Crumbing it Up

Thursday's efforts

As a quilter, seeing and touching fabric is so important to me and it really does influence how I feel and I have been feeling quite deprived. It sounds silly but the more time I spend around fabric the more it makes me want to just dive into it and surround myself with the messiness of creating something with it.

As I was cleaning up my sewing room I couldn't help but start feeling the pull of needing to sew something...anything!

I decided that my crumb bins were just too tempting and that is where I started. It is so satisfying to sew up all of those little bits and pieces of fabric and then see what I end up with. It is just so random. :)

I started out with just a few strips made on Thursday and the next thing I knew I had all of these made. I added them to the crumb strips that I had sitting in my inventory and I made all of these blocks.

I finished this flimsy last April but I ended up loving it so much that I felt it needed to be bigger. I think I now have more than enough blocks made to get it to a better size. Any extras will be returned to my crumb strip inventory as a starter for another future quilt.

I have so many crumbs that I doubt I will ever run out even if I live well past my planned expiry date of over 100 years old.

With the reorganization of my sewing room I have made sure to include a dedicated 'crumb piecing station'. lol

Time to Tidy Up!

It seems that working on the quilt for my sister has inspired me to clear up my sewing room and get back in the groove.

The room was quite messy to begin with but over the last couple months a lot of stuff had migrated in there that really did not belong. Why does that happen????

There was an awful lot of clearing up required and I still have more to do but the important thing is that the space is now usable. I have been sorting through papers, miscellaneous quilting 'stuff', ironing and folding fabric and moving furniture in and out. It is still far from perfect but it is much better than when I started.

As part of the clean up, I have also been plugging away at reducing an unbelievably huge pile of scraps that needed to get gone and I have made pretty good progress. I pulled out my Go die cutter and I cut a stack of 2" squares, 2.5" squares and hsts and then when I got bored with that I cut lots of 2", 1.5" and 1" strips using a single combination strip die. At this point quick and easy is good!

My strip bins in the 2" and 2.5" sizes are so full that they are overflowing and I can just barely close the drawers that contain them so I just threw all of the newly cut strips into my string bins. They are pretty full too but they don't have lids so the ceiling is the limit...lol.

After working in there for the past couple days I started getting tempted by my crumb bins so I made several 2.5" x 8.5" strips and it felt really good. :)

Garden Notes is Finished!

It has been just over four months since I last posted to my blog - wow - time does fly by! I thought I would pop in and give an update on the last quilt that I posted about. This was a quilt that my sister Glenda asked me to make for her friend.

Well....I finally finished it and I even made and attached the binding and the label for her so all she needs to do is flip the binding over and stitch it to the back of the quilt and fill in the details on the label.

Glenda chose these fabrics based on her friend's hobbies of gardening and music and I think I managed to put them together into a pretty good looking quilt. :)

I quilted it with a medium tan thread on top (Cansew #6711) and light tan MagnaGlide in the bobbin. Glenda chose the pantograph Maple Syrup by Jodi Beamish and I think it suits the quilt very well.

I used leftovers of the maple leaf fabric for the binding but I didn't have quite enough so I added a small bit of the brown instrument fabric that I also used for the back.

She is very happy with the results!