My Sewing Space

A couple of years ago I started assembling these quilt blocks with my daughter. It was a good project to work on together and my scrap bins were over flowing. We worked on it on and off in between other projects, usually eight or ten blocks at a time. I figured we'd do it until we had enough for a twin size quilt and then see if we wanted to keep working on it. This is twin size and we are done. The original inspiration is here and the accompanying tutorial for paper piecing the blocks is here . We made our blocks 8.5" square because we used the 8.5" x 11" printer paper we had on hand. I just eyeballed the placement of the white strips, so those don't all line up precisely, but I'm okay with it. I really like the variety of colors combined with the white strips. The diamond shapes and variety of stripe widths keep the eye moving, but the white provides some grounding, too. I don't have plans to finish this in the immediate future because...

We're just wrapping up our March break week here. Other than some sickness, we had a good week. For the most part, we kept busy with good and simple things close to home. One of the days I invited the kids into the sewing room to work on a project together. I saw these little house ornaments on Pinterest and wanted to give them a try. The kids got to pick out the fabrics, trim, button, and ribbon that they wanted to use from my stash. We made a big mess, but it was fun. I did all the sewing and ironing and did some prep work the day before to make sure things kept moving. In the interest of simplification, we left off the bird and house number included in the tutorial. The kids liked getting to choose all the parts, but they loved  doing the stuffing part. Each of the houses has their own unique mix and it was fun to see their choices (not always what I would have guessed!). Here is my house in my hand for scale purposes. The three houses pictured above are my two ...

During the summer, Heidi of Handmade by Heidi  generously gave away some of her scraps. I was the lucky recipient of one batch and was thrilled with what I received. One of the things in the box was a partial charm pack. If you aren't familiar with quilting, a charm pack is a set of pre-cut 5" squares - one from each piece in a fabric collection. Every time I'm in a quilt shop I look at the charm packs and am tempted to buy one, but I've never been sure what to do with them so I've never bought one. Several weeks ago the Sew, Mama, Sew blog featured back-to-school patterns and tutorials. One from The Polka Dot Chair caught my eye and after looking at it further, I decided to try making it with the charm pack from Heidi. I really liked the T-shirt with the owl applique, too and decided to just copy the whole outfit. My daughter is really happy with these clothes, but you sure wouldn't know it from the picture. Since I was working with only a partial charm...

I said that I was going to be making some hanger pouch things next, and that's what I should be doing, but these notecards jumped rank and begged to be made. I'm quite excited about them!  I'm pretty sure I have seen this sort of thing on the internet before, but when searching for it, this is all I found and I know I had not seen it before.  Regardless, it's pretty simple - just sew on cardstock. With the exception of the cards with the 12 tiny squares, all of the fabric is adhered to the cardstock with fusible web.  For the 12 tiny square cards, I just used a glue stick.  This probably could work with the other shapes, too. However, I liked how the fusible web kept the edges from raveling and smearing the glue stick on the pieces did distort them a bit. The cards are 3.5" x 5" and came from Michael's.  I'm sure I'll be doing more of these.  It was a fun project. This one is my favorite: I used a zigzag stitch and off-white thread f...