A Coffee Break

A pretty white empty bowl.



A pair of scissors.

A large stack of un-trimmed half-square triangles.

Coffee break begins. Sit back on the sofa. Turn on the TV. Put the bowl on lap.

Start trimming dog-ears.


Partly finished.


Only a gazillion more to go!

1930's Doll Quilt

Today I am showing you my mother's doll quilt. She was born in 1925, so this fabric is right out of the 30's. Although, I have never been a fan of 30's reproduction fabrics, I sure can appreciate how authentic the repro's are. I don't know what my grandmother used for the filling, but it is all lumpy and has shifted all around. It's machine pieced, and very lightly hand quilted along some of the seams, which I only discovered today. It really needed more quilting to stop the shifting of the filling.


I wonder how my grandmother acquired all the little prints. There are 38 prints and non are repeated. I know she wasn't buying Charm Packs. LOL She must have exchanged scraps with her friends, as I can't believe she made that many dresses for my mother, an only child. Although it doesn't show well in my photos, the colors are still pretty vibrant and not worn.


Maybe my mom didn't play with it or drag it around very much. Who knows.

Quilt Storage

This last weekend, I spent some time moving around furniture in my loft/office.
For years, my computer has been housed in a computer cabinet.

I even made a quilt depicting it. It's a free pattern on my website. You can see a photo of it here.

It is a very pretty piece of Mission style furniture. We bought it years ago when our extra computer was downstairs in the family room.
It was perfect.
I could close it up when not on the computer and everything was hidden away. Then one child moved away and freed up a bedroom for my sewing room, so my loft became my "office" and we moved that heavy, heavy piece of furniture upstairs.
You all know what " musical furniture" is. I am good at it!!

Anyway, as things were updated on my computer, Dave started hating my computer desk. He couldn't get to the back of it for the cords. I wanted drawers, which it didn't have. I never closed it up and the desk top was always a mess.
In the meantime, I have made a gazillion quilts with no place to store them.
Light bulb moment!


I emptied all the computer stuff, set up a new desktop with some file cabinets and turned the cabinet into quilt storage.




I still have more quilts to put in here. There won't be enough room for all of them.
They are everywhere in this house.
In the closets, under the beds, over the banister, on top of quilt racks.

Do you know, I don't have any on the beds! LOL

Zig Zags Are Finished

I have quilts to show. And they are all finished!
I have been very busy quilting this week!
And enjoying it! Which isn't always the case.

These are the three quilts for Carol. There is a lap quilt, a baby quilt and a doll quilt.
And I only made blocks for the lap.
The other two quilts got their blocks from the not-needed left-overs or the throw-aways.
That made the two smaller quilts really fast and easy.

I had fun shopping my stash.
I only bought fabric for the border and a couple of 1/8 yard cuts.

Here is the lap for Carol.


Here is the baby quilt for Evie Jo.

And here is the doll quilt for Evie Jo's dolly. (Hope she plays with dolls!)


The quilting was so simple. Just straight lines.
With the baby quilt, I followed the zigzags.
Even that took more time than I wanted, plus I had to keep turning the quilt with each zig and each zag.

So, on the lap and the doll quilt I did a cross hatch, and I really liked that.

Here is the last time I will show you this quilt. It is all quilted and bound and it is just for ME!

Now on to quilting my Spanish Tile. Hope to show that next week.

Spanish Tiles Progress

Remember how I once told you to save the inside strip of the Stitching Lines to use latter when you only need to stitch once.

Well, that's just what I did when I needed to add snowball corners to my Spanish Tiles block.
These were left over from making the blocks.


I trimmed them to size. With these, I was able to get three smaller strips out of each. And just sewed on the solid line.



My Spanish Tiles is coming along. Only a little more to do.

Spanish Tiles Update #1

It's a dreary day in sunny San Diego. We are getting the last storm of the season. Or so say the weather men!
My photos reflect the lack of sunshine streaming through my dirty windows!!

This is the Spanish Tiles variation I am working on. An addition of small snowball corners is all I am changing. Plus, I am making the third fabric in each block the same.
Still need to add the "grout" between the blocks, plus finish a few more blocks.

Another Quilt and Lots of Machine Frustration

This is what I am trying to make. I have made lots of Spanish Tile Quilts. This will be a variation of my pattern.



It all started with this cute little Alexander Henry bird print.


It's a little out of my comfort zone, but I thought why not. I need a new Spanish Tile quilt and I wanted something different. Spanish Tile uses Primrose preprinted fusible from Quiltsmart. The process is easy, just a little time consuming.
I picked most of my fabrics to go with this print from my stash. There still is a little fabric shopping that I need to do. Not a bad thing!
My newer machine worked great on the fusible. I love how I can set it so the presser foot lifts up each time I stop sewing, great for sewing curves, how it knots the thread at the beginning and end of my stitching, and how I can set the machine to cut the thread, although the whole operation is slower than I would like it to be.
But, all in all it works good for making appliques using the fusible interfacing method.



I am sure many of you know how this kind of applique works. You place the interfacing on top of the fabric, sew the shape, trim and turn right side out. All the edges are turned under, and the fusible is on the back side.
I made 30 applique shapes and fused them to the black background.
Black!! What was I thinking????



I always use mono-filament thread to zigzag the turned under edges for a permanent application.
First I started with the smoke color. Black----------smoke. It made sense to me. Only the smoke showed too much on the colors. Stupid me. I sewed way too many before I decided the smoke was not right.
Did I think it would get better over time???
So I ripped that out and switched to the clear mono-filament. Much better. Did I mention this was smoke and black thread on jet black Kona solid!!
Ok. That was the easy part.
Even ripping out the black bobbin thread was easier than the /!#@#^*$%^ I put up with before I even got that far. My newer machine kept breaking, clumping and knotting up the thread. I re-threaded a gazillion times, changed the tension and all but gave up. This machine just does not like mono-filament nylon thread.

So what did I do? I got out my old trustworthy workhorse that I bought in the eighties, my most favorite machine of all time and it worked beautifully. Yes, it was slower and I had to cut the threads myself. But it liked my choice of thread and it worked!


My shapes are all made. I need to find the next fabric.





The moral of this story.
It isn't about good machines and bad machines. It's about hanging on to the tried and true. Sometimes all the bells and whistles are not what you need. It's kind of like the turtle and the hare. Sometimes slow and steady can get you where you are going faster than high tech! One machine can't do it all.

You just have to find a place to store them!!