Sewing Play

I have been working on a variety of projects in the sewing room. This is the quilt I started when the boys decided that they wanted to play with the blocks for this quilt. I have this new baby quilt pinned and ready for quilting.

In my sewing room switch about I found a bin of felted sweaters. I made a few play oven mitts.

I made one of these for miss Petunia a while back and she has really enjoyed using it with her play kitchen stuff. She snitched one of the new ones so that she now has a pair.

The turquoise mitts are made from a cable knit sweater and have a lovely texture.

I gave up waiting for a new plan for the Colorful Butterfly quilt and today have been sewing that one together in a randomish scattered layout. 

Back to School Skirt

I know, M isn't even on summer break yet and here I am making clothes for P to wear to school next fall. Crazy.

A friend cleaned in her sewing room and gave me this baby wale corduroy. I knew I wanted to make a skirt for P so rather than let the fabric get buried and forgotten under other projects I went ahead and made the skirt. P said she wanted it to be REALLY twirly so we followed the same formula that we used for this skirt but used two widths of fabric instead of one. I turns out that we had JUST the right amount of fabric. I like when there are no leftovers from a project.

I think it  passed the twirl test.

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End of May Color

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We are enjoying some splashes of late May color in the yard. P loves that she can see these pink peonies from the window in her room.

I love these Siberian Iris that were divided from some that belonged to my mother.

I don't remember what these flowers are but the bees really like them.

We also have a variety of other iris blooming now. My neighbor gave me a garbage bag of pretty rusty brown iris last year. We planted them all along the front of the yard by the road. A few are blooming this year but next year should be spectacular.

I am still learning about my new sewing machine. I have a quilt top pinned and ready to go when I feel confident enough with my skills on the new "sewing computer".

I think I'll go ahead with the "random" look for the Spring Butterflies quilt. I will need to lay that out again and then sew it together.

I should have some fun sewing progress to share soon. I don't think you would be very interested in the mending of blue jeans that I did yesterday.

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The Sampler

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My grandmother had quite a collection of fancy hand towels hanging in her bathroom.  She taught me how to make these Swedish Weaving towels when I was little -  some of my very first needle work projects.

When D was in elementary school I taught him how to make them. He made a few for teachers and other special people. My grandmother was so thrilled that he had learned how to do this that on one visit to her house she gave him this:

I wonder why I had never seen this sampler before.

I love how she stitched just enough to show the pattern and that the patterns just run into each other.

Finding treasures like this makes sewing room clean up and rearranging all the more fun.

Out With the Old - In With the New

I bought myself a new sewing machine this week! The sewing room is in disarray as I try to figure out how it will all be arranged. I am thrilled to have a sewing cabinet that the machine will fit down in. I have never had the sewing machine bed to be level with the table. I'll share more about the machine later, after it is set up and presentable. I can tell you that it has lots of space to the right of the needle which is great for machine quilting.

In the mean time we are busy with window repairs, bathroom installation, and issues with our well.

Never a dull moment.

Color Play

P was thrilled to help me lay out the 361 blocks in the butterfly quilt. We had to move the furniture in the living room to have space to lay it all out.

We were pleased with the layout but others in the family want to try a color or value placement to the blocks.

We picked up all the blocks and have them sorted by light on dark, dark on light, and same value. We all got headaches from squinting our eyes at the blocks to see which way they read. 

Does anyone have a ten foot design wall I can borrow?

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Back to School!?

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P is SO very excited about starting kindergarten in the fall. We went to Kindergarten Round-Up a couple of weeks ago and now the talk is all kindergarten all the time around here. Preschool is over and she is revved up. At Kindergarten Round-Up one of the teachers showed a backpack and demonstrated what would need to go into a student's pack. She pulled out a lunch box, homework folder, a library book, a "book-in-a-bag", a pair of snow pants, and a pair of shoes. P was amazed. She started asking me right away about her backpack. The well trained seamstress that she is came right into the sewing room to choose fabrics to make one!

We used this pattern by Cindy Taylor Oates. P chose the fabrics, trims, and even decided on the quilting patterns.

I reinforced the bottom gusset and the straps with denim cut from an old pair of jeans.

We made the small size and had to shorten the straps a bit to fit her.

I like the finished look on the inside. I  just hope we can fit all of the required items in there.

P loves her new pack and even wore it when helping with the field fire.

This could be a very long summer.

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A Great Day for a Fire

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Sunday was a great day for our annual field fire.

Each year we burn a portion of our prairie areas. The fire helps to discourage the plants we don't want and encourages the native plants we do want growing there.

I enjoy being outside and watching the flames. If everything goes as planned that is all that we have to do. The fire puts itself out when it gets to the mowed grass that is next to the prairie.

The flares when the fire hits a thick patch of dry grass can be exciting.

It was a great afternoon. The fire behaved just as planned.

I like that the annual fire is something that the whole family enjoys. It is a relaxing work day and we come in smelling of smoke. It has become a spring tradition of sorts. Maybe we have an unusual definition of family fun.

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Thoughtful Sunday

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"That morning I walked to school looking down at all the different colored pieces of cloth in my coat. All the stories the Quilting Mothers had told me about the rags and who they belonged to, I knew by heart. I had ended up choosing the most worn pieces for my coat because the best stories went with them."

The Rag Coat, Lauren Mills, 1991. (This is an excellent book. I have read this book aloud many times at home and at the elementary school and still can not read it aloud without crying.)

Spring Butterflies

P has been helping me make these butterfly blocks for my latest quilt. First she helped with stacking the background fabrics for each block. She counted the bundles of four and had fun making the star pattern with the blocks turned on each other.

Her favorite part is matching up the scraps to go with each background. She auditions several colors with each fabric before deciding. I have to say she is really good at that part.

It is fun to sit and work at my sewing machine while she is helping  on the other side of the table. I also enjoy how much faster the process is with a helper.

I am eager to get all the blocks finished and see what they look like together.

I don't currently have a design wall to put these on (I always just arrange the blocks on the floor) but I think I may have to fashion something to arrange this quilt. I want to have it up and play with it for a while before I sew it.Well, it is a soggy, rainy, thundery sort of day so I expect we will do a bit of sewing today.

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Petunia's Rose Dress

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Sometimes I need a deadline in order to actually finish a project. This dress is one of those times. The Olympics gave me the push I needed to finish the knitting.  The preschool Mother's Day Lunch is the deadline I needed to finish the rest of the dress. P has been telling me that she wanted to wear this to Mother's Day Lunch at preschool on Friday.

Last night I sewed on the buttons and this morning I worked in all of the thread tails.

I am pretty sure she likes it.I like it too.

There was a time back in March that I wasn't even sure I would finish this but now I am thrilled with the result!

The dress is knit from a 1945 vintage knitting pattern book. I used two whole skeins of Grandma's Blessing from Briar Rose Fibers.

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The Dandelion Experiment

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P has been telling me about two DIFFERENT kinds of dandelions - the yellow kind and the gray kind.

She could not be convinced that they were the SAME flower. So, we started "The Dandelion Experiment."

We marked an unopened dandelion flower and took a picture of it each day.

The experiment was, however, cut short by a rabbit.

We will be starting the experiment again but perhaps we need to find a wire cage to put around the dandelion. 

Instagram Photos

I finished the Dala Sweater and couldn’t be happier with it! The pattern is #dalasweater by @elenormortensen. More details on my ravelry page. #knitter #strandedknitting #operationsweaterchest #handknitsweater #makersvillage #makersgonnamake
I started this sweater on our car trip last week. I had chosen a different yarn for the horses but it was thinner and didn’t work well with the blue. I frogged the few rows I had knit and subbed in some yarn from my stash when I got home. The y
Narrow hand appliquéd bias strips. 1/16” quilting lines not going over the appliqué. I’m about a month in on the quilting and ALMOST finished. Whoop! Quilted with Invisalign on top and Decobob in the bobbin. Threads by @wo
This summer we watched my two oldest grand kids one day a week. Towards the end of the summer they started making projects on their own in the sewing room. They made lots of little projects from my scrap basket including pillow cases and tiny quilts