New room

Happy Good Friday everyone!

Hope you have a Blessed Weekend in remembrance of what Jesus did for us.

 

My AWESOME husband took off from work Thursday and Friday for Easter and also because the kids are home this week.

I don’t know if it’s just because he painted the bonus room not too long ago or what, but I woke up Wednesday morning with the idea of measuring my “studio” and the bonus room and the long arm machine, table, iron etc.. I played with layouts in EQ actually- more about that on Tuesday

 

So when Hubby cam home Wednesday night we started moving furniture!!

Here’s the Bonus room (next to my “studio” room)

On the left was a huge craft table for the kids which was ALWAYS a mess, then our former neighbor gave us two brown desks before they moved, and my husband built the kids a lego table a while ago too

This is the other direction, a nice built in counter where my embroidery machine is already sitting on top- and YES that’s a PILE of my quilts I just put there and didn’t know what to do with.

This is my “studio” a door from the bonus room leads to it. It was unfinished when we moved in and my husband put up drywall, made 48 cubbies in the walls, did the flooring and ran A/C…… The room has served me well but I’ve outgrown it, behind the door is a wire shelf where I have UFOs and quilts etc and I have another wire rack to the left, so they both block some cubbies and the long arm blocks cubbies in the back of the room.

So first we moved the table in the blue room and the long arm wasn’t hard at all to take apart actually, the BEAST (V17) weighs 75lbs that was the worst part I think and getting the long poles off. But the frame came apart in 3 pieces pretty much.

Here Sonja is helping DADDY do some wire “management” by the desk, she’s sorting the ZIP ties

Why are they all in a bundle anyways?? you can see them better spread out!

Before I show the reveal of my NEW room I’ll show the CRAFT room now, we moved the craft table in the middle (used to be my sewing table) so we knew how that would look, and YEAH! don’t look at the messy cubbies. I’ll sort thru my stuff later but still we’ll have a bunch of storage there still. I did tell the kids that if they do crafts, they HAVE to clean up the table when they are done, otherwise anything I see there goes in the trash and they get banned from the room! (good thing that rule doesn’t apply to myself!) LOL

My husband doing more wire “management” by the long arm, which is one thing that always bugged me in the old place, it was hard to get behind and the power cable was a tad short so sometimes it would unplug while I was working

So handy guy took some “tubing” from our old washer and dryer- why did he keep those in the first place?? well they could come in handy- and they did, after cutting slits in them and a bunch of zip ties later… VOILA!!

He also went in the attic and took apart some wire shelves and “we” (mostly him) put them together and I got the idea for having a place to HANG quilts

So this morning after a late night of sorting and re-arranging my STUFF

here is what it looks like

I have fabrics on 3 shelves, and a roll of batting below, with a railing thingy that blocks the roll from falling off so I can actually pull out batting and cut it off, then quilts on top, hanging quilts and batting scraps underneath

The other side has another shelf where I have the boxes with scraps (need to figure out something else for these some day) I have a plastic bin with threads for the long arm and the bobbin winder next to it too.

Then my desk with Sonja’s playpen right at the end! Even though when I cut fabric I often trim from one side then walk around and cut from the other side and often the fabric hangs off of the edge, but I might have to work around that

The counter is of course still there and then look at the ironing AREA…

The wire shelf was the one I had in my room before and I already had this extra board on top of the ironing board which fit perfectly on top of the wire rack! perfect!! ( just have to try it, as I think it’s a smidge higher than normal but that’s okay I LOVE it)

I moved the printer off of the counter and put it on the shelf, then my UFO’s are on the rest of the shelves

And a gift bag of interfacing in between on the left

Now I need to finish this post so I can SEW!!

what do you think??

(sorry to all the husband’s out there who’d get into trouble now)

Happy Easter

Friday Quilt Along Block 5

We are getting near the end!!

Today we are making the CENTER block that’s appliqued.

Download the file here

Print it out – it’s 4 pages and tape it together on the lines

Here is what it looks like

I like to use Heat N bond, but if you have another brand you like to use that’s fine of course. trace everything out. Everything comes out reverse, but since the flowers are 2 and 2 in mirror image, as long as you trace out 2 of each, you’ll be fine.

Instead of tracing EACH little petal I connected them “under” the circle.

Rough cut out all the shapes and group them together

Now using a light table (if you have it) or a window or if you have good lighting and your background is light like mine, you don’t “NEED” the light table. Then trace out the pattern with a frixion pen or other erasable pen or pencil, I tapes the fabric to the paper and centered it the best I could.

It’s hard to see but here it’s all traced and ready

With a close up

Now take the Heat n Bond pieces and iron them to whatever fabrics you want for the flower pieces, the only time I sort of fussy “placed” them were the center of the flowers and the big center circle, this white fabric just seemed to FIT with that

Now cut out your shapes ON the line

remove the paper backing and place your shapes on the traced block, now since I used the frixion, which disappears when I iron over it, I ironed gently on these pieces first with just the tip of the iron

Then placed the rest of the pieces and ironed everything down.

Now onto machine applique!

I LOVE to use a button hole stitch, it takes a while but it’s worth it!!

Enjoy the process and maybe do one flower at a time and take a break?

One TIP I like to add it for turning/ pivoting.

When you pivot around a curve or corner edge. Do it after the machine has finished the side to side stitching, make sense?

So a button hole stitch goes, FORWARD, BACKWARD, FORWARD, LEFT, RIGHT…. this is the point where you turn WITH the needle down!!

I LOVE my needle down feature AND my knee lift! SOOOO easy to work with applique this way

With the small curves on the petals, maybe just do a few stitches then pivot and do a few more, again with the needle down and just doing a few stitches, it looks much nicer and not “crooked” stitches.

In between the petals, I had the needle down at the end of the stitch on one petal, then pivoted around, raised the needle and moved over that tiny bit and started again with the needle down, this way there’s not much thread to cut

Here’s the back of the block after I finished with red thread, I then used a light yellow thread

I started with the yellow thread on the large center circle right below a stem and went all the way around, then up one stem, did the complete center flower circle, then down the other side of the stem and moved over to the next stem, again it saves a lot of pulling and tugging and thread to plan your path!

Here’s the finished block!

Next week we’ll work on the borders and sew it all together!!

Have you enjoyed it so far? I know I have!! I love seeing how some people pick close to my colors and some go totally different. LOVE that :-)

Again we all love to see Link ups!

Spring quilt

Remember I mentioned earlier about some spring blocks I had from a swap

Here’s a sketch from EQ7 I decided to use

The middle border uses 2 1/2” wide strips

Perfect for binding strip scraps!! which is overflowing BTW

So I picked out the most SPRING ones

I

Ha! can’t even tell!! hmmm (I do have a plan for the rest of these though!!

I know scrappy trip around the world blocks are all the RAGE on blogger lately and I THINK I want to do it too! following Bonnie Hunter’s directions here

Here’s my pile of “spring” strips all ironed and ready

I cut them all into 3 1/2” sections and it was easier to count by 10s so each pile has 10 with a total of 81.

When I sewed them together I picked randomly from the 10 piles and also looked at the EQ sketch to count how many sections were in each row.

I ironed toward the “dark” which could vary depending the set. In one set a yellow might be a light but paired with white it was counted as dark.

Here’s the finished top

Here’s the latest Ahhhh’s too

This one is #12

#13

Last night my husband was playing with Sonja on the floor with Peanut

And I finally got more pre-wound bobbins and got to play some more this morning!

This Bee is in EQ Stitch, I changed the mouth a little, the text is arched in the brother machine

This label will be BIG, the hoop is 5x7

Here’s the completed label.

It took 28min to stitch out.

(Can’t remember the stitch count but I think it was around 16000)

Now this is for a friend, BUT If I would SELL this, how much should I charge for it? I read somewhere to charge $1 per 1000 stitches. well that seems a bit high for “just” a label, but with 30 min work….. I don’t know

My son then wanted a basketball to be made into a pillow, he picked some black dotted fabric. The basket ball was also in EQ Stitch

the embroidery here on the ball is super DENSE, the underlay was maybe 4 different directions!

A cute basketball! –sorry can’t say CUTE about boy stuff…. umm it’s COOL!!

(again I did this post in live writer, but is there a way to auto add a signature every time?)