I'm Sew Very Happy

...with this new wall hanging I made for my sewing room.

It was inspired by this photo I saw in a Better Homes and Gardens special interest publication (Do It Yourself, I think) a couple of years ago, and I've had the project on my to-do list ever since. I'm pretty certain the photo example is done in paper, but I wanted mine to be made from fabric.

I started with a great fat quarter of Art Gallery Oval Elements for the background and several Kaffe Fassett scraps from my Crayon Box quilt for the letters.

These punch-out 2" letters were at my local JoAnn's store. I traced the letters onto fusible webbing then ironed the webbing to the wrong side of the fabric scraps.

I just eyeballed the placement of the letters on my background doing my best to center them on the fabric without being too mathematical about it. The dots certainly helped with that!

After fusing the letters to the background, I sewed a very small zigzag stitch in a coordinating thread around the raw edges of each one to secure and give them a little more definition.

This adhesive foam-core mounting board and my frame were purchased at Michaels. I cut a piece of very thin cotton batting and placed it against the adhesive side before layering the appliqued design on top.

After removing the glass I placed the whole thing in this 12" x 16" frame and promptly hung it on the wall.

I just love it! I'm even thinking of using the same motto on a pillow with script lettering - what do you think of that idea?

displaying my quilts

Whoa! That was a longer break than I had planned! I have been sewing, but kind of jumping around from project to project without making any real forward progress on any of them. But I do have a few things planned to show this week.

We've been planning a re-do of our living room, and just this past Saturday we got the walls painted. They were some variety of boring beige (with a more hip-sounding name that I can't recall, courtesy of that lucky-duck with the paint-naming job. Who does that job? How does one get that job? Sounds like a pretty good gig to me... but I have strayed off topic...) Now the walls are light, bright, and the color of whipped butter. The room faces north and was previously so dull and dreary that no one ever used it, but this new color is so lovely and inviting :)

Since I've made quite a few bright quilts, my husband decided to make a custom quilt ladder to display them in our redecorated living room...

Pretty amazing, right? The entire ladder is 4 feet wide and 8 feet tall. Each rung section is 2 feet wide, and they are spaced 18" apart to allow a large section of each quilt to be visible.

Just in case you want your dear someone to make a similar one for you, it was built with 1" x 4" by 8' maple boards stained lightly and covered with polyurethane. Each of the four dowels is 3/4" diameter by 48" long. It simply leans against the wall, and the weight of the quilts keeps it steady. The dowels are inserted into holes in the maple boards and secured with small screws drilled into the back of the maple boards.

I'll show you the rest of the room once all the furnishings are in place. It's going to see a lot of use from now on!

well that only took 21 months!

If you've been with me from the beginning of this blogging adventure (or if you've paged back through old posts to numbers 2 and 3) you might remember this quilt.

Finally after 19 months of stopping and starting, the Italian Tiles quilt is hanging in my foyer!

I finished quilting all but the outer border in September of this year, and then I was just stumped on how to quilt that last bit. I settled on a simple diamond pattern that was easily marked by dividing the border into 3" segments. Then it was just a matter of zig-zagging from point to point, once starting at an inside point and another go-around starting at an outside point.

The binding's been ready for months, and I machine finished it on the back (rather than hand-stitching - too time consuming) so that was a pretty speedy step.

And just in time for the end of fall decorations, we were able to replace the fall-themed quilt that was hanging there for not one, not two, but three fall seasons (and everyday in between), with this new lovely that is much more holiday neutral :)

I'm not really hung up on this "completion thing" when it comes to quilting (obviously), but it does feel oh so good to have this one finished and hanging where we can all see it each day!

ahhh, now that's better

Wow - what a lot of advice and encouragement I received from you all concerning my "ugly" quilt! I wanted to stick with the center focus fabric and try to tone the whole thing down a bit, so I nixed the orange...

and replaced it with a softer light turquoise (Moda Grunge - not sure exactly which color), and made the outer rim of color one consistent shade of darker turquoise - one fabric is an older Kona Bay marbled print and the other a batik. Much better!!

This is the baby size (42" square) of Jaybird Quilts "Taffy" pattern, which uses the Lazy Angle ruler. Love that ruler!

Thanks for all the kind words and advice! As my friend Vicki always says, "quilting is a team sport."

going directly from Halloween to Christmas

Just like the retail world around us, I have shifted overnight from Halloween to Christmas mode. Right after I finished my Halloween Confetti table runner I started working on this Christmas door banner. It's a Nancy Halvorsen pattern that I've been wanting to make since I saw the sample in a trunk show of hers last year. So sorry for the poor photo quality - very dreary days do not make for great photos :(

The main pattern is from her book Tidings, and is actually featured on the cover. I wasn't crazy about the capital block letters on the original, so I used the letter patterns from another book by Terry Atkinson, Fat Quarter Fonts. I had to fidget with the scale of those charm-size letters, increasing them 130-140% until they fit just right. I fused them to the background using Heat N Bond Lite, and then used a machine blanket stitch around all the raw edges.

Now I just need to quilt, bind, and add some fun red buttons to it before November 27 - the day I'm scheduling for Christmas-ifying the house. I'm going to hang it from a door in my foyer hallway so we'll get to see it everyday!

Just curious - does the sudden retail switch to full Christmas mode bother you? I don't really mind it, as long as I'm not assaulted with all Christmas, all the time music in the stores until after Thanksgiving. What about you?