To be a bit cliché, this shoemaker is a professional Web Developer and her child is this blog, but it was past time to launch what I have of a new design. All the content is still here, everything else is a work in progress (kind of like most of my sewing projects)!
It’s February. Wow! January flew by and I accomplished less than half of what I hoped.
I hope to get back to posting more often now, but I still have a to-do list a mile long from January. Not to mention that my studio is in disarray thanks to an electrical problem that leaves me one (non-grounded) outlet. For reference, today’s photo is a Christmas present for 2012 that I finished this morning before work.
Having made six of these bags now, I think I have all the kinks worked out. Now I just have to figure out how to condense the time frame (it takes me about 3 hours to cut, quilt, and construct) into a two hour class. Good thing I have until May to figure it all out!
One Christmas present down, quite a few more to go. The journal is store bought, but I whipped up the zippered pen bag. Quick, mostly pain free, and I only had to steal one thing from another project instead of running to the store (the zipper, but I have one in another color that will work for the other project anyhow).
The rest of my planned projects aren’t quite so simple.
These are my youngest sister’s presents for her birthday/college finals week/Christmas (she get to go on a cruise over Christmas with her boyfriend and his family, so I won’t see her this year). I’ll post more about the bag soon. The other is a hot iron sleeve for hair straighteners/curlers. I posted about it back in July.
The bag didn’t turn out half bad for something I made up as I went along. I never thought I’d use more than a 100m spool to quilt something so small though. I hate last minute runs to the store to buy thread for those last four inches of quilting. Happens to me all. the. time.
Now I need to remember to put them and the rest of the care package in the mail tomorrow…
…and then maybe get a gallon of paint for our window seat 😉
I’m working on a bag in which to cart around my EPP project. I decided it needed something on the front, so I (normal) paper pieced this small (4.5″) Mrs. Bryan’s Choice block variant.
I don’t really know how to paper piece, so I made it up as I went along. I think it turned out okay. I hope to show you the bag next week. The shell is done. I wanted to do the lining tonight, but I’m traveling all weekend, so it will be a while.
Choosing a binding was hard. Arduous. I wanted to use leftover scraps, but piecing those small triangles meant that my planning failed again and I didn’t have enough. I think it would have gotten lost in the top anyhow. The only semi-matching fabrics in my stash were solids: a yellow (Kona Canary, I think) and a dark purple (Moda Bella Terrain Iris).
I asked Twitter. Susan and my sister both said yellow (or scrappy), but in person it just looked so wrong. Too bright, too off from the other yellows in the quilt. Carl agreed.
So, I went with purple. It’d be nice if it were lighter, but it is very close to the darkest purple in the prints, and frames it well enough. It’s fine. I’m happier with it than the quilting, at least.
It’ll be a few weeks before I write up the finished quilt. It has to be delivered first.
We’re starting Double Wedding Ring in Sew You Want to Quilt. Here’s my background fabric and two pieced arcs. If anyone is interested, we’re mostly using this free pattern from Free Spirit.
Momentum slowed a bit, as the handouts from class were printed smaller than my printer printed yesterday. Now I have to figure out the scaling factor before I can continue piecing.
This is the top of a doll quilt version of a simple project I’ve been working on between larger, brain-power–requiring projects. Or maybe it’s a pillow sham. I haven’t yet decided. Mostly I wanted to play with my ruffler foot.
The end is in sight (albeit close to a month late)!
And, this evening I will be seeing both Seven Nations and Enter the Haggis play live.
These two things make me immeasurably happy.
In other news I changed my template around, so now the blog is a bit more blog-like, for your perusing ability, and the homepage has a slideshow of finished projects. Enjoy!