Lake Wobegon

Sometimes as I sit here an write my weekly post, I feel a bit like Garrison Keillor of Prairie Home Companion fame.  For those of you who are unfamiliar with him, he has a radio show on NPR on Saturday evenings about 6 pm.  It is formatted like the old time radio programs with music and skits.  Every week he does a news update from Lake Wobegon Minnesota, which is his fictional hometown.  It always begins "It's been a quiet week here in Lake Wobegon, my hometown."

It's been a busy week here in my hometown.  The wedding is just 5 more days away (including the day itself) and there's still plenty to be done.  Now I only have a few things to do, and most of them are done.  But I was waiting until this week to hem V's pants so he didn't outgrow them.  I have him every day after school, so I decided to try them on today and pin them up.  How do you get a 5 year old boy to stand still for such a thing?

hand him your iphone

He loves to play games on it and he's good.  Then he got kinda casual:

Well the pants are hemmed and I am stitching closed a couple of seams on some double sided napkins and my wedding sewing is totally done!  So I worked on a couple of other things over the weekend.  I am finally putting my 36 patch blocks together to get ready to quilt.  I want to piece the back too.  I have an idea.  I was hoping to make progress on this:

still a bit to do

and I did!

all done...just in time for October's block

Also, all the mug rug talk going on right now has me stirred up so I dove into that too.

Hometown scraps...I'm wasting nothing.  I love that line.

My daughter has a Mac

Still more Hometown scraps

I'm also piecing two other quilts and have more in the cue for the rest of the year.  I hope to have some more finishes to show by the end of the year too.  I hope you get plenty of sewing time too.
Have a great week.

Pay It Forward

I have just seen this fun idea over on Summerfield Quilts and of course I had to participate. Because I can just never seem to have too many things to do. lol.  Who doesn't love a surprise parcel?  I know I do.  Unless it's a bill or something like that.  So here is what I am promising... I will send a surprise gift to the first three people to comment on this post. This gift will be made by me and I will send it sometime within the next year. Exactly when you will receive it will be a surprise (it will probably be a surprise to me too :-D).  Of course there are some rules in this game. Here it goes:

Rules:1. I will make a little something for the first 3 people that comment on this post. It will be a surprise and may arrive at any time in the next 365 days (yes, a year).

2. To sign up to receive a gift from me you must play along too. Share the giving love on your blog by promising to send a handmade goodie to the first three people that comment on your blog post.

3. You must have a blog.

4. After commenting on my post, you have to post this (or similar) on your blog to spread the love.

I don't know if three people will even get around to commenting on this, but I will say that if you find this post 6 months from now and only 2 people have left a comment, you can still be commenter #3 and get a random goodie from me! When you comment, I'll email you and get your address and then you should get something from me sometime before next October. I have never done this before, but I love the idea of surprising someone.  Hope to hear from you soon.  Charlotte

I have my 3 comments.  One was e-mailed to me by someone who had trouble with the comment button.

Countdown

Well, my daughter says the countdown has begun.  The wedding is in12 days.  The napkins are all done.  Check that item off my list. 

The outfit for the little man is done.  Check that item off my list.  He is ready to walk his mom down the aisle.

Went shopping today (which I hate to do) and now my outfit is ready.  Check that item off my list.
 So now that my stuff is done, I guess it's okay to work on all the other projects I have going on, right?

Like this:

for a special baby girl in Vermont

and these:

putting together my 36 patch

my hometown quilt

and this:

just bought the pattern

I have been dying to try the Swoon quilt and since I didn't have enough going on, I caved and bought the pattern this weekend.  I want to try and make it out of fabrics I already have so when I have time I will go hunting in my stash.  I also have a couple of other things to get going on for Christmas.  I know it will creep up quickly like it does every year.

So after the wedding I will be sewing like a maniac.  Oh, wait, I already am.

Have a great week.

Finished!

I think I started this in March, when the days were still short and barely warm yet.  My daughter still lived with us and every sunny day was a blessing.  I fell in love with the Sunkissed line and found the Moda Bake Shop and the rest, as they say is history.

I bought a jelly roll and some yardage and had actually picked out another Moda Bake Shop quilt to make with my Sunkissed loveliness,  then I saw this one and knew it was the one for me.

When I downloaded the recipe, I found that I didn't have exactly enough of the different fabrics needed to make the quilt exactly as it was.  I really wanted to do it that way.  So I set out to see if I could make it work without buying any more fabric.  What I came up with was this: I had enough to make each of the large, whole squares in the colors called for.  What I did for the four interlocking squares in each quarter of the quilt was to make most of the square from one fabric, but where it visually "passed behind or through" the main square, I made the pattern change, but not the color.

From a distance, in some squares you cannot even tell.  Others are more obvious.  But it worked, and I L-O-V-E it.  The other thing I learned as I began getting into blogging was about pearl cotton.  I decided to use that to outline each square in its matching color of pearl cotton.  I finally got that done, but the quilt wanted more quilting to feel right to me.  So I meandered all over the large open areas and the border.  A cute little thing happened when I spur of the moment decided to do a little sunshine in the crossroads between the squares.

The back is pieced to include a bit of the fabrics from the front.  And now, it needs a label, but I have washed and dried it and it is so pretty I can't begin to convey how much I love how this turned out.  Or maybe you can tell.

Have a great week.

She's Back!

I really missed Nina, my Bernina.  She went in for a check up last week.  I thought I was to a point in all my projects that I had enough hand work to keep me busy.  But instead, the minute she was gone, everything I wanted to do involved Nina.  She was only gone 5 days, but every day brought another idea that needed trying.  Torture I tell you.  But now she's home!

And the sewing has begun again!  Such chaos, such clutter; I am one happy quilter.  But the first thing I need to do is make some pants, a vest and bow tie for V for his mom's wedding in a few weeks.  I got the pattern idea/advice from Dana.  She drafts patterns all the time for her son and they are adorable.  I can do this!

Well, it took several tries with "junk" fabric, but now I think I've got it!

It's a very nice linen and the vest will be the same.  I have drafted the pattern for the vest, but haven't started it yet.  I am having trouble getting my Nina to sew over the elastic in the casing at the back of the pants.  If anyone has advice on how to make this work, I would be grateful.  The needle hits the elastic and won't go through.  It is one inch non-twisting elastic.

So I thought, since I have been so good about working on this must do project, I am going to reward myself with a want to do project.  I am starting my Hometown quilt.  I bought a layer cake of Hometown a while back and was waiting for inspiration.  I found it on Moda Lissa's blog.

This is an easy pattern that will really showcase the fabrics.  Since I really couldn't indulge myself with more of this line, I wanted to make the most of it and this pattern does it for me.  First seen in Moda Bake Shop, it's simple, but fun.

The rest of my weekend was spent helping my husband get some things done in the back yard for the upcoming wedding.  We will have family here with us, and want to spend all our spare time just hanging out and talking and cooking and eating.  So we needed more outdoor space to do this.  He found plans on line and we built a picnic table and are working on a fire pit.

it's nice and sturdy.

needs a few more bricks

We are going to have so much fun!! I can't wait.  Now, back to Nina.  I've got lots to do.
Have a great week.

After the Storm

What a weekend.  So much destruction all up and down the coast.  Our beaches, our cities, our bridges, our homes.  We have been here before, during hurricane Fran.  I never knew before then, that a hurricane could cause so much damage inland.  So when they said Irene was coming I felt a bit of fear, deep down inside.  I didn't really acknowledge it.

Now we were lucky here in Chapel Hill.  Hardly any rain and wind for a few short hours, but it was scary.  We sat on our front porch for several hours and watched the wind blow the trees around.  Every time the wind began to gust, my husband would stand up and look and I would stop what I was doing and watch... until it stopped again.  I was sewing yo-yos for my yo-yo along.  I kept that up for about 3 hours straight.  It was a way to pass the time until it was over.  A way to calm the nerves.

I was able to sew almost 50 yo-yos during that time.  When it was over... this was all the damage:

a few leaves

one small branch

This was a far cry from the many trees of Fran's wrath.  The next morning, the light looked different from all the leaves that blew away.

But also because summer is almost gone.  Fall is around the corner now.  I hope that we don't have another weekend like this one. 

I also packed up my Bernina and took her to the shop for a tune up  It was way past time for it.  I will miss her and use this time to finish up some hand sewing that I need to do.  If all else fails I will make yo-yos.  I still have 685 left to do you know.  And she'll only be gone a week.

Bye.  See you soon.  And of course I have tons of ideas jumping in my brain right now to try, but I have to wait until my Bernina is home again.  Then we will create again.

Have a great week.

And then there was one

So after some fast and furious sewing today, I decided to post about the great napkin project.  After seeing a post over a year ago on Purl Bee, my daughter thought she'd like to make a bunch of napkins to use at her wedding.  Afterwards, she could use them in her home.  We decided to do lots of different fabrics (because who can decide?) in sets of 4, 6, 8 and one set of 12 for Thanksgiving and such.

So we bought fabric every time we found some we thought would be good.  Now we had lots of fabric, but hardly any hemmed up and no idea if we had enough.  So we finally had a napkin cutting party and got them all cut to see what we had.  I think this was in late January.  I began hemming, a few here and there.  I had lots of time until October.  We simplified some of the ideas from decorative stitching to just plain hemming.  There were 97 napkins here folks!!

She took one set to top stitch with embroidery floss and the rest I had at my house.  There are 2 sets of 4 that are double sided with rick rack around the edges.  There is one set of 6 that she started to embroider a flowering vine on.  It was also double sided.  After 2 of those she was ready to give up.  They were taking way too long to finish.  I told her to leave them and I would see what I could do.

Now they are all done but one, and I have started the embroidery on it.  Should have it done in about a week, in between everything else and work.  I cannot begin to tell you the relief at having this so close to done.  As October looms, I am feeling the time crunch. 

I have other projects too, you see.  Like this one with Crazy Mom Quilts:

blocks all done, so I can breathe.

And I finished my August Birdie Stitches block.  So here I am, feeling pretty good about myself.  Uh oh, what's that?  V needs pants for the wedding...and he wants a bow tie too?  No sweat, Grammie can do that easy peasy.  There's a tutorial on Dana Made It for boy pants.  Here's the fabric:

A nice linen from Joann's...on sale too!  So I'll just be going now.  Got to draft a pattern and get sewing.  I am glad I never lack a project to whip together.  How boring would that be?  One last shot of those napkins....

Have a great week.