Monday, July 14, 2014

HALFWAY THROUGH 2014!!!!!!!

WOW! Time has a  way of continuing to move on even when we slow down. It's been 18 months since I was last here. So much has changed in my life. I am now a single divorced woman (which socially is about as low as you can get). I own my own home. While I was once fully retired I am back to work part-time. Most importantly I am back to crafting and quilting. Now I just need to get back to taking pictures on my camera rather than my smart phone. Either that or I need to figure out how to post to this blog from my smart phone rather than my laptop.

Right now I am mainly sewing and quilting. I still do greeting cards for people who are interested in them, but I seem to be spending most time at my sewing machine. This may be aided by the fact I am once again selling fabric and teaching quilting as well as being the president of my quilt chapter. It is also related to my having a garage full of fabric which is not necessarily a good thing in humid FL summers. (While I was renting a nice big house I had room for it all inside. No such luck in my cozy little house.) I personally don't need any more quilts myself and no one I know has expressed an interest in a quilt so most of what I do now is either a class sample or made for charity.


My quilting focus right now is using up scraps and fat quarters. So far from approximately 75 fat quarters I have made 4 lap quilts and have a 5th started.  The sad thing is using up 75 fat quarters hasn't even made a dent in what I have.  The good news is I haven't had to spend any money to do any of these quilts.

This is the first quilt I did I call Scrappy Diamonds in Rectangles.   I needed 45 different fabrics to make it. I had made this quilt once before years ago and so I relied on my memory to cut it out. NOT A GOOD THING! Consequently I cut it wrong. So I needed to round up another 30 fat quarters (I reduced the size of quilt to lap size) and re-cut it after I read the pattern. After that things went pretty well and it is a fun quilt to do. It is now a model for a class I begin teaching at work next week. The students will learn from my mistakes; I hope!

 The second quilt was a twister. I used 20 of the above fat quarters and was able to get 10" squares from them to make this quilt. It is also a lap size. I really like making that size as they are relatively easy to machine quilt myself and I can use one length of fabric for the backing rather than piecing 2 lengths to get the backing wide enough. I did need to add a half a yard of beige fabric for the boarder on this.

I haven't taken pictures of the other two quilts yet. I took the scraps left over from the fat quarters used in these two quilts as well as the left overs from my first miss cut fat quarters and cut them into 2 1/2 inch strips to make those quilts. I will get some pictures taken an post them later. Also I have re-cut the miss cut pieces and added more fabrics from the other left overs and am working on a quilt with them. SO I will end up with 5 lap size quilts from 75 fat quarters and a few 1/2 yard pieces for boarders on some of the quilts.

This has all been fun but I sure wish I could see a few empty spaces on my fabric shelves. I am on a fabric buying moratorium until I use up a lot of what I already have. Saves money  which I do need to do, but there's an awful lot of beautiful fabric out there that I must just pass by.........