Updates in September

First Day of School

Wow, 5 months without a post! It’s been a whirlwind last 5 months and I just haven’t done a lot of stitching. We finished the school year at home with mommy as the teacher, Cassie did great and Alex just didn’t want to work on anything. Home just isn’t the right place for my kids and school. They just started back this week and we’ve had an eventful first week! Yesterday the phone rang and my heart always drops when it says it’s the school. Yep, Alex threw up at recess and had to come home from school. So I had to run up to school and get him. Let’s hope it’s the only time this year!

It was a busy spring and summer with orders, including one to Germany that took forever to get there! Everyone was shopping online for the end of the school year gifts and it definitely helped me! It’s been a slow start to fall, but that’s ok it will pick up in the next month or so for Xmas. Because I was so busy with orders the sewing machine sat idle for a long time. Plus we were doing a lot of camping and visiting with family in other states. We stayed in the whole time but had so much fun!

Now that I am starting to have some time to myself I’ve been working on Harry Potter SAL blocks. Just finished another one today, I only have 9 more blocks and I can get the top put together. Since our quilt show for 2020 was cancelled due to COVID-19 I have time to get this and maybe a couple more quilts completed before our show in September 2021.

I have a lot of projects to work on when I’m sitting in my chair at night, cross stitch, all the various EPP projects, a new knitting project and I picked up a QAYG Hexagon template at a guild meeting a few months ago and have been hand stitching those and will be machine stitching them together when they are all ready. Hope to be back soon with a new update, hopefully it won’t be 5 months from now!

It’s Been Awhile…Again

*sigh* I always have the best intentions when it comes to blogging, and then I get busy with non-quilty things and it’s almost 2 months since my last post! So let’s see if I can catch up on the last month and a half!
raffle-baskets-100816Our Guild Quilt Show was wonderful! We had over 150 quilts hanging and it was great to see all the people enjoy the show. I had a good time setting up Thursday and then working Saturday and Sunday. To my surprise when I showed up Sunday to help with tear down, at least 5 ladies told me I won 2 of the raffle baskets! I was majorly surprised and couldn’t believe my luck! I also tried to get a full length shot of my Mario Quilt – unfortunately it didn’t work very well and I had to take 2 pictures and stitch them together, so it doesn’t line up very well. I still love it and it’s been on our bed since it was finished.full-sized-mario-quilt-100816

After the quilt show, we celebrated Alex’s birthday. I still can’t believe he’s 6 now! We had a wonderful party weekend with tons of friends and family. There were a few camping trips thrown in there, and we always have fun with that!

birthday-gifts-110816Next up was my birthday in the beginning of November. My wonderful husband picked a bunch of items off my wish list, all of them crafting related! I’ve wanted to try Cascade 220 yarn for a while, and I now have 2 skeins to play with! I know what I’m making with one of them, I need some ear warmers for the cold walk down the driveway to the bus! Unfortunately I can’t start it yet as all my needles are in use. If I have time tomorrow I might stop at Joann’s and see if I can use a coupon to get another set of needles with cables so I can start it. I don’t think it will take long to make.

I made my sister yet another ladybug decoration for her birthday. I actually made 2, but I didn’t get a picture of the blanket before I gave it to her. I need to get her some command hooks that she can use to hang this up next time I’m at Walmart. The blanket is a Cuddle Kit that I bought at Lolly’s when we were there in August. We saw them in the store and I told her I’d buy it and make it for her birthday. The fabrics are SO soft, I love them, but I don’t like sewing them. Every time you make a cut it sheds all over the place. I didn’t find them easy to work with. I have a small amount of leftover fabrics that at some point I’ll use to make her a pillow, but it won’t be anytime soon!

Ok, I have some more to catch-up on, but I’ll do another post with all my hexie updates in the next day or two.

Finished Quilt!

mario-092816I started this quilt on March 31st and finished it yesterday including putting it on our bed with brand new sheets.  It’s now finished with a week to spare and entry in our guild quilt show (I will get a better picture when it’s hanging for the quilt show). This was my first time doing quilt as you go, and I’m not 100% happy with the way they blocks were put together. If this quilt were ever judged I’d get a lot of bad remarks because of the lack of batting in the sashing, but since this is a for “us” quilt I don’t care! 🙂 I love how it turned out and I’m happy to be sleeping under a quilt that I made. Now to work on some projects for Xmas, consignment quilts and some guild stuff I need to get done.mario-092816-a

So I finally decided what I wanted to buy with my Fat Quarter Shop gift certificate, just looked at tracking and it should be here tomorrow, I can’t wait!

Linked to My Quilt Infatuation, NTT.

Merry Christmas!

2014 Xmas CardI know, it’s a few days after Christmas, but I haven’t had time!! These kids have been keeping me busy with school for Alex and just taking care of a super mobile 9 month old! I still don’t have much time to sew, but I’ve been working on some knitting and hand work. For Christmas I asked the hubby to get me a sample kit from a site called KnitCrate.com. They have a monthly subscription where you get yarn, a pattern and some other items, and I wanted to see what it was like.  While I think it’s a good idea, I don’t think it’s for me, it’s a lot of money for yarn and other silly items that I just can’t use.  The one I got is here and I love the yarn color a lot, I just have no use for a big pom-pom!

122814 - Quilts entered in quilt showLet’s see, to catch up the last few months.  We had our guild quilt show in October, and I entered 5 quilts. We don’t do awards or anything in our show, maybe in future years we will. The only quilt I’ve been able to finish this year was Cassie’s wall quilt – I finished the binding 2 days before it needed to be turned in for the show! We had a great show and raised a lot of money for the guild, our next one isn’t until 2016, maybe I can get hexie diamonds finished to enter!

polar bearsI didn’t make any presents this year, well except for the calendars I make every year. I just did not have as much time as I used to have and unfortunately sewing was on the bottom of the list. I did make 25 little candy cane holders for Alex’s 2 classes (daycare and preschool). They were so cute and the kids liked them (or so I’m told!). It took me quite a few days to make all of them, I had some issues with the embroidery machine that I had to work out before they started moving smoothly.

Gavin blanketI finally finished the blanket for my sister’s friend. They loved it and I’m happy to have given something to that sweet little boy! The 18 rows of border went fast, and I don’t think there are that many errors in it. I know there are a few, but I doubt they’d ever notice it! Once I finished working on the blanket I decided to take apart the blanket I was crocheting for my sister and start all over with a knitted pattern. I found a nice pattern called Ziggy-Zaggy on Ravelry and I’ve gotten 1 repeat done already.  It’s slow only because I only knit at night and lately I’ve been too tired to do any work! I’ll get a picture next time I have it out.

Hexie Insanity 122814Back in August I started working on a new hexagon quilt. I’ve been slowly working on it and currently have 18 of 158 diamonds and 17 of 64 flowers completed. I had won a gift certificate to our local quilt shop at a guild meeting a few months ago and bought 5 quarter yards of some nice bright Moda Marbles and a yard of a white for the background. Now that the holidays are over I’m hoping to get more of this fabric cut up so I can work on prepping more hexies. Hexies are just the perfect thing to work on at night, as long as I’m not falling asleep!

I can’t remember if there was something else I wanted to mention, but I can always do another post if there is! I’m hoping to start posting at least once a week, whether I have something done or not!

Where have I been???

Wow, it’s been a LONG time since I posted anything!  I was trying hard this summer to get my hexie diamonds quilt finished for our quilt show, until they posted that quilts had to be completed by the end of September.  AHHHHH!  I’d never make it since I had 3 rows to finish, plus the black fill in spots at the top and bottom, PLUS quilting it?  Yeah, I decided to just put it aside and work on it slow and just have it ready for the next show.  Then I realized I needed to start working on a cross stitch piece for a wedding gift.  Now of course it’s still not done and the wedding is next weekend!  The bride works with the hubby and asked Alex to be the ring bearer!  He’s going to look so cute in a tux, I just don’t know if he’s going to do what he’s asked or not!

2013-08-23 16.23.06

In July the hubby went to California to see his dad for his 70th birthday.  Alex and I stayed home since I don’t really want to take him on an airplane yet! (There’s another reason why we didn’t go that I’ll explain in another post.)  Turns out it was a good thing we didn’t go as Alex got sick that weekend and had a 100 degree fever – only for about 24 hours though!  Anyway, I found out there was a new quilt shop (The Quilt Loft) that opened within walking distance of his dad’s house.  We’ve always had this deal that if one of us went out of town, the other would bring back a “prize”.  So I told him where he could get my prize!  So he went and picked out a jelly roll of Icicle Kisses by Kansas Troubles Quilters.  I have no idea what I’ll do with it yet, but I will come up with something!

2013-08-23 16.22.51I was playing around with one of my Accuquilt Go dies and made this little table runner.  I’ve had it pinned for awhile, just haven’t gotten around to sitting down at the machine to quilt it!  This was a charm pack that I ran through on the triangle die (don’t remember which one off hand since we are camping while I write this post!) and just put them together into 2 rows.  Haven’t decided if I will square it off once quilted or bind it with the angled corners.  Once we get home from camping I will look at which die I used and also get the information for which line this was from.

Spent some time working on blocks for our Guild block exchange using the 2013 Hoffman Challenge fabric.  All blocks have been exchanged and now it’s time to put it all together into a quilt.  We want to have all the quilt tops completed by the December meeting so we can hopefully get more people to participate next year!  I’ll do another post with those once we get home, I haven’t taken pictures of all the blocks yet!

I received an email yesterday from Accuquilt that the Studio cutter is on sale again for $399, the lowest price I’ve seen all year.  I’ve been debating it for a long time, mainly because there are a few dies I’d love to have that are only made for the Studio. Plus I’ve been thinking about adding die cuts to my business, since at some point I need to get that going again.  I currently only have 2 customers for embroidery work and I need to start making things I can put on etsy.  Die cuts might be a good thing, quick and I could even cut customer fabrics! Plus right now is triple reward points and that will be nice, since it will give me a good way to buy more dies at limited cost to me! 🙂

Time to charge the laptop and make some lunch, I’ll be back later with more of where I’ve been!

Quilt Show!

I know, I know, I haven’t been around much lately.  I will explain in a post (or 2) soon.  I wanted to get this posted right away though.  My guild (Lorain County Piecemakers) is having a Quilt Show October 4-6.

Over 100 guild quilts will be displayed along with our own Quilt Car. Many vendors will be set up displaying their sewing and supply items. We will also be raffling off a Serger and many baskets of sewing and other items.

Hours:
October 4th: 10am – 8pm
October 5th: 10am – 5pm
October 6th: 11am – 3pm

New Russia Township Hall
46268 Butternut Ridge Road
Oberlin, Ohio

Hope to see you there!