Off the Clock

After my father passed away his wood lathe came to live at my house.  A couple of years ago I took a pen-making seminar and really enjoyed it.  I was a little reluctant to make more on my own because, like all hobbies, it needs new equipment and a financial outlay.  Even though I have the lathe I would still need to buy a mandrel, bushings, finishing products, etc. on top of the actual materials for each pen.  The cheap b@stard in me was reluctant to do so.  It's like buying pins and tape measures and seam rippers and scissors and everything else just to make a set of napkins.  You are reluctant to make that initial investment.  Just before this past Christmas I started talking about biting the bullet and getting into it anyway.  Life is too short.  I went ahead and ordered a starter kit and J took that as a signal to stock up on blanks for me as a wonderful Christmas gift.  And for the last week I have been having so much fun playi...

I started this quilt about a year and a half ago to use in the sunroom.  It was just going to be a cheapie quilt to learn some new techniques on.  I used cottons I found at Lens Mills in Woodstock and I used cheap polyester batting.  I have a metal dragonfly on the wall and one of my fabrics has dragonflies in it, hence the name.  I found a dragonfly template that you pat with chalk to give you an outline to follow.  Sounds great in theory but it brushes off as you are sewing so it is hard to follow.       So some of the quilt was quilted with dragonflies and the rest was a sampler for learning free-motion quilting. The quilt began as a lap blanket but I added another row and then I added a border and then I added another border... you see where this is going.  It now fits over my queen bed.  The blues are for the pool and one of the blue fabrics has fish on it.  The oranges and yellows are for sunny days which...

So this just came across my Facebook feed lol

I finally finished Granddaughter's quilt.  The last quilt I finished was for her mom - roughly 29 years ago!  Don't look too closely or you will see lots of imperfections.  Having said that, I am so pleased with how it turned out! I used the "Essentially Irish" pattern from this Fabric Surprises  booklet by Love of Quilting magazine.  I notice that Northcott is one of the sponsors of this booklet and I used Northcott fabrics for this quilt, so it seems it was meant to be. I love these fabrics and I'm pretty sure Granddaughter will as well, especially as she gets into her teenage years.  Hopefully it holds together for her until then. I thought about embroidering butterflies on it after I had pieced the quilt top.  You would think it would have been easier to do that ahead of time but I think having the top as a sheet helped with the hooping for the embroidery machine.  I quilted diagonal lines over the Irish chain squares, and then...

Some Christmas' are fairly mild where I live and we are able to have our Christmas dinner in the sunroom with a heater on.  This year we have been having a very cold early winter, and are heading into sub-zero temps over the next few days.  What better time to think about some warm sunny colours for a sunroom lap quilt! I was at Lens Mills last week and picked up the above fabrics.  I initially was thinking of making placemats or mug rugs just to give me something to play with on the old White machine I brought up to J's, but I didn't know how much fabric I would need.  I ended up buying a meter of each and then though "that would make a quilt!".  I've got the blocks made and they are just waiting to be assembled.  I did find that my points are not nearly as accurate as they are with the first quilt I pieced on the Pfaff.  I'm not sure if that is because of the Pfaff's IDT or because the Pfaff has an edge guide 1/4" foot where the White ...

I guess the new baby and the new hobby aren't quite connected, but seeing how negligent I've been about updating my blog I'm just going to put them both in this post. The new baby, as you can see in the above pic, is a Babylock Enlighten serger.  I've been happily serging on my Brother 1034D for many years.  The other week I went to adjust the stitch width from rolled hem back to a regular stitch width when something popped loose.  I had the pressure foot down and I think that's why.  I managed to get it working again but decided that since I had a little extra cash in my pocket this fall why not take advantage and buy my dream serger?  So I did!  As an added bonus I brought the Brother serger and my old original White sewing machine up to keep at J's house so that I can play when I am staying up here. I'll be honest I haven't done much with it yet as I've been totally engrossed in my new hobby - quilting!  I started and finished a quilt top ...

Between picket duty and then being back to work I've been crazy busy the last month.  I've carved out some time to work on projects but I haven't had time to post about them.  So I'm just going to plant a bunch of pics here and perhaps I'll get back and write about them at some point.  You'll have to scroll all the way to the end to find a finished project.