{WiP} Wednesday ~ 24/56

I haven't sewn much lately. My family and I just got back from an epic 12-day, 3000 mile road trip in an RV. Yes, it was as exhausting and crazy as you are thinking. It was also as good as you are thinking. :o)

And while it was (technically) possible to have a sewing machine in the RV, it wasn't really possible to sew while in motion, with 3 small children and their constant needs. And their constant motion. And their constant talking. 

Thankfully, I was able to work on my Schnitzel and Boo swap mini at my in-laws' house. I didn't do much, but I did attach the Dresden blades to the background for my partner. Then I hand-stitched them down on the drive home. 

                                 

I don't think it will be that big, though I do want it to be off-set. Here's a picture of just the Dresden plate.

Now my question to you is, how should I quilt it? What do you think?  What would you love if this was given to you?

I'm linking up with Lee of Freshly Pieced for her regular WiP Wednesday party. :o)

And Let's Bee Social at Sew Fresh Quilts :o)

{WiP} Thursday ~ Week 11

I hope you've had a great week. The weeks always go by super fast for me! 

(almost two weeks ago, now!) Last Friday I gave a lecture/trunk show on modern quilting to a local traditional guild, and I think it was well received. (At least the people who came up to me afterwards were nice!)

Here I am showing off the awesome mini quilt Elizabeth Dackson of Don't Call Me Betsy made for me in a swap. (I won the jackpot, didn't I?) She turned it into a pattern if you want to make one for yourself. :o)

                                          

Here's the hexie quilt I made during Madame Samm's Hexie Queen blog hop last fall, and I'm donating it to Crafters For Courage so they can auction it off and raise money to build another Courage House for girls rescued from sex trafficking. I recently read that approximately 1% of the people rescued from sex trafficking have a safe place to go, so they often find their way back into the traps of the pimps. (We all need to do more to end modern slavery.)

                                                        

And this is the longest (and largest!) WiP, my Mod Mosaic bee quilt. The Mod Mosaic bee started 2 years ago, if that gives you any idea. :-). It's a king-sized quilt, and all that's left is the binding. Unfortunately, I didn't think about Susie's Magic Binding technique before I started binding this. :-/ But it's for ME, so it can sit. :o)

                                            

My newest WiP is this improv beauty of solids. I am totally crushing on it! Here is a bit of one of the sections:

                                                  

And here is a picture of the whole thing. I hope to get it quilted in the next week.

And something I've been wanting for over a year? The Sew Together bag by Michelle of Sew Demented!  It took me a full week (because I kept making stupid mistakes), but I love it!  And, yes. In case you are wondering, I am planning another one. Hopefully it won't take me another year! :o)

                                                

Here's the outside. I guess I've been in a gray mood lately! Everything I've done lately, including a super new pattern I'm working on, is gray! No worries, though. Rainbow is still my favorite color, and I'll get back to that really soon. :o)

 

And, finally, a super cute dumpling pouch and key fob for our Front Range MQG pouch swap on Saturday.

 

That'll probably be it for things I can show for a while. I've got to get my nose to the grindstone and sew up the new pattern (very exciting and daunting and nerve-wracking and oh-I-hope-this-turns-out-like-in-my-head stressing!)

I hope you all have a wonderful week! I'm planning to post a giveaway -- soon? -- just need to get myself together!

Blessings,
~Melissa

{WiP} Wednesday ~ 20/52

I didn't get hardly anything done this week, so my WiP list is just as long, if not longer, than it was last week.

Man, I love it when that happens!

Here's what I did finish, though:

Did I tell you much about it last week? I'm part of the {Faith} Circle of the do.Good Stitches bee, and we decided to have a little pouch swap to get to know each other better. Well, I was given Alecia's name, which was great because her style and mine are really similar! She likes yellow and gray and aqua together (easy!), she loves linen as a neutral (had some!), and wanted a zipper.

Hold the phone. Me and zippers? Well, we've tried to have a good relationship, but last time we broke up, harsh words were spoken, and I vowed to never bring one into my home again. :o) I'm only half kidding...there were definitely harsh words spoken.

You can see that I did some improv piecing of the yellow and gray. Well, not really improv because I alternated the colors, but definitely wonky. Then I filled in with the gray linen, measured out my lining fabric and stitched the pieces to the zipper.

And quickly realized that this gigantic bag (measuring 10 x 12"!) wasn't going to hold up very well by itself, and needed some kind of interfacing. So I did what everyone would do, and got on Facebook and asked for help! :)

 I used fusible web to attach some batting between the layers, and then hand-stitched the yellow above and below the pieced area. Then I went back to the sewing machine to sew it all up.

And quickly realized that I had screwed up, yet again. When you make a pouch the right way, you can sew it so the seam of the lining is sewn inside. I, however, was not going to be able to do that because of the hand quilting and the outer piece being fused to the inner piece. Shoot!

I blame the zipper. Back to Facebook, and someone suggested turning it inside out and binding the lining! Brilliant! Facebook and quilting go hand in hand. :)

And, after much coaxing, pleading, and harsh words, I finished it, and was able to turn it right-side out, and zip it! Yay!!

My next unexpected hurdle was the zipper pull. I found a little ring that says "believe" that I wanted to put on there, but didn't like my fastening options. So I got some split rings (like mini key rings) and attempted to attach the zipper to the pull.

More harsh words were spoken in my head.(children were present) Again with the zipper. It's all the zipper's fault!! MAN those little rings are a bear to attach! Heck, I think it would have been easier to attach a real bear to the zipper than that little pull! But, I gotter done, as they say, and I really do love the pull.

 

I put a few treats inside, and the little pouch hitched a ride on the Pony Express and found its way to its new mama. Alecia says she loves it, and I really do hope the bag brings her hope and encouragement and a smile every now and then. :)

SO...that leaves us with what I did NOT finish this week!

Still working on everything else...Healing quilt block, Gavin's blocks, Bee Happy blocks, do.Good Stitches blocks, Mod Mosaic blocks. SO many blocks!

Tomorrow. Tomorrow I must sew. I hope you get to sew some, too!

(I'm linking up with Lee of Freshly Pieced for her regular WiP Wednesday blog party)

A Year Later

If you're visiting from Apartment Therapy, WELCOME! I am honestly astonished and amazed that they chose to feature my quilt in their 10 Modern Quilting Inspirations post. Apartment Therapy is always on the cutting edge of home design, and I think THEY are the inspiring ones! :)

It's hard to believe that the tsunami hit Japan over a year ago. And hard to imagine how long it will take them to put the pieces back together.

I'll never know what happened to the quilt I made to send to a needy family after the tsunami, but I trust that God sent it to a family that loves and appreciates it.

I love the original design, and the original inspiration (a random guy's t-shirt in a cafe), just as much as I ever did, and hope to make another one for myself one day. :o)

For now, I'm finishing up making receiving blankets and burp cloths for my own little "tsunami" who will be here in 8 days. :o)

Have a great day!

{WiP} Wednesday ~ 8/52

Happy Leap Day!

Happy WiP Day!

I can't believe how quickly the days (and nights) go by. Whoosh. Another week is gone, and I don't have much to report.

It was a great week, of course. We had our guild retreat last weekend, so there was a lot of prep-work for that, and then a couple of days recuperating, of course. :o)  There wasn't a whole heckuva lot I had to do to prepare for others coming to the retreat, it was more preparing all my stuff that I wanted to take. (And then eliminating what I knew I wouldn't accomplish, but still taking WAY too much!)  :o)  In hindsight, I wish I had taken a picture of the myriad stuff I took! It was pretty ridiculous. Haha!

Here's a shot of the lovely, talented, vivacious Amy of Stitchery Dickory Dock, at registration.

And here is the group on Sunday morning. We had 18 attend, but only 17 made it into the early morning photo. :o)

I'm not sure when I actually put my sewing machine on the table, but I think it was about 9:00 on Friday night! Late start, eh?

The first thing I worked on was my Sea Glass quilt. And I quilted, and I quilted, and I quilted. Now, keeping in mind that I am S.L.O.W., and that I wanted to socialize a bit, and that I can't really sit still long enough to sew 3 rows at one time, I finished quilting it sometime on Saturday. Productive, I know. :o)

Then I took off my walking foot, and went to fold up the quilt, and I saw a bunch of tension issue blobs on the backside.

Tension issues cause tension issues!! Amen?  Wow. I was SO disappointed!!!  The tension issues aren't horrid, but I have been working on that thing for SO much longer than I thought I would be that I just folded it up and put it a.w.a.y.  Harumph.

And I started working on bee blocks.

The first one I finished as Amy's for our in-guild bee. It's a sweet little 5-sided wonky log cabin, using this tutorial from Aneela Hoey.

(the fussy cut deer is from Toyland by Bored, Inc. from Robert Kaufman, and it's a couple of years old)

Next I tackled our Fabric Dance block for our group quilts for Firehouse Quilts of Colorado.

The "fabric dance" was a little swap activity we did as a group. Those who wanted to participate brought in a fat quarter, and the dancers stood around in a circle...or maybe they sat, I had to leave for about an hour, so I missed the actual dance. They brought their rotary cutter, and in the first round, they cut their fq in half and passed it to the next person. Then in the second round, they cut the newly acquired half into half again, and passed it to the next person, then they cut the second acquired half and cut it into half, and passed that. Et...cetera. :o) So, at the end of the dance, everyone had a handful of scraps from the majority of those who participated (apparently, the fabrics didn't make it all the way around, but, again, I wasn't there!) When I got back from my errands (the bank and Starbucks and home to give Dave my key to the car since he couldn't find his...), I discovered a colorful pile of scraps on my machine.

This is the block I made.

And this is a picture of 9 of the blocks that were made at the retreat. We are hoping to make 2 quilts. The Firehouse Quilts are made for whenever the firemen respond to a call involving a child. The firemen like to give the child a quilt or a blanket or something comforting, and Firehouse Quilts is the charity our guild is going to focus on this year, so we're starting off right. :)



I also worked on my granny squares for the {Faith} Circle of the do.Good Stitches bee. I finished the second one at home. I haven't trimmed it yet, but you know what it looks like. :o)

I worked on some other blocks, but didn't get anything else finished. I am totally impressed at how much other people accomplished, though. Amanda made 3 quilt tops - start to finish. And they weren't tiny, either! She was a MACHINE!!  Granted, she lives in a teeny, tiny apartment and doesn't get a lot of time (or space) to sew, so she made the most of it, but still! And then Andrea completed an entire quilt, from cutting to binding. It was a "bargello" quilt, too!  Sheesh!  The other stunner was Traci making 6 stinkin' adorable dresses for her (stinkin' adorable) daughter.

I'm glad that everyone else accomplished so much... :o)

When I got home, I was completely shattered, as you can imagine, but I still wanted to sew!  I took all of Monday off, and only started sewing on Tuesday. Since I am working on some Mod Mosaic blocks, I wanted to try stand-up sewing, so I set up a little sewing station on my kitchen island.

It has its advantages, but I don't know if I'm going to be one to sew standing up all the time. It's great for lots of little piecing, lots of pressing, lots of trimming, but it's also hard on a pregnant woman's back. :o)

Speaking of pregnant women...
(A) I had another friend announce her pregnancy this week, and one friend had her baby, so with one up and one down, we're still at 14 pregnant women in my immediate circle. And one will be induced on Friday, so I need to finish her receiving blanket! (Get on it, Melissa!!)
(B) I had an ultrasound yesterday, and Mr JuiceMan is growing nicely, right on track. If he doesn't come sooner, we'll induce on April 9th. I'm pretty freaked out by the fact that in less than 6 weeks, I will be holding a baby boy.  I'm ready to not be pregnant, but not ready to have a newborn! :o)  I know you know what I mean.

That's it for today. As I always say, hopefully next week, I'll have more to show you! :o)  I'm linking up with Lee at Freshly Pieced. (She's also got a giveaway this week!)

Hope you have a great, and crafty, week!

Sewing Recap of 2011

I think it's really good for me to see all the things I've made this year.

I often feel like I'm doing stuff, but not really getting anything done, you know? I mean, I know I've made stuff, but it's just nice to capture it all.

I suspect, however, (OH...I should totally have an ultrasound picture in there somewhere, eh?) (except I'm not quite finished crafting the baby, yet)

Sorry...I suspect, however, that I will have significantly fewer finishes in 2012. :)  The baby isn't due until mid-April, but I never have much energy in my past pregnancies (Nesting? What is THAT?), and I have 2 very active fibroids that, if I don't get enough rest each day, they make my life MISerable. SO...even though I've got a while till the baby comes, I don't envision myself spending tons of hours at my sewing machine. Maybe I'll actually get around to some hand-sewing... :)

Anyways, here's a recap of my 2011!

Here are all the blocks I made for the bees I'm in.

And here is a mosaic of all the crafty things I made (or finished) (or started, then never finished) over the course of the last year.These are in no particular order, by the way. :)

 

I do, of course, have some sewing goals, and some life goals, for the year ahead, but I'll put those in a different post.  I've got loads of WiPs, I've got loads of fabric set aside for specific projects, and loads of other fabric just waiting to be assigned to a project. 

I imagine that if fabric had feelings, that "waiting for a project" fabric might feel like the puppies at the pound when people come looking for a new pet. They are fondled, they are taken out of their spot, they are admired and told how pretty they are, but yet, they go back on the shelf. :)

I hope you all have a wonderful weekend!

{WIP} Wednesday

I'm in the middle of WAY WAY WAY too many things. Ugh. I want to be at the END of some of these! And yet, somehow, I still keep adding more...I'm not too bright. :o)

Well, okay. I do have one finish. See that new little button on the right? Yup. We now have a button for our local Front Range Modern Quilt Guild! Yay!

And on that note, we are going to do something in the fall that I'm just a little too excited about. I don't know what we're going to call it, but something like "UFO"...as in "Un Finished October" where anyone who wants to participate agrees to not start any new projects for the entire month.

Did you swallow that? No. New. Projects. For an entire month. And it's a big month, too! Not a little month like February or April. A month with 31 days! We do get one mulligan, though, if we need to start something new. :o) The idea is that we spend our creative time finishing projects. Especially leading up to the holidays, this should be a good thing. I'll let you know how it goes. Heck, maybe I'll even make a button for it since I'm all skilled up in that department now. :o)

Where was I? Oh, right. Works In Progress = Too Many.

I've got my Japan Quilt. I took a class at a LQS on their long arm machine, and I was able to do one row of meander stitching before I had to hustle home to my babies. Unfortunately, the tension was off for about 1/4 of it, so I spent a little time last night doing some "reverse sewing" with my reverse sewing machine (a.k.a. seam ripper). (sigh)  I am going to spend a couple more hours on the long arm on Friday, and I absolutely positively MUST finish the quilting on it. I found a pretty rainbow polka dot (on a black background) for the binding, and I'm going to try my hand at machine binding the behemoth. Otherwise I'll never finish it in time!

I used Lady Harvatine's Hexagonia tutorial for machine piecing hexagons, and I'm totally smitten. Here's a sneak peak at a block I did. I'll tell you the story about it later. The important thing is that I am now The Hexagon Master east of the Rocky Mountains.

I am in the middle of making my bee blocks for Yolanda. She asked us to make pineapple blocks that do not require paper piecing! Did you swallow that? No paper piecing! And the pictures that the other worker bees have done look really great. She's going to have an incredible quilt when we're all done!

I still need to embroider my Birdie Stitches for March and create my block for April. (Heck, I might as well just create my May block while I'm at it.) You can see the orange border here for March. April's block will have a yellow border, and May's will have a green border. I am surrounded by rainbows right now! (Which I love...)

And then there's a mug rug for my guild-mate, Audrey (I'm only showing you the carnage).  I'll show you the finished mug rug after I give it to her. We were supposed to give them to our partners at the April MQG meeting, but she wasn't able to attend. She asked me to give it to her in person, so we'll all just have to wait till after May 9th. I'm kind of excited about it, though. :o)

And, of course, my Robert Kaufman Kona Solids Challenge. See the dust collecting on my charm pack? Hah. I have a million ideas -- some easier than others, of course. And I had a fabulous idea the other morning, but I need to do a test run to see how easy it is.  If I wait much longer, I'm going to have to default to my easiest design and just whip it out!

And with that, I'm off. I know there are other projects I'm in the middle of, but I just can't think of them.

OH...how could I forget!!  It's not really a true "finish", but it is something creative that happened this week. Last Saturday night, Dave and I went to a place in Denver called Canvas and Cocktails. They give you all the supplies to paint a picture, AND they put an instructor at the front of the room to tell you everything you need to know! It was a lot of fun. Saturday was their first "Guys' Night", so half the room was men, which really changed the chemistry of the night. Normally it's a bunch of women and a lot of wine, and there's a whole lotta chatting going on. We all know men are different, and are less likely to chat while they're doing...well, heck. Let's be real. They're just less likely to chat. Period. No matter what they're doing. :o)  Can't use up their 500 words for the day, right? Haha. :o)

Here's what Dave and I made. You can see the inspiration painting in the background. He didn't do too bad, did he? :o)



I hope you have a great week.

{WIP} Wednesday

You know? I love traveling to see family and friends, but MAN, is re-entry hard!

We spent a fabulous spring break week in LA seeing old friends and just really enjoying being back. Really. Sprout and I went to a LAMQG weekend sew, and got to see our buddies there. We went to Sew Modern and bought loads of yummy scrummy fabrics from Lauren. I bought some prints for stash and for swaps. (and, let us just be real, here...I bought them just to pet and admire).

I bought a lovely, rainbow array of Kona solids. Some for Stitched in Color's Bottled Rainbows Ticker Tape Quilt-along, and some for the next round of the Hexagon Swap on Flickr.

We went to Momen+ and bought too many fat quarters.

We ate at In-and-Out Burgers, and the Omelette and Waffle Shop. We went to the Aquarium. We spent time with people we love. Good, good times. I miss my LA friends and my LA life. People often ask if I'm glad to be back in Colorado, and I always feel bad for saying "Not really", even though it's true. Colorado is wonderful and beautiful and has lots of wonderful and beautiful things and people, but it's just not the life that we had created in LA.

Then the girls and I traveled to Phoenix to spend a few days with my brother and his wife. There's a whole lot of mutual idolizing going on between Uncle Robbie and Mookie. I took pictures, but they're on the other computer, so I'll try to upload some later to my other blog.

Because we were gone, I don't have much in the way of finished works. Really only one. I finished my February block for the Birdie Stitches Block of the Month. March is ready to be stitched. And the April design comes out Friday. Oh how I love to be behind.

I am doing each month in a different color, so January was pink, February was red, March was orange, April will be yellow, etc. And I decided to use embroidery thread to match the block color, for the most part. I was really surprised to see the stark difference between the pink January stitching and the red February stitching. Hopefully in the end, it will all be cool and I'll love the finished quilt. :o)

But while I was gone, I received two gigantic and bountiful packages of scraps. I participated in Sew Sara's scrap swap, and Mariliz and Jessica both sent WAY too many scraps. :o)

And check out this rogue, super cool scrap from Mariliz! I'm desperate to know what it is, and where I can find loads more of it. I don't drink coffee or tea, really, but I just LOVE this design!

Eventually, I'll be using those scraps to make my own Bottled Rainbows Ticker Tape quilt.  I have all the supplies now, so I can get started on it whenever I want, but I've got a zillion other projects that MUST get done, and that one would be just for fun, and just for me, so I'm going to wait.

Speaking of other projects, I decided to use some of my hexies from the Hexagon Swap to start a quilt to send to a survivor of the earthquake in Japan.  I am taking a class on how to use a long arm machine at a LQS, and we're supposed to bring a quilt to practice on, so I decided to hustle up and get this one finished so I can quilt it there at the shop.  Here's the quilt top so far.

I used 52 hexagons (cut using the Accuquilt Go! die), and I'm so glad that I participated in so many rounds of the Hexie Swap so that I would have enough to sort through and have enough of each color to really use. Needless to say, I totally love it. It's symmetrical, it's rainbow-ey, and it's modern. My kind of quilt. My next task is to applique the hexies to the top. THAT, my friends, is what's going to take me a while. :o)

And, I've still got Libby's bee blocks, Yolanda's bee blocks, Janice's bee blocks, Audrey's mug rug, mug rugs for other friends, a camera strap, a quilted purse, squares to cut for the next round of the hexie swap and more to cut for the Around the Circle swap. Oh, duh. And my Kona Solids Challenge quilt.

Ugh.  You know I loved that trip to LA and Phoenix, but it was hard to be away from my sewing machine for so long! There is just SO much to do!

But that, my friends, is what's on my {WIP} list this week. I hope you have a great, and productive week!

Following A Trend...the Plus Pillow

Have you seen the plus pillows and quilts and wall hangings all over the internet like I have? They just seem to be the hottest design right now!

In February, Sew, Mama, Sew had the I ♥ Pillows theme going on, and when Aunt Spicy, Erica and I saw this one by Cherie, we were all hooked! And got to scheming. We decided we wanted to make this pillow. All 3 of us. With the same fabrics. Because they're cool like that and I want to be like them, frankly.

A few days (and many emails) later, we had divvied up the colors and agreed to mail each other the appropriate strips so we could have have matchy-matchy pillows even though we all live a million miles apart. I got busy coloring in squares in my MS Word doc, and pretty soon, we had a pattern to work with! The problem was, we didn't have each other's fabrics! I'm not entirely sure why I didn't think about making it with other fabric first, but I tend to have tunnel vision to the nth degree, and just can not seem to modify my original plan once it's in my head.

Thankfully, though, Kelly stepped in and tested out the pattern for us. She made this lovely pillow with her scraps, and said that the pattern was easy to use and easy to modify. Which, YAY!

Aunt Spicy and Erica and I finally got our swapped strips, and I started to sew mine together. As I was motoring along, I wasn't sure I was going to love the final result (but I do!), and I didn't know what color border I should use since I wanted to make a 20" pillow cover to go on the 20" pillow I already have. :)



I knew wanted the pillow cover to be quilted, so after my internet friends helped me decide on Kona Charcoal as the border, I added some backing and some muslin to the top and quilted it corner to corner. I really like the effect, and will probably do that again when I do another plus pattern pillow or quilt.



Along with the suggestion for a charcoal border, a few suggested a Kona Aqua binding. Well... I wasn't about to do a binding on a pillow, but I loved the idea of something extra around the edge, so I used some aqua scraps and made what I'm calling a "flange" around the outside.



It was fairly simple to do, and I imagine the installation process was similar to using ric rac or pompoms or piping. I just laid the strips along the edge before I joined the back to the front, and sewed it all together.




I kept the back very simple, mostly because I just wanted to be D.U.N. Done. with this pillow. :)



And D.U.N. it is. It's living on it's new home, our new (to us) Ikea couch I found on CraigsList for $50.

I know Aunt Spicy has made a few of these now, too, following our pattern, with great success. And, without further ado, you can have the pattern for yourself!

Plus Pillow Pattern (JEM Collaborations)

(please excuse the highly unprofessional format of this pattern...you get what you pay for!)


I hope you feel empowered and able to make this pillow, now! To me, it looked WAY more complicated than it really was. :o) If you make one from this pattern, please come back and leave a comment (with a link to your blog post with pictures??!!) or email me to let me know how it went! I don't ever plan to sell this pattern, but I would like to make sure it's user-friendly, you know? :o)

Have a great day!

-----------------
While this isn't the point of this post, I have decided to enter this pillow into Stitched In Color's Blogger's Pillow Party for March. You should TOTALLY go over there and see the fabulous (and highly inspirational) pillows that people are entering! Wowzers, Man.