A smattering of recent projects

Turns out summer means way less time for sewing. I'm almost looking forward to winter so I can guarantee time in my studio more regularly. Here's a round up of what I have been doing recently.

- Dresden Plate table runner!

I've mentioned before that Dresdens are my favorite, and sunflowers are my favorite, so this has been on my to do list for a long time! It was all stash, and at just over 17" across, the biggest Dresden I've ever done. I hand quilted this one with a simple running stitch. It sits on my coffee table, and makes a great backdrop for my many charcuterie plates...

- Flags for a themed campout!

On the left is what I was working from, and on the right are the completed banners. The camp theme was castle based, and what's a castle without a crest and banners? These were made from ripstop nylon which behaves VERY differently than what I'm used to. The appliqués were cotton though. Lots of needle turned appliqué. Overall, I'm pretty pleased with myself.

(Bonus castle shot!)

- Drawstring bags!

I also made these little guys as gifts. Super quick and easy, and a great way to use scraps.

- Still in progress: Picnic blanket

This is getting close to being done. It's a picnic blanket using Eat Your Veggies by Pat Sloan. I wanted a crisp way to use these charms, so I went for half square triangles set in the Barn Raising pattern. Should be about 5' square when it's finished.

- A new sewing machine!!

This is Tweety.

Tweety is a Janome DC 1050. I killed my old machine (RIP) working on the nylon flags and decided it was time to upgrade. Tweety is computerized and has a host of fancy features that are already making my life easier. My local sewing machine repair shop demoed one of these for me, and then I purchased on Amazon. As much as I want to buy from the local shop, Tweety was $150 cheaper online. I will be taking it in for repairs and maintenance to the shop though.

One more order of business: I finally joined Pinterest and you can see my pinning feed over on the right hand side of the blog. I'm trying hard to only pin things I can see myself doing, or is something I want to learn to do better. We'll see how it goes!

Quilts for Little Boys

These were Christmas presents for two little boys. The 2 year old likes cars, trucks- really anything with wheels. The 1 year old, well he doesn't have a lot of preferences yet, but he sure does love the family's assorted dogs. These were the first quilts I'd finished in years, and even at just 36x46" the largest. I took my cues from Elizabeth Bett's Car Quilt from Beginner's Guide to Quilting.

The tops are pieced in cotton. I did go out and buy fabric special for these as I don't keep a lot of kid oriented fabric on hand. They were both supposed to be all 5 inch squares, but the construction equipment print ended up being too big for that. A very nice lady at my Local Quilt Shop suggested making large squares of it instead. Brilliant! The backs on both are flannel. Rather than the usual binding, I just brought the back around. I used a low loft all cotton batting. For the quilting, I did it by hand with with a perl thread. Thank goodness I have a standing quilting hoop because it saved me a lot of backache.

Overall, I'm very pleased. The dog one especially came out exactly like I pictured. I washed them with color catchers before wrapping them up and got a tiny bit of bleeding even still on the cars one. I hear from their mom that they're getting a lot of use out of them!