the expression, it goes something like this: she was jumping around like a flea on a hot brick. That is how I feel about my sewing and crafting right now. I am jumping from project to project with not too much forward motion. Not trying to lament that fact. I was just thinking about it yesterday and these are my thoughts. If something won't hold my attention, or excite me into working on it, I jump to something else, even start something new. It will all get done eventually and I'm not punching any time clock here. So here is my finish:

 Meet Spring Maggie Rabbit. This sweet bunny is a pattern by Alicia Paulson of Posie Gets Cozy. I have made about 5 of these now and each is different and fun. The other day I needed something that was really spring-like...desperately.

 So I dug around and found my Maggie Rabbit supplies. I keep the pattern and felt all together in one place for this purpose. One of my few organizational things that works.

 I auditioned so many pretty flowery fabrics for the dress. It was hard to choose. This is a Jeni Baker print from her Dreamin' Vintage line. I can't tell you how much I love the pretty flowers on this.

 I was unsure about making the boots that are a part of her outfit, then my husband said "How about making her some colorful Wellies for spring?" Genius! So out came the brightest pink felt in my stash. I got it at Purl Soho.

 Look at this pretty. So springy and fresh, yet feminine and oh, I can't think of enough adjectives.

 Here is Maggie with her sister, Summer Maggie. She is the very first one I made several years ago when the pattern first came out.

 Her boots are exactly like the pattern is written, to lace up and tie at the top.

Summer Maggie has a hat that I designed for her to wear while gardening.

 Here is a detail shot of Spring Maggie's apron. I used a decorative stitch that my machine makes.

I even took her out in 25 degree weather this morning to try and capture how pink these Wellies are. Hard to do. It rained buckets all day yesterday while I sewed these Wellies. Very appropriate, I think. Now, the question is, what will the flea jump into today? Have a great weekend friends.

Tuesday Stash Show

It's Tuesday and I have been trying to find my creative mojo. I miss it and I know it is hard to focus on other things rather than the cancer, but creating keeps me sane and feeling somewhat normal. So, since I didn't feel like sewing for the last few days, and in fact would walk into my sewing room and just sit and watch the birds out the window, I decided that some tidying might get me over the hump. It took me 3 days to tidy the one shelf where I keep most of my stash. Unsure of what was next, I opened my Bloglovin' posts this morning to Lisa of In the Boon Docks and found her post on #SecretStash contest from Craftsy. That got me interested. So here we are, in all truthfulness, unedited pictures of my stash.

 This is the shelf where I keep all the 1/4, 1/2 and larger pieces, folded and stacked in a method I learned from Jeni Baker at In Color Order. Love it since it shows the fabrics off so well. I decided to try stacking the colors together this time, instead of by collection or random, which is how they were. This is a 4 foot tall Billy bookcase from IKEA. The stacks on the top two shelves are 2 deep, beginning with red and pink on the left. Orange is behind, as is green (2 stacks of that). The bottom is multi colors that don't fit another category and Christmas fabrics on the right. The left is 2 yards or more flat folds. This is the pretty side of my stash.

 This wire bin is my old stash holder. It used to be organized by color in each drawer. Now it is older fabric and by that I mean years older. Some 10-20 years old that I bought at my LQS before the days of internet shopping. I still reach for it from time to time and I am always happy when I can use something from this bin. I stash larger scraps from newer collections in here too, but not in any currently organized manor.

 This I have shown before. These are my true scrap bins. Small scraps, sorted by color. You can see that after a project, I many times just toss the scraps up there Until I am motivated to have a sorting day for them. I used to smooth or iron them, but the way I dig through them it seems a waste of time. I iron as I use now.

 These bins are part of the home made table that holds my featherweight machine. I started using them for projects in progress and it worked...for awhile. The fabric in most of them is from finished projects and needs to be re-filed elsewhere.

 Some new bins added to the room have batting, mini quilts with no permanent home and yes, more scraps that my daughter just gave me. She has decided I am the keeper of all things fabric and she is the keeper of all things yarn. It works.

And then, in several places there are these. Jelly rolls, one of my favorite pre-cuts, randomly stacked. I have 6 or 7 of them. There are also charms, mini charms and layer cake squares in here in random spots. And there are lots of other crafting things in this little room. Two boxes of DMC floss for stitching, zippers galore and lots of odds and ends. I dream of the day when someone, not me, comes in and really organizes my space. I forget what I have and when a project comes up that is not just quilting, I can't find the things I swear I have, so I often buy more. That's not good. Maybe the organizing fairy will come visit some day. I have tried to talk my daughter into doing it, but no luck yet. Have a lovely week.