Whaoo! I woke in the middle of the night and couldn’t get back to sleep. I crept down to my sewing room and set about cutting out the shapes to make my first ever Dresden Plate. Crazy, I know but it was on my mind when I went to bed… I used the Darlenne Zimmerman Easy Dresden ruler that I bought two years ago and which, until last night, I’d never lifted from it’s packaging. (I should explain here that I do have a bit of a quilt ruler habit – my ruler collection continues to grow – read on to discover more!).
‘Autumn Leaves’, my patchwork wall hanging is completed – a Happy Dance has been performed! At the start of January this project was a quilt sandwich that I’d put to one side when back in November the pressure to move onto projects with Christmas deadlines became too strong to ignore.
You may know of Sandra Walker’s ‘Dreami’s’? She defines Dreamis as the projects that catch us unawares, demanding we ‘Drop Everything and Make It’! When Sandra first described this phenomenon and began the monthly Dreami link up I was right with her! My sewing room is littered with drop-everything-and-make-it projects! Indeed I have ‘project master lists’ (written with the express idea of keeping me on track with existing projects) that have more unplanned projects penciled in at the bottom than there are projects neatly composed in printer ink at the the top!
In the past two months I have embarked on two Dreami projects. On Sunday I began a third… I spotted Jenny Doan’s latest on-line tutorial featuring a Christmas tree quilt. I thought, ‘I could make that to hang in the sewing room/guestroom!’.
Continuing my attempt to catch up with quilty goings on and other stuff in no particular order:
I’m keeping the quilty momentum going through a nicely balanced week. Yesterday evening I made the final blocks needed for the 2019 Beginners Class sample quilt. It has been a real joy to cut and piece the very pretty Serendipity fabrics. I think the colours will look particularly appealing in the New Year when grey skies abound and the trees and flower beds are bare.
This is a photo of my sewing space set up for cutting and piecing. Everything within easy reach.
The swivel office chair is really useful and the folding table is lightweight but sturdy – a good rest for the little ironing board and my coffee mug 🙂 My cutting mat is on the folding, gate-leg table which when fully extended becomes my basting table. I am on a mission to find a proper place for everything in my sewing room. The wooden ruler rack my Dad made for me is just wonderful. I so enjoy reaching for rulers as I need them and slotting them back in place after each use – no more scrabbling around on the cutting table to find a ruler or trying to ‘store’ them leaning against the legs of the table!
The wooden ruler rack has six grooves and currently holds eight rulers.
Not nearly as elegant as the handmade ruler rack but just as practical are these re-purposed washing tablet containers. A couple of these on the cutting table or next to my sewing machine help me to keep all my supplies within sight and easy reach. And I’m forming good habits, putting items back in the containers straight after use – less time searching for mis-placed items is more time to be creative 😉 What measures have you taken to make more efficient use of your creative space and time?
Today I would like to stitch the Beginners blocks together and complete the quilt top but I know quilting the current Beginners quilt is a more urgent task. Time to rearrange the furniture for quilting…
Tables rearranged to support the weight of a quilt whilst machine quilting.
In my previous post I mentioned a couple of crafty projects I had been working on for events at our Church. Our monthly craft group received a kind donation of a box full of polystyrene balls. Humm! What to do with them? A quick search on-line and I found this excellent tutorial on You Tube – how to make a fabric covered bauble by Big Dreams Embroidery. The tutorial even includes a very helpful demonstration showing how to make the double bow that sits atop the completed bauble. My daughter and I spent a morning experimenting and made a bauble to use as a sample. I took along a pile of my Christmas stash fabrics to the Craft Group meeting on Monday and the bauble making was a big success 🙂
The second craft I’m working on also involved looking on line for inspiration. A tea-light holder. Members of our Church congregation have responded generously to a request for empty preserve jars. I’ve had a search through them all and brought home a few that need more than a scrub with wire-wool to remove the last traces of the label glue. This is a job for solvent…
The weather has been so mild this week that I’ve hung washing out to dry in the garden! Last week and over the weekend we did have some very heavy rain. I’ve been aware that the seed in the bird feeders had got very wet and was looking distinctly moldy, not to say manky. Making the most of the dry weather I dismantled the feeders, gave them a soak and a scrub in hot, soapy water before leaving them to air dry in the warmth of the sun. It was very satisfying to get on and do one of the many ‘I must get round to doing that’ jobs dotted around my house and garden!
I hope you will bear with my snapshots and snippets – I am so happy to be capturing some of my whirling thoughts and bringing them to the blog at last 🙂 I’m afraid it all reads as a real jumble of random thoughts and activities but maybe I’m not alone in jumping about from one crafty/home activity to another?
