Sunday Sevens 07-26-15

Tags

Bateman Island, cats, Chiawana Park, CozyAfternoonQuilt, Pasco, quilting, sewing, Sunday Sevens

Sunday Sevens is a weekly blog series in which we share seven-or-so pictures that show a little bit of what our week was about.  Natalie at Threads and Bobbins is the one who got the whole thing started.  Everyone is welcome to join us!

Lots of outdoorsy photos to show you today, as I did a lot of walking this week.

This is Chiawana Park in Pasco.  Love this end of the park with all the old trees.

Those big white birds there are pelicans.  (Most of the other birds in the picture are our full-figured local geese, and the pelicans dwarf them, so they are BIG.)

Grumpy Old Bear wasn’t happy about having to share the bed with his sister, so he went off to sit in the sink, where there’s only enough room for a bear.

The July block for my Cozy Afternoon BOM is done; I really like this one.

Wade and Chiawana Parks were taken over by boat race stuff on Friday, so I took this raised path along the Pasco side of the river.

My niece had a baby boy this week, so I decided to whip out a quick baby quilt for her.  I pieced this on Friday, got some batting from SCRAP on Saturday, and put my quilt sandwich together.  And now I’m being horribly indecisive about how I want to quilt it.  😛

I was initially thinking wavy lines like this, but I’m also considering big concentric hearts . . . I just haven’t done enough quilting to feel confident in my choices yet.

I just need to dive in and quit thinking about it, don’t I?

Yep, I thought so.

Have a great week, everybody, and try not to let your brain get in your way.

STH

New Resources Page

Tags

cats, meta, quilting, SCRAP Tri-Cities, sewing

Happy Monday, everybody.  😛

(The bed only got halfway made this morning.)

Just wanted to let you know that I’ve added a “Resources” page to the blog with lots of links to free sewing tutorials, quilt patterns, scrap projects, etc.  This is going to be an ongoing project; right now, I’ve just got the sites and projects linked up there that immediately came to mind, but I’m planning to keep adding to it.

This is largely for my own use, since I’ve been using Delicious for bookmarks and it just keeps getting glitchier and glitchier (SHUT UP SPELL CHECK THAT IS SO A WORD).  Deleted bookmarks reappear, other ones just randomly disappear, and now it’s just occasionally throwing up error messages at me.  According to the techie person I live with, this situation is unlikely to improve.

Another consideration is that the folks at SCRAP Tri-Cities have expressed an interest in having me teach a few sewing classes over there, and I’d like to be able to refer students to a list of resources they can use to learn more and make more after the class.

So I’m going to keep working on it and adding links as I come across them. Any suggestions you have for additions would be very welcome, and please let me know if you find any linky wonkiness (OH HOW I CHAFE UNDER THE TYRANNY OF SPELL CHECK) on the page.

Thanks much for your help and I hope you find the links to be helpful and inspiring.

STH

Sunday Sevens 07-19-15

Tags

cats, CozyAfternoonQuilt, quilting, RSC15, SCRAP Tri-Cities, sewing, Sunday Sevens

Sunday Sevens is a weekly series of posts containing seven-ish pictures from our week.  Thank you to Natalie of Threads and Bobbins for getting it all started.

This week was sort of all about new fabric, which is weird considering how rarely I buy fabric, but it was a BARGAIN, so it totally doesn’t count.

On Monday, I put the cage around our tomato plants as they’re getting big enough to need one (will also keep out the neighbor kitty that’s been digging in there–BAD KITTY).

My mother and sister brought me back fat quarters from Oregon!

Better pic:

On Wednesday, Chrissa from SCRAP Tri-Cities called to say they’d just received a HUGE donation of fabric and did I have any time to come in and help measure it all?  Which donation led to a fabric sale, which led to this:

Hey, don’t judge–all this cost me less than $10!

And then there were these on Thursday–$1.50 for the lot!

I’m pondering what to do with them, but I keep coming up with some sort of folded-fabric, 3-D quilt.  Would have to be a wall quilt, because this is all wool and silk and will have to be dry-cleaned.  Hmmm . . . .

By Friday, I was going a little batty due to sewing withdrawal, so I sewed up the first two blocks for my Cozy Afternoon Quilt.

And Saturday, I did the second purple block for my scrap quilt.

Have a great week, everybody, and I hope you’re able to get some crafty time in there.

STH

Sunday Sevens 07-13-2015

Tags

dogs, gardening, Missoula, Montana, Quartz Flat Campground, quilting, RSC15, sewing, Sunday Sevens, Superior, travel

Sunday Sevens is the brainchild of Natalie over at Threads and Bobbins.  It’s a weekly blog series in which we post seven-or-so pictures from our week, usually on Sunday, except if you’re me and it’s been one of those I’M RUNNING AS FAST AS I CAN kind of weeks.

Not much crafting this week, as I was house-sitting for my mother and sister while they took a trip to Oregon.  They’re both big-time gardeners and temps were still 100F and above, so there was much running around with watering cans and hoses.

They also have pets–this is Nigel, one of my sister’s little dogs:

Isn’t he a cutie?  And much less noisy than her other dog, who barked and growled at me THE ENTIRE TIME I was at her house.  He would finally stop when I left and closed the door behind me, then START UP AGAIN when he heard me put the key in the door to lock it.

Perhaps not the sharpest tool in the drawer.

My own few plants have been struggling in the heat, except for the basil:

You can’t really tell from this picture, but my basil plants are about a foot tall.  That’s a pot of oregano next to it (which is not as happy about the whole heat thing).

I did get one more block done on my scrap quilt; the center block here is called Carrie Nation.

Mid-morning Friday my partner and I headed out for our camping trip in Montana.  Here’s our tent all set up in Quartz Flat Campground, near the town of Superior.

These are Ponderosa Pines:

We actually arrived in the middle of a thunderstorm and had to wait in the car for it to pass before we could set up.

The forecast for Saturday was for temps in the 70s and 50% chance of rain.  Instead of that, it was chilly and rained all day; the planned whitewater rafting was shelved in favor of a trip to Missoula for breakfast.  Then our group of 11 split up and spent the day shopping and exploring.

After checking out the local bike shops, my honey and I did a little hiking around the campground.

And I took many, many pictures of moss and lichens.

On Sunday morning, it was still raining off and on and we were happy to head home out of the damp.  It was a fun trip, though, and the group we were with was full of interesting, quirky characters–just the kind of folks you want to sit around the campfire with.

Have a wonderful week, everybody, and I hope you have some good friends to spend it with.

STH

Sunday Sevens 07-05-2015

Tags

cats, cooking, CozyAfternoonQuilt, quilting, recipe, RSC15, sewing, Sunday Sevens

Sunday Sevens is a weekly blog series in which we post sevenish pictures of the events of our week.  Natalie at Threads and Bobbins got it started.  Feel free to join us!

The ongoing heat here means I’ve been spending WAY too much time cooped up at home.  The downside of that is no outdoorsy photos, but the upside is that lots of home projects and crafts happened this week.

I have apparently caught the organizing bug BIG TIME and went ahead and measured and sorted out the rest of my fabric.

I guess it must have been bothering me more than I realized?  Or something?  Because otherwise I have no explanation for this.

I even cut some selvages off of the leftover scraps for a future selvage project.

No, I don’t know what’s come over me, either.  😛

Of course, the inevitable result was that I came up with another project idea.  I have a ton of this cotton with leaves and ladybugs/ladybirds on it and decided to make a simple woven tee with it.  I’ve been wearing my lovely cotton me-made blouses non-stop recently, so maybe I could use another . . . .

(Ack, sorry about the picture.)

Some more blocks got done on my scrap quilt this week; that’s three months worth done now.  W00T!

Working on these yellow blocks was like being bathed in sunshine.  🙂

The next color is purple, MY ONE TRUE LOVE.

I’ve also finally gotten started on embroidering the first block for my Cozy Afternoon Quilt.

I’m also happy to report that the cats have settled back into their little routines after Pooh’s Not-Very-Excellent Medical Adventure.  Pooh’s back to his grueling napping schedule (rather than constantly following me around, as he was doing for the week after his surgery) and Shelby’s decided she still loves her big brother and has stopped hissing at him.

The coveted nap spot on the windowsill in my sewing room:

We all spent a quiet Independence Day at home with our respective hobbies:  me quilting, the cats napping, and my honey building up his new frame into a bike.

We had a nice dinner of barbecued burgers, potato salad, and grilled marinated vegetables.  If you have pots of herbs growing on your windowsill, this is a great way to use them; when I make it, I increase the herbs and cut the oil to 1/4 cup.

The week to come should see less crafting and more outdoorsy-ness (yes, it is totally a word).  My mother and sister will be in Oregon, so I’ll be doing house- and pet-sitting duties for them, and then my partner and I are headed to Montana for our second camping trip!

Have an excellent week, everybody!

STH

WAY MAX COLOR DUDE Tote

Tags

bags, McCall's 3894, sewing

I hope everybody is having a great day, whether it’s a holiday where you are or not.  I’m not all that big on Independence Day, but I am big on barbecue, so we’ve got burger patties thawing, potato salad chilling, and vegetables marinating here.  It’s WAY too hot to go out and watch fireworks (still over 100F every day here), but I may be able to endure our patio for long enough to grill dinner.  We’ll see.

Is it my memory distorting things, or was everything in the ’70s covered in huge bright shapes?  I was a kid, so maybe it was just all the stuff for kids that looked like that.  I remember a dress that my mother made for my sister that had big cartoony apples on it and a zipper up the front . . . the unfortunate thing was that she didn’t realize it was a directional print until it was too late, so all the apples were upside-down.  (Is there a sewer who has never done that?)

This fabric reminds me of those big graphic prints and has some very ’70s colors in it, especially the orange and avocado.  I suspect it may be vintage–my googling was inconclusive–but what really matters to me is that it makes me smile.

The pattern is a McCall’s from 2002 that I’ve used to make a tote bag before.  I wanted a little bit bigger one this time, so I added a few inches to the width.  The plan is to use this for weekends away (though I did find it STILL a bit too small for our camping trip).

I used the leftover green flannel from my last travel bag for the lining here.  The handles and pocket lining are black duck.  Only new component to this project is the outer fabric, which I bought at SCRAP Tri-Cities.

This pattern is a little unusual in that, instead of lots of pockets inside, it has big ones on the outside.  To make them a little bit more useful, I sewed some huge snaps on them to keep them closed.

Then I sat back and looked at the bag and debated.  Yeah, it’s got that huge wild print on it, but it feels like it needs a little something more . . . .

Yep, that’s what it needed.

I rummaged through my beads and found a couple black glass donuts and two bright pink wood beads and added them to the pockets right over the snaps.  It was a bit of a trial sewing them on; I really hate beading needles, and I’m pretty sure I threw mine away in a fit of OH SO GRUMPY, but I could have used one here.  The beads may not survive the laundry (must remember to cover them with foil!), but for now I’m loving the contrasting textures they add to the bag.

Have a great day, everybody!

STH