Right at the top of this page it says something about food, quilting and gardening. Yet, nearly all the posts are about food. I guess this blog has shown where my true priorities lie. Or perhaps it's as simple as I eat several times a day but weeks can go by without my sewing a stitch or pulling a weed.
I have been doing some sewing. Some of it has been really boring and some was simply sewn only to be ripped out again or even tossed into the trash. True confession time, I do toss away block and pieces and parts that just do not work. I do not save them "just in case" nor do I cut them up into little pieces to fill a box of other bits to turn into something scrappy somewhere (or never) down the road. Heresy, I know but there you have it. I am a quilter who throws fabric away.
While at Asilomar, a classmate kept pulling out little cloth bags and with a ripping of velcro sound would open them up and munch away on treats. I loved those little snack bags. What a great idea to make these then to use those disposable plastic bags for snacks and lunches. Even better they could be tossed in the washing machine rather than the laborious hand washing and drying process that clear plastic bags require.
As luck would have it, she sells kits and yardage of the lining at her shop. When I got home I ordered a kit and sewed up the four bags lickety split. Then, since I had also ordered an extra yard of lining I made two more with the thought to give them to everyone who sat in the same row as me at guild meeting.
Everyone loved the bags. My mother loved hers so much she asked me to make one for everyone at Easter dinner so she could fill them with treats.
Why is it that I, who would describe herself as a decidedly non-bag sewing person, always ends up not just making one bag but dozens? A dozen it was in cute Easter prints.
A little quilting has happened lately too. Mostly my time in my sewing room has been building, moving, organizing and rearranging. Eventually, there will be pictures of the new room. For now, suffice it to say that I've been having more fun in my quilting room thinking about quilting than actually doing any.
I did buckle down this week and make some real progress on the Halloween quilt.
The rows are together and just need to be joined and the borders added. I'm getting there. I started this with a
shop on-line - hmm, seems to be the same shop as those lunch baggies. It was advertised as a block of the month. See, singular! I ordered the adorable kit and pestered a friend into joining me. Then the first post was read and it said to make two blocks. The next month brought the revelation that in order to be done by October (of 2009, ahem) we actually had to make three blocks a month. Yeah, like that would happen while I was also doing a Moda block (really three blocks) of the month and a few other projects as well. I resigned myself to doing what I could each month and having it a year late. I actually kept up until the werewolf. I had mistakenly used his face fabric in the pumpkinhead and then had nothing suitable to use for the werewolf. Nothing in my stash worked, nothing in my friends stash worked and it took several shopping trips to find something I was happy with.
After a few months of neglect I got back on the machine appliqué bandwagon and had finished up all the blocks and was working on the lettering. About halfway through, the knee lift on my machine died and I'm just too spoiled to consider dealing with the rest of the letters manually. Into the shop went my machine and there went another week of no sewing.
The machine came home. The knee lift works, and I finished up the last of the lettering over the weekend.
Now, I must finish this top so I can pack it up for later quilting and decide what to do about the guild quilt show at the county fair. Do I enter or not? If I enter, can I actually find a project I'd like to enter to finish up in time? Decisions, decisions.
-- marcella
