A New Sewist

 So, it was a delight to see this on my counter, this week

It always amazes me to see things blooming in the middle of winter, even if they are indoors. It is a grocery store orchid, in a plastic cup, next to the kitchen sink. We have had it for a number of years, and it occasionally decides to reward us with flowers. We have a second one, but it isn't very generous just now.

My favourite little boy came to visit yesterday. I decided that it was time for sewing lessons.

I think he did very well for his first try. Since he is the only one sewing, he can't compare his work to anyone else which makes him less likely to give up. Knitting will be next.

I finished my own hand sewing.

I am really out of practice. However, I will continue to turn this into something usable.

I spent some time working on my current lace shawl, though I kept having to rip back and do it over again, when I didn't count carefully enough.

As a more soothing meditative work, I went back to my sock.

The heel is turned, I'm in the home stretch. 

My found quilt has returned from the long arm quilter. now for the sleeve and the binding, then I will show you the finished piece. I also have a couple of purses to make, so today I was inventorying my supplies and wondering if I can make it all from stash. I have bobbins wound, so that is a start.

My four legged helpers were emptying the dishwasher the other day.

Emme was looking for anything that might have gotten under the lower rack. Mudd was checking that all the cup handles are pointed the same way, and that the cat mugs are right at the front. It is good that they do these quality checks. If I could just get them to dust.

Creating My Own Space

 We are currently being bombarded with "experts" telling us that if we use their simple method of organizing, and "decluttering" our world will be blissful. I quickly came to believe that I was hopeless, because none of it worked for me. 

A couple of years ago, I saw a TED Talk by Cassandra Aarssen. She had a system, believed her system was the best, and made a business of organizing other people. One day, she failed. Her client couldn't make sense of her method, and Cas discovered that their is more than one style of organizing, and everyone has to embrace what works for them.

Over the last couple of years, I have been working on this. It is slow, because I am inventing something that works for me. My greatest achievment so far has been storage for my fabric. No, it isn't sorted by colour, or anything like that. I wrap my fabric around comic book boards, to make mini bolts, and store them in two rows in an IKEA Drona.

It may not be the way you would store your fabric but it works for me. I have an ides, I pull out my boxes, and pick what I think works for my idea. I can even roughly estimate the yardage of a piece of fabric I have. One yard is about two wraps around the board. 

So, why am I telling you this? Because, over the years, some helpful people have tried to help me get my things organized. Some of it has helped and some of it has made things worse. Today, I was sorting through fabric that someone (not me) had decided should be hung in the closet on hangers. Since the fabric  was piled up, I only saw the outer ones and lost total track of what was there. Today, I took them off the hangers and found some lovely surprises that will be going into the boxes after I have wrapped them around boards.

I also found a quilt top, the backing and the binding, lost under other things on a hanger. 

Really bright and full of cats, how could I have lost it?  It is a stay-at-home round robin. The challenge was to start with a block and continue from there. This was my block.

It is out of it's hiding place now. I have sent a note to the long arm quilter, to ask when she has time to quilt it. With luck, it will be done soon, and brightening the wall of my stairwell.

Inner Circle

 I got the pattern for the Inner Circle Bag from the Bag of the Month Club on March 1, 2020. I decided it was very doable and dove in, starting on March 4. Then things went sideways. 

Inner circle got tucked away, and I started making masks, and hand sanitizer pouches. So, last week, while tidying my sewing room, it popped up again and I decided it was time to finish it.

It did take awhile to figure out where I left off, and what needed to be done. I had the zipper attached to its facing, and it looked a bit wonky. I'm pretty sure that nobody else will think it is wonky, so, I will move forward. 

I realized that it needed its stabilizers, so they were cut and attached. I had second thoughts on the pocket, so I redesigned how it was going to work. Now it has a lining pocket.

Even I think the lining is pretty wild. So I went a little more subtle on the pocket lining.

This is the outside of the bag. The lining is actually a near perfect match. The fabric was embroidered denim from a long time ago, that was lounging in my stash.

It will be a lovely spring bag for somebody. 

Yesterday, I got the Income Tax Returns finished, so now I am free to play with this. It should go together quickly from here.

A Squirrel or Two

 I have gotten a few things done this month, including a quilt I planned to bind. And then there were the things that popped up.

The kit for Oscar arrived and was just begging to be knit, so I dropped everything and made an Oscar hat. It is going to a fundraiser coming soon.

Then I was told that my favourite little boy didn't have enough masks for school. So, of course, Nana had to drop everything and make 10 more masks.

I despair of every being free of mask making, however, his teacher said that they must be good masks because he doesn't try to take it off in class, like some do. Oddly, after being told it was an emergency, they are still at my house. Does it count as a Squirrel if it's a request from a dear one?

Meanwhile in my WIPs Be Gone, I made a back and binding for a quilt that I started a long time ago.

I remember trying very hard to make sure that the same fabric wasn't touching and I see that I failed. Oh, well, it will be done and the new owner will love it.

I also pulled out this UFO from the start of the pandemic.

I think I decided that the zipper was a bit wonky, but I think I'll leave it wonky. It can be a design feature, right?

I am going to link up with Sandra for her DrEAMi #58 linkup.

UFOvember

 On the Geeky Bobbin blog, she is running a blog hop on dealing with your UFO's. I have been reading the posts and pulled out a couple of mine, to finish. I have 2 table runners finished, so far.

The first is a Triangle Frenzy pattern, called Swirl. I made the top for this one, just to try the technique. I pulled it out recently, and it is now finished. I am submitting it to be sold by the Lyndhurst Feral Cat Project's Christmas Market. 

I think the fabric was called Holiday Sparkle and it is an unusual colour combination for Christmas. I donated a couple of other things, that I already had finished. as well as some Newfoundland mittens from my friend, Pat. Check out their Facebook page for details of the sale.

https://www.facebook.com/LyndhurstFeralCats

Yesterday, I was the responsible adult for my grandson's remote schooling. Although his parents know I am not very grownup, they didn't tell the teachers, so al was well. While he was doing his online class stuff, I was stitching the binding from a UFO that I pulled out a couple of months ago. Amazing what a couple of hours of hand stitching gets done. 

Christmas side.

Everyday side. It is quite long, but not as long as I had intended. However, my calculations were off, so this is all the fabric I had. I'm sending it off as a Christmas gift. 

I should have tidied that table a bit more. It is actually fairly tidy but I needed a lot of space for the runner.

Week One of Social Distancing

I have been playing in my sewing room, knitting and binge watching TV this week. I actually did some yoga and took a couple of walks, as well.

One of my projects this week, was to sort through some of my UFO sewing projects to decide what to do with them.  I watched a video awhile ago on dealing with your UFO's by Just Get It Done quilts.  So I am using her method to sort things.

I actually let go of two projects that I realized I no longer liked. Once I realized I didn't like them, it was easy to let them go. It was very liberating.

I also found two projects that I can finish easily if I make the project smaller. One was a twelve block embroidered quilt. I realized that I could make it six blocks and have a nice little wall hanging. Five of those six blocks are done, and the sixth needs only a small amount of effort to finish.

The second one was a tablerunner, that I had seriously over reached on. I had planned to make it about 12 feet long. In looking at it, I realize that I didn't buy enough fabric and the sections took much longer that I had anticipated. This morning, I decided to put it to the top of the pile, and get it finished (in a much smaller size).

This is the Christmas side. It is quilt as you go, and strip pieced. This is the one end completed.

This is the other end, still in need of a triangle, and piecing.

This is the everyday side. If I were starting this now, I would use a lot more contrast in my fabric.  However, I will finish the last triangle, put the binding on, and call it done.

My short term goal is one UFO for every new project I finish. When I finish this, I get to start a new project. I have a pair of socks nearly done, so I will have to choose a knitting UFO to finish next.

My amaryllis are looking great, and brightening up my days.

We have a house guest, just now.

He is a friend's cat. She is trying to get home, but in the mean time, this guy is hanging with us. I have a serious soft spot for ginger boys.

Roses For Leanna

This has been a week of finishes. I started this quilt in a class about 10 years ago. Put it away while I figured out what I needed to do to love it. Pulled it out this past spring, fixed the top to my liking, and then Leanna fell in love with it. Since Leanna needed a quilt, it is going to her, now that it is finished.

Of course, I have a very hard time finding a place to take a picture of a large quilt, that isn't covered in pet hair, but I tried.

It is a little lumpy but it stayed clean. It is 78" x 78", according to the lady who did the quilting.

It has lots of red roses. The border is tone on tone roses.

Krista did an awesome job on the quilting.

The back is red flannel so I asked her to use beige in the bobbin, too, to give the back some interest.

The corners are flat and square.

It is even labelled! Most of my quilts aren't. I expect she will enjoy it when the weather gets cooler.

And, because summer isn't quite over yet,  another pair of shorts for my little guy.

A Trip West

We headed all the way west, to visit family, last week. So let me bore you with some holiday snaps.

Before we left, I was looking for something and found a UFO that needed very little work to finish, so I finished it up.

It is a scarf, in pompom yarn and given that it is 29C today, I guess it is going into the Christmas box. I wonder who will want a lovely soft scarf.

I also made 6 lip balm holders to take along as hostess gifts.

I managed to get a picture of 4, two had already been claimed.

The weather in Victoria was lovely, so we spent as much time as we could outdoors.

I tend to take pictures of things I don't see here. Ocean, mountains, lighthouse.

The highest point of Fort Rodd Hill. The fort was in use from the 1800's until the end of WWII. This is the Belmont Battery.

We went geocaching at Esquimalt Lagoon, but didn't find anything. I think our middle Canada mindset kept saying that no one would put a cache there because it would be destroyed in the spring floods. Of course, it is the ocean, so no spring floods, just tide.

I was invited to visit a private bonsai garden. This is a bonsai dogwood tree.

An azalea with flowers much bigger than we see them here. This one blooms in two colours, and it isn't grafted.

This azalea was tiered like a wedding cake, and also two coloured.

I was sworn to secrecy on the location of the garden, but it isn't really a problem because someone else drove, and I have no idea where I was.

This was the concierge at our hotel, an amiable fellow, named John. Not good on advice on where to eat, though.

This is the dock at Butcharts Gardens. I brought back lots of pictures of ocean and mountains.

This pretty much encapsulates Butcharts Gardens. From the bottom up, you can see the Italian Gardens, The Rose Gardens, and the tops of the trees in the Sunken gardens, with a view of the trees going up the mountain. The gardens are built in an old cement quarry.

Because we travelled back on June 22, we got to see the Midnight Sun. This picture is out the window of the plane at about 23:30 Eastern time.

The sun can still be seen to the north. Of course, we didn't get to see an Northern Lights because it was still bright.

Fortunate Finds

A few weeks ago, in my ongoing sewing room cleanup, I found a quilt top that had been resting for quite some time (I suspect it might be 10 years). If memory serves, I was originally overwhelmed by the size of the quilt, then, when I next looked at it, I thought it looked too Christmas-y to put all that work into.

This time, I took a careful look at the top. The green borders had not been sewn on, merely pinned and there was more fabric in the box. My original plan would have made the quilt huge. After I removed the green borders, and added just red borders, it is much improved in my mind.

It is now about double bed sized. It has very nice red borders.

Doesn't look Christmas-y at all. It actually looks kind of like my backyard trees.

Lots of red and cream with some green leaves.

In a piece of good luck, I was at the quilt shop where I got the fabrics for this in the first place. Another store in the building had had a flood from a burst pipe, which caused the quilt shop to go through their storage area, looking for things that had gotten wet. They found some older fabric, that they dropped on the sale rack.  I found a bolt of the floral print.

There was a little over a metre on the bolt, so I took the whole thing. I now have binding for my new quilt, as well as extra fabric for doing something with the borders I removed. I have a plan!

Oh, and I figured out a way around the overwhelming size. I am sending it to be quilted on a long arm. Turns out you don't have to do every thing yourself. I just need to make the backing and it will be off to be quilted.