Paper pieced

Today was my local quilt guild's sew day, so I had to bring a project to work on.  I'm in the middle of quilting my mom's quilt and my log cabin quilt, but since treadle machines don't travel well I had to come up with a project that was a little more portable.

Paper piecing to the rescue!  I used this pattern to create my block.

I kind of adore it!  I'm going to make two more paper pieced blocks to use as mini quilts to hang between two of my husband's guitars in the living room.  Even though I love it, it took forever to make.  I couldn't imagine tackling a whole quilt this way.

Mending

Crafting and blogging don't pay the bills, so I have a job as an educator for a local school district.  Unfortunately, this coming year will be a challenging one.  I won't bore you with the politics going on in Wisconsin, but the end result is that my take-home pay has been sliced.  Badly.  And as the sole breadwinner in this family (my husband is a stay-at-home dad, another great occupation that doesn't pay bills) it's been causing me a lot of stress.  So I've been looking at ways to save money.

Unfortunately, over the past several months my son has developed the habit of chewing on the collars of his shirts.  His pediatrician and his dentist both have no idea why this is.  It seems to be an absent-minded habit at this point.  I started putting spray on his collars to deter him with a bad taste, but it was too late.  The necklines of several of his t-shirts had holes.  After taking a good hard look at his shirts, and a good hard look at my bank account, I decided to mend them instead of replacing half of his summer wardrobe.

I don't know how to mend...I actually had to look it up on YouTube.  It wasn't too tough, and now I'm pretty decent at it.  I worked my way through a small stack of his t-shirts this afternoon.  This was one of my first attempts.

Not perfect, but not too bad.  I think it'll be pretty inconspicuous on a moving five-year-old.  I also mended a dress of my daughter's...she got a hold of a pair of scissors and decided to "make a pocket." 

I also shortened the sleeves on one of my son's long sleeved t-shirts...his kindergarten class was painting one day and he got paint all over his sleeves.  It absolutely wouldn't wash off.  Why on earth would you give four and five-year-olds non-washable paint?  Anyway, my Singer 27 did a great job, as always.  I'm always a little surprised when I find it can sew a type of fabric that didn't exist in 1901 when it was manufactured.  But it actually did a better job than my modern machine did the last time I tried to sew knit.

I need to finish my mom's Carpenters Wheel quilt, but I'm itching to start a paper-pieced Mariner's Compass...I want a Mariner's Compass mini-quilt, and I already know just where I'll hang it.  I hope I can finish both soon!

Finished block

My finished bee block...I kind of love it. I may need to make a great granny square quilt!

Bee blocks, Mom's quilt, and oh yeah, I had a baby

I'm finally back on my sewing machine after a hiatus of over a month.  I had my baby!  She's beautiful and wonderful, and everything went great.  But the adjustment of going from a family of four to a family of five has been a challenging one and not much time was left for sewing.  Fortunately she's started taking longer naps, which means I can sneak downstairs with the other kids and get some sewing in.

My August bee block is underway!

I think this is the first block in the bee that I'm actually sad to mail off...I wouldn't mind keeping it!  I'm still working on piecing it together (and I actually made more progress since this photo was taken this afternoon) but I already really like it.  The colors are really pretty to me.  I hope the recipient likes it too.

I also got some work in on my mom's quilt.  I'm over a third of the way done quilting, and I'm going to show it to her this weekend.  Hopefully she'll like the direction it's going, since I don't want to rip out all of that quilting.

I also got an urge to start another mini-quilt...a paper pieced Mariner's Compass.  We'll see if I actually get around to doing it...I feel like I have too many WIPs, and I want to finish some before I start some more.

It feels so good to have my hands back in fabric and my feet back on my treadle.

Attachment Love

Today I did a little work on the Carpenter's Wheel quilt.  Nearly at my due date and still able to use a treadle sewing machine - that proves how easy they are to use!

The set-up I use for piecing and straight-line quilting is actually a combination of two sewing machines - I had a sewing machine head that I was able to oil up and use, but the cabinet was in pieces.  I bought a second 27 (I felt sorry for it!) with a completely frozen head, but a cabinet that was at least intact.  They were both made in the same giant batch of Singer 27s in 1901, so I don't feel bad about smooshing them both together. 

Some people may think that the second 27 was a poor purchase, but the cabinet came stuffed with goodies in the drawers - machine manuals (how cool!) and a big box of attachments.  Attachments to make hems, attachments to make ruffles, attachments to shirr fabric, and an attachment to quilt.

There it is!  It's just a guide bar to help you follow lines you've quilted previously.  They still make them for modern machines and they look a lot the same.  They work the same too.

The quilting is not actually that puckered, I just neglected to smooth it out before I took a photo.  Oops.

The quilting bar wasn't expensive - 20 cents in 1901, which is about $5.50 in today's money.  I forget how much the whole box cost, but it was pretty expensive.  I'm so lucky that I found one!

Baby shoes

I finished my last bit of pre-baby sewing...a pair of baby shoes. 

I was hoping they'd be like bait and lure her out, but I doubt it.  At least I can just quilt away until she comes...working on quilts is so much more relaxing than working on clothing or other things that are three-dimensional.  That works out a whole different area of my brain.

Cat-astrophe

I'm trying to make light, but I'm seriously not amused.

We have three cats - Lucky Lou, Edison, and Juneau.  Edison has the tendency to wake me up around 5:30 AM by walking on my face, and Lucky Lou thinks litterbox use is optional.  I find both of these habits highly annoying, so I often refer to Juneau as "the good one."

Two days ago I finished the quilting on the central star of my mom's quilt.  I decided to bring it over to show her before I finished anything else, to see if she liked the direction I was headed.  I was going to visit her the next morning, so I carefully folded it and put it on the couch so I'd remember to bring it with me.  Juneau promptly curled up on it and went to sleep.  I laughed and thought, That's cute, it's not even done and it's cat-approved already.

The next morning I woke up and found her sleeping on the back of the couch near the quilt.  And the quilt?  Covered in cat vomit. 

I was so upset that I just put the quilt in the basement.  I couldn't even deal with it then.  Last night I brought it back out to survey the damage.  Luckily because of how it was folded only one corner of the back got stained.  However, I needed to wash it, and I couldn't very well put it through the washer and dryer in its half-quilted, half-basted state.  So I hand washed it and hung it in the basement to dry.

Today I'll inspect it in the bright sunlight.  Hopefully all of the stains will come out.  Otherwise I'm not sure what I'll do.  I've already quilted through a big chunk of it...I'd hate to rip it all out and replace the entire back.  I just really hope it all washed out.

This is the quilting I've done so far.  My mom wanted all straight lines, so I hope she likes this.

Oh, and Juneau seems fine by the way - not sick at all.  Honestly, why couldn't she have just jumped onto the floor to do that?