Woodland Sampler - Back in Business!

After almost twelve months of waiting, my Frosted Pumpkin Woodland Sampler is finally seeing some new love.  It's nice to have a portable project to work on when life gets crazy!

Stealing a few minutes of stitching in the car!

Linking up with Let's Bee Social and WiP Wednesday.

Progress Through Purchases

I went to visit a new quilt store last weekend and came home with fabrics for setting my rainbow cabins.  The brown dot will be used for setting triangles to put the blocks on point, and the two darker browns are for borders.  This is going to end up a pretty large quilt when it all comes together.

I wanted to have a fresh start for the second round of blocks, so next I worked on remaking the puckered blocks from the first round.  The block on the right still has the original stitching.  The tan fabric is puckered along the inner seam and is pretty wavy overall.  The block on the left has been re-sewn and lies a whole lot flatter.  Success!

Linking up with Let's Bee Social.

Getting (Re)started

I finished the first round of my rainbow quarter cabins and am slowly working on cutting the fabric for round two.  Two blocks per color was not enough...

I'm also planning to unstitch the first four blocks (those in the purple family) because, when soaked, the brown didn't shrink evenly with the tan.  Since the first blocks were together when the (accidental) soaking started, they're now pretty wrinkled compared to the later blocks and I'd like to fix that if I can.

In other news, I felt the need to play around a bit yesterday and pulled out the triangle remnants from my Maple Rose quilt.  This offset diamond layout was my favorite thus far but, since they're only 3" blocks, the design is still pretty small.  I'll have to some up with something to make it bigger!  Challenge accepted.

Linking up to Let's Bee Social and WiP Wednesday.

Field Of Hearts - A Finish!

This year has proven difficult for blogging, but I'm still lurking around and I finally have a finished picture of my Field of Hearts quilt to share!  The last stitch was put into this quilt in mid-March - just in time to send it across state lines with a dear friend visiting from it's final destination.  Thank goodness I didn't have to trust it to UPS!

Field Of Hearts - 59x72

110 pieced hearts went into the quilt top and many more loopy hearts were added when it was quilted.  I tried to squeeze in all the love and good wishes I could fit on this one.  I hope to have a received report any day now, but I'm sure she's going to love it!

Linking up with Let's Bee Social.

Rainbow and binding

I started off with some hand stitching this weekend.  The first stage of the binding on Field of Hearts is done and I'm now working on doing the second stage by hand.  My mother-in-law had given me some wonder clips for Christmas, and I'm loving them!  I'm almost through the first long side.  Deadline: Friday!

I also tried some layouts for a few blocks I've been working on slowly here and there.  These blocks were from a mystery weekend where I never even got to the mystery!  To give you an indication of how long they've been waiting, my mother's quilt is already stitched up and gifted.

First I tried laying them out similar to how my mother laid hers out.  With my rainbow colors, I didn't think that was going to work.  So after a little playing around I came up with the layout below, and I really like it!

It's looking like I'm going to need to make another set of blocks for each of the colors.  It's going to be way too small otherwise!  That's perfectly fine with me though.  I'm loving the relaxed nature of being able to walk through my sewing room and put two blocks together whenever I have a few minutes.  No deadlines, no rush... just playing with pretty color.   Isn't that how life is supposed to be?

Linking up with Design Wall Monday, MOP Monday, and Let's Bee Social

Basically Patrick Suds

And we're back.  I haven't been waiting all this time for a replacement iron, never fear!

I was invited to hang some photography in a public space for the month of March, so my sewing room had to remain closed while I pulled it all together.  There was much framing and matting and running around this past month... but my pictures are all up now and just waiting for people to come in.  It is an amazing opportunity.  And it was also a lot more work than I ever expected.

So this weekend was the first time I've been able to get back in the sewing room since the end of January and I made good use of my time - washing and ironing (and petting) some fabric.

Now I swear that I don't bleed all my fabric, though I'm sure it looks like I do from my blog, but in the course of all the fabric washing I've been doing recently I did have some issues.  Some of the fabrics must have been damp next to each other in the washer for too long because the orange, red, and pink suds fabrics came out looking like a toddler had drawn all over them with a pen!

I tried applying some Dawn and water, to no avail.  However, with the liberal application of Shout stain remover and another trip through the washing machine, I was able to remove most of the dark marks!

Good as New!

And now all the colors of my suds line are washed and just waiting to be made into something delightful!

Linking up with Let's Bee Social and WiP Wednesday.

Sewing Room Shut Down

In the course of putting together my scrappy hearts quilt another iron bit the dust!  I've only had this iron for five months and already it was building up black deposits on the soleplate and spitting from the steam holes.

My attempts to clean the soleplate were unsuccessful and I wasn't thrilled about dancing around with a leaking problem, given how my last iron died, so I called customer service to request a replacement.  Unfortunately, the process required me to mail in the plug from this iron, so my sewing room will be shut down for a few weeks.

In the meantime, today brings my second year of blogging to a close and I would like to celebrate by sending some fabric and notions to one lucky reader!  There's no picture, because I don't have one yet, but I hope you'll play anyway!


In order to win, please leave a comment telling me what pattern you would use to make a quilt from a fat quarter bundle.  A winner will be drawn one week from today.

Linking up with Let's Bee Social.