Seeing Straight

Have you ever heard someone say, “If you can sew a straight seam, you can make a quilt”?  I can make a quilt, but I can’t seem to sew straight lines very well!

I attempted to quilt this with parallel vertical lines.  I followed the edge of my walking foot to try to make all the lines evenly spaced, but they are neither perfectly straight or evenly spaced!

My favorite block is this butter yellow version with the bird in the middle.  Every single piece of every single block was made from scraps only, which I’m kind of proud of.  I almost cracked on the last green block and used some fabric from my stash, but then I pulled myself together and looked through my scraps one more time to find two strips long enough for the last two sides.  Victory!

The binding is this great Loulouthi stripe I had in my stash.  And the backing is a SSI yellow swirly fabric I bought in my early sewing days.  It’s not something I’d probably buy today, but I’m glad to finally have a use for it! 

The finished quilt is made of 42 9 1/2 inch blocks and measures 54” x 63”.  It will be gifted at Christmas to relatives visiting my great aunt.  She asked me to make a quilt for them.  Hope they like it!

Linking up to Ellison Lane Quilt’s Scrappy Stash QAL.  Thanks, Jennifer, for putting together such a fun project!

Getting back to sewing

We’ve been sick around here, and we’re not quite over it yet.  I did get a few precious moments tonight to get my bee blocks for April finished so I can mail them all out tomorrow.

We were asked to make 2 modern Gothic window blocks using gray/black/yellow background fabric.  I didn’t have anything that fit the bill, so I bought 3 fat quarters on Etsy right away, but then I ended up procrastinating until the very last minute to get these done.

These two blocks are slightly more rectangular than square.  One side is a 1/4 inch shorter, but if the queen bee is using sashing, these should be usable.

And once I get the hang of it and am ready to move on to doing my last two (hopefully perfect) blocks to send on to the queen bee, I make a move like this:

I wish I could say that mistakes like this are far and few between, but it’s more like every.time.I.sew.anything.  For real.

 

This block is my favorite.  It uses Washi for the background, and the yellow centers are a special-to-me yellow 3o’s repro that I’ve had for years.  Since this block only needed three 2 1/2 inch squares, I thought it would be acceptable if I cut into the fat quarter.

I also spent a little time cutting out fabric for my next quilt.  Everything is ready to chain sew.  I also got my Aneela Hooey quilt basted and ready to quilt. 

Hope you all had a restful and sewful weekend!

This week’s finishes

I have two finishes for this week.  I finally put the binding on this quilt and blogged about it here.

And then I made a special little fishy mat for my daughters’ room.  They have an ant farm (which has lasted much, much longer than the 5-6 weeks as stipulated in the directions—more like 4 months now).  The deal was they could get a betta for their room after all the ants died.  It looks like that is never going to happen, so we went ahead with our fish plans.  (ps.  If you ever get an ant farm and the ants happen to be harvester ants which can bite/sting, tell your babysitter NOT to let the kids go to their room without supervision.)

I used just various fabrics from my stash.  The solids are quilter’s linen (not really linen) by Robert Kaufman.  I got a rainbow of colors from Fabric.com a few weeks ago and have been trying them out.   I didn’t measure it, but the finished dimensions are about a foot square.

I fmqed all over (because I still have not bought a new walking foot) and binded and backed it with el cheapo fabric from Joanns that I bought when I was first starting out sewing.  The quilting is done in light pink thread, but it pretty much just looks white against the top fabrics.  My oldest daughter wanted to know what all those squiggles are supposed to be.  She thinks they look kind of like coral, so I told her that’s what I was aiming for…lol!

We got a new fish on Wednesday, dubbed him “Feather Fin,” and he is doing well, enjoying his much more spacious home.

I am linking up to Crazy Mom Quilts today.