Pics or It'll Never Happen

The funny thing about not blogging regularly is that I still take pictures as though I were.  Maybe not as many, but I still do some kind of photo documentation on a regular basis.  

Then every so often (like this evening) I'll be looking through my photo archives and wonder why I couldn't get my act together and just write a blog post.  

(Table runner made for a friend)

When and if I ever figure that out, I'll let you know.  In the meantime, how about I share a few pictures from the past several months.

I love a good thrift shop fabric score, which will come as no surprise to many of you.  

One day, I bought a bag that I thought was fabric scraps and one completed quilt block in it that I could see.  It was sealed with tape so I couldn't inspect the rest of the contents, but I took a chance.  

Turns out it was a whole bag of orphan blocks!

I put them up on the design wall and left them there for a week or two while I mulled over whether (and how) I might put them together into one quilt. 

Ultimately, it just made my brain hurt so I nixed the idea (for the time being), and they all went back in the bag from whence they came and then into my own orphan block box.  But when I opened that box to put them in, some orphan squares of my own caught my eye and I pulled those out to play with.

I ended up making hourglass blocks out of those leftover squares and it turned into this baby quilt.

(Back of hourglass block baby quilt)

 So I guess the bag of orphan blocks was worth it insofar as getting me in the headspace to create something from (my own) orphans.

Here's something I left behind at the thrift store recently, but I had to take a picture.

This sewing machine reminded me of the one I learned to sew on.  My mom bought a second-hand machine for my sister and I to use.  I don't remember the brand, but it looked an awful lot like this one.  I really, really liked that machine.  This one was only marked $15, but goodness knows I don't need another vintage machine.  It sure was pretty, though!

This post is getting a little long (or I'm just getting tired), but I have more pics to share, so look for Part 2 soon.  I'll leave you with a couple non-sewing related photos from the summer. 

My husband I were biking along on a country road, blasting Led Zeppelin from a portable bluetooth speaker, when I noticed cranes in a field out of the corner of my eye.  Not just sandhill cranes but also a pair of whooping cranes!  

I quickly killed the music so as not to scare them away, and we got off our bikes to watch them for awhile.  How exciting!

~Paulette

Sunday Sundry 5-21-23

It's been awhile since I did a Sunday Sundry post, a smorgasbord of this and that.  I have been sewing, too, so let's start with what I'm currently working on.

This four-patch quilt is coming along nicely.  It started with a pull of some fat quarter remnants and similar scraps I've accumulated over time.  These muted colors don't typically resonate with me when I'm fabric shopping, but somehow, by gift or thrift, I've ended up with enough of them such that they can all now live their best life together in a quilt.  I'm happy to do the honors.

When I saw this pattern on Mary Quilts, I decided it would work well for this project.  It's called Four Patches on the Diagonal. 

I actually have the top mostly together now except for the outer border, so you'll see it soon.  The more I work on it, the more I like it!

Happy Mail!

A few weeks ago, I got a happy mail package from The Joyful Quilter!  She sent me some nice John Deere themed fabric, as well as a couple bags chock full of blue and green scraps.  I was oohing and aahing over the green ones here.

I may be putting these to good use soon, as Jo's Country Junction is doing a YouTube tutorial series on a scrappy star block quilt she is calling Picadilly Circus.  It looks like fun!

Joyful also included a fun mug rug.  The happy colors make me smile! :)

Like Another Hole in the Head

I had my ears re-pierced a few weeks ago.  Yay!  Since I quit in-office work a dozen or so years ago and thus didn't wear earrings regularly, one of them had completely closed and the other needed way too much effort to shove a post through.  So I met my daughter at the tattoo and piercing salon and we made an afternoon of it, shopping and having lunch after the deed was done.

We even stopped at the thrift store and made a pretty good clothing haul.  Dear daughter spotted this colorful shirt on the rack and waved it as I was getting ready to check out, and I gave it an enthusiastic nod (under $4, I think it was).  It's a Lands End rash guard with UPF 50. 

I tried it on at home and it fit perfectly (always an iffy proposition with my long arms).  Having had my first skin check in February this year (and the scars to prove it; nothing cancerous, thankfully), I probably need to get serious about protecting my skin.

Suddenly Spring!

It took forever for spring to arrive—or feel like it was sticking around, anyway—but it finally seems to have made up its mind.  I planted flowers this past week, mostly in pots scattered here and there around the house.  

Lily of the Valley always reminds me of my grandma.  She had a patch of it in one of her gardens, but she also had some kind of scented powder that smelled like it.  

I did battle with it in the flower bed on the north side of my house, but it persists in finding a way through the cracks.  Ah, well.  I pinch off a sprig and inhale and am transported back to Grandma's house on Hubbard Street all those years ago.

Today was also my first bike ride of the season.  We did a respectable 15 miles with a couple rests stops along the way to give my knees a break.  The idea of an e-bike is looking better every year, but I'd like to keep pedaling under my own power as long as I can.  We tend to bike fairly flat trails so it's still doable for now. 

It was about as perfect a day for biking as there could be!

It's rhubarb season, and I picked a fresh batch a couple days ago.  Earlier this month, I used up the last of the frozen rhubarb and some mulberries from last summer in a rhubarb-berry crisp.  Delicious!

~Paulette

Cutting, Committing, and Cuffs

Sometimes what I do in the sewing room seems hardly worth mentioning.  Cleaning up, refolding fabric, making frankenbatting...those are the kinds of things I've been up to.  Necessary, but mostly background stuff.  Eventually, it leads somewhere.  

I picked up a few shirts at the thrift stores last week.  It used to be (and not long ago) that I could buy a decent shirt for $3.99, but now they're almost double that in price and then some if it's a name they associate with a premium brand, which seems weird to me because brand name doesn't always correlate to quality.  Wow, I sound like such an old person.  

Anyway, when I shop for shirts now, I take note of the tag colors that are 50% off and hone in on those.  I came home with a good armful of them, and a few other items.

(Thrifted zippers for bag making and some thread.)

(I think this thrifted shirt and striped fabric will become a bag.)

Over the next few days, I cut up shirts.  There ended up being a nice pile to add to the stash.

I usually toss the cuffs and collars, but I played around with them first.  The thought occurred to me that perhaps I could join the cuffs together for a table runner.  

After removing the buttons and giving them a good pressing, I butted together the cut ends and zigzagged them, then joined them all in a row.  At that point, I couldn't tell if the idea was "cool" or "crap."

Should I trim them off evenly and use the button plackets as an edging and finish it that way?  I mulled it over for a few hours and then decided to toss it in the orphan box to marinate and move on.  But as I started to do that, I passed the bookshelf in the sewing room and decided to try the piece out on top of it in place of the vintage fruit-themed dresser scarf that was there.

Well, well, well...  I liked it there!  A humble little runner under the old toy tractor my dad used to have for his grandkids to play with.  It'll do just fine, as is.

Now what's next? I pondered.  A few ideas were floating around in my head, but I needed to focus.  One way to help me do that is to make a commitment, so I went and signed up for the Hands2Help Comfort Quilt Challenge.  

With that in mind, I started cutting out a sampler-type quilt from a free pattern I downloaded from JOANN and bought fabric for a few months back.  I really like those big wavy curves.  It's something a little different for a sampler.

I originally thought it would be a baby quilt, but it's more like lap quilt size. So I'm going to make it up for H2H.  At least, that's my thought at the moment.

Here's the first block on the design wall.  Turns out the fabric wasn't as bright blue as the pattern seemed to indicate, but that's okay.  It is a little brighter looking than the photo in real life, but more a muted navy than medium blue in any case.

What are you working on?

~Paulette

Luck at the Thrifts

I've had some good luck at the thrift stores over the past few months.  I don't think I've done a post about these finds, but forgive me if I do repeat anything.

Actually, this first item came from a flea market several months ago.  One group of tables was piled with clothing and that's where I spied this beautiful red plaid shirt.  The tables seemed to be a family affair, so when I asked how much the shirt was, the man deferred to his tween-age son to answer with a price.  The kid said, "Fifty cents."  The father nodded.  Sold!

This is a big shirt!  There's a lot of usable fabric in this XL size.  And it looked like it had never been worn, with a lightly starched feeling and creasing like it was right out of the package.  A quality brand as well, Brooks Brothers.  Deal of the day!  It's so pretty, I haven't even washed and deboned it yet, but eventually I'll do that and add it to the shirt stash, along with another one I found at a thrift store, below.

I like the bright blue and turquoise check of this shirt.  I have no immediate plans for it, but it adds a nice variety to the stash.  I did use up quite a few shirts for the last couple of quilts, so I'm on the lookout for good ones, especially lights and brights.  

As far as actual fabric finds, you can see a couple pieces that I got the same day I bought the checked shirt.  At another store, I found quite a few good-sized pieces, including some John Deere fabric, the three pieces on the right side below.

I hadn't thought of making a John Deere themed quilt, but when I saw these, I decided maybe it was time to do that.  Dear Dad, who worked for Deere for 35 years, would have approved.

Now, I'm not a big jewelry wearer anymore; my pierced ears have closed up (might get them re-pierced), but once in a while I wear a necklace.  This one caught my eye at the thrift store.  Even if I don't wear the pendant (but why not?), the chain is nice and I could put a number of other pendants on it or wear it alone.  At under two bucks, it was a no-brainer.  Found another green and yellow fabric there, too.  It could become part of the JD quilt?

This gorgeous apron caught my eye.  Just look at that bright yellow gingham and the pretty embroidery.  It's been washed and pressed, and Dolly (my mannequin) is now modeling springtime itself!

I found a couple of boxes of handy sewing machine gadgets that will fit my old Singer and the one I gave my sister, too.  I already have most of the cams or discs (those dark circular do-dads) and many of the feet, but I don't think my sister has them, so I'll probably pass these on to her.

That blue and yellow floral piece of fabric was a cotton shower curtain, new in the package.  It has already been used as the back of a quilt.

I think that's about it for now.  I'm sure there were other things I picked up but they never made it into pictures, like the brand new camo pants hubby found for mowing lawn...whenever spring gets here.

Have you found any treasures at the thrift store lately?

~Paulette

Jelly Roll Race with Thrifted Batiks

 Back in June, I stopped at a local thrift store I hadn't visited in a while.  I can't remember now if I had something in mind to look for; maybe it was junk journal ideas or supplies.  Whatever the reason (and there doesn't need to be much of one for me to go), I made my usual pass through the sewing and crafting aisles and spied a couple bags of fabric.  They were both sealed and taped, but I could see they were stuffed with batik fabric, including what looked like a good chunk of a jelly roll.  For around three dollars total, it was a no-brainer.  Into the cart they went!

When I got home and opened the bags, OH MY GOODNESS!  There was at least 5 or 6 yards of batik fabric, from scraps to fat quarter size to half-yard cuts and half a jelly roll.  On top of that, there were 10 meticulously pieced 8.5-inch blocks and multiple strip sets sewn together.  Wow!

A couple weeks ago, I decided it was time to do something with those batiks.  The starting point, I thought, would be to utilize the remaining jelly roll strips, and then I'd cut additional strips from the other pieces to make something.  But what, exactly?  I started looking around for inspiration and soon found a video for a jelly roll race quilt with a twist (free downloadable pattern HERE).  Perfect!

I know the jelly roll race quilt has been around for a long, long time, but I'd never made one.  This particular idea had a little three-piece section inserted at the end of each strip, which supposedly would make an interesting secondary pattern due to the way those would fall when piecing it.  Okay, cool!

But here is where I tell you there was more fiddling involved than you might imagine.  Now this is probably, in part, because the extra batik strips I cut were perhaps not the exact same length as the ones in the jelly roll.  Some may have been a bit longer, some a bit shorter by a couple inches.  Hence the fiddling.  Also, by the time I got all the strips sewn together vertically, the right side was a full one inch longer than the left side, so there was a bit more fiddling and trimming to even it up.  I also removed a strip that didn't look right among the rest of them and replaced it with another.

For the backing, I went rooting around in the sewing room and found one I had pieced a few years ago but didn't use.  It had a section in the middle pieced from hand-dyed fabric scraps, but they were too dark for this quilt.  I ripped that section out, rejiggered the other large pieces from the original backing, and then sewed in a replacement section using some of those batik strip sets from the thrift store bag, as well as scraps from the jelly roll race quilt.

After quilting, this was the final result.  I'm happy with it!

And here's the back.

The scrappy binding is from three different purple batiks that seemed to play well together.

I don't normally wash finished quilts right away, but I am going to with this one since I didn't prewash all the bits and pieces from the thrift store.  I'll throw in a couple of color catchers, cross my fingers, and hope those deeply saturated batiks don't bleed too badly.  I also used a different brand of 80/20 batting than I normally do (Pellon), which quilted beautifully but seemed to have a stiffer hand.  Hopefully washing will soften that up bit too.

I still have quite a bit of pieces left over, so I'm sure there will be another scrappy something or other from those batik goody bags in the future.

~Paulette

Table Scraps Challenge - June 2022

The idea for my take on this month's Table Scraps Challenge came from a Facebook friend who was making these and shared the link to the YouTube tutorial with me, and also necessity.  

See, we had just replaced our old Corelle dinnerware with new stuff, and I don't know why but the new bowls get HOT in the microwave!  I don't know about you, but I'd like to start my day without burning my fingers on a freshly-nuked bowl of oatmeal, thank you very much.

Bowl Koozie tute to the rescue!  Although for the rest of this post, I am going to call it a cozy because I am old and crotchety that way.  Also, if you're interested in the difference between Koozie, Cozy, and Kozy (like I was), have a listen to the explanation here. 

Word nerdiness aside, this really was an easy to follow tutorial and my first attempt came out fine.  I didn't have much in the way of 100% cotton batting scraps, so I used an 80/20 scrap on half of it.  Since I don't intend to microwave the cozy itself, it should be okay.

(Second bowl cozy with thrifted striped shirt interior)

For the second cozy, I did make a trip to Joann for some Wrap & Zap batting, which is made for projects like this.  It struck me as odd that a package of 100% cotton Wrap & Zap was half the price of the same size package of Warm & Natural 100% cotton batting, and it basically looks like the same stuff (and made by the same company).  But that's neither here nor there, just interesting to note.

Both cozies are BLUE and have STRIPES, which were the two prompts for June's challenge.  No matter that they match nothing in my kitchen decor (seasonal runner aside), but white bowls go with anything, so there's that.  Also, they do coordinate well with the blueberries that adorn my morning oatmeal every day. :)

So that's the Table Scraps Challenge checked off for this month.  Before you go, though, I thought I'd show you another BLUE/STRIPE score this month.  

I've been pretty lucky at the thrift store lately, and more on that in future posts.  For now, I'll show you one item I was super excited about.  

I had just changed out my comforter set for this one (not my bedroom...I wish):

(Image source: Kohls.com)

I just love that it's airy and kind of beachy looking, and it's lightweight enough to throw off and on multiple times a night when the hotness flashes, lol.  I didn't have any wall decor to match when I bought the comforter, though, so when I spied this triple-matted piece of wall art at Goodwill a week or so later, I practically jumped for joy!  On the inside, of course; in the store, that would have been weird.

Here it is on the bedroom wall.  Perfect, no?

Hope you're having a great day!

I'm linking to The Joyful Quilter: June 2022 Table Scraps Challenge.

~Paulette