Stories from the Sewing Room

My regular Wednesday post will follow the link up below.

Now it's your turn to share your progress. Link up your project and then visit others and make new friends and gain inspiration.

This link up will remain open until October 31 at 11:55 pm EST.

I attended our small guild retreat Friday and Saturday as a day-tripper. I got 15 more blocks done for the Log Cabin Stars quilt.

A few quilts got completed. This first one belongs to Sara. She wanted a strawberry quilting design and we decided on Strawberry Patch.

Next is a community quilt made by SCQG. I quilted it with Toss Up.

Finally, Ann's quilt is quilted with Daisy Bounce.

I'm pleased to introduce my very first published pattern, Starfall!

I designed, sewed, quilted, bound, and wrote and had the pattern printed all in one week. It wasn't perhaps my best idea, but I really wanted to have something to hand out at the retreat I attended a few weeks ago and I waited too long to have something like pens printed with my logo. This pattern is in the postcard pattern style, 4" x 6", with the photo on the front and the instructions on the back. It even has an official barcode!

Starfall is available as a PDF download in a larger format (instructions closer to 5" x 7" size) here at a very modest cost.

I made my sample quilt using Kona Black and Kona White to match my website and logo, but it would look fantastic in just about any fabric combination.

I used the Mid Mod Orange Peel design for the quilting. I was very excited to have the perfect piece of black and white fabric in my stash for the backing fabric. It's a print by Gingiber though I can't recall the name of the line.

In other news, I've completed five more blocks of my Log Cabin Stars quilt. This is the last week of the QAL and I have 10/42 blocks made. I'm going to another retreat Friday and Saturday, this time with my small guild, and am planning to make more of the blocks there. Who knows, maybe there will be a glitch in the universe and I'll actually get all the blocks made?! 😂

I also made and attached to the front the binding on the Buttercups quilt. 

I'm in the busy season for quilting. Here's this week's batch of quilts:

Trish's Girl Scout Chandelier quilt. She selected Pretty Paisley and light pink thread and it's so cute and girly!

Next is Trish's Bar Hop quilt. We decided on Riviera for the quilting and she wanted dark navy thread. You know I love blues! It looks very sophisticated.

Barbara's baby quilt, quilted with a new design for me, Mod Moon. This design was a little challenging, but I got there in the end.

I quilted Jess's quilt with Cloud Nine Petite and also did the binding. She's a newer quilter and it's so fun to see her skills improve with each quilt. This one was so square!

I spent a couple days on Annie's quilt. It's a king size and I can't share what the quilt looks like yet (waiting on the pattern release), but I can show you a bit of the quilting. Another new design for me, Cone Flowers. This design was a bit tricky to set up, but once I got it figured out (the offset had to be set at 75%; weird), it quilted beautifully. It just took forever! The gray fabric is on the front and the green is the back. The quilting is hard to see on the back. Sorry. I tried. It's all Alison Glass fabric.

Moving on to nature, I forgot to share this picture last week. Some quilts got delivered while I was gone, so I texted my son to bring in the box when he got home from school. Here's what he sent me, along with the comment that he had to remove it before bringing in the box. Gee, thanks! LOL.

We spent a little time over the weekend weeding the side garden. My husband was cleaning out the vegetable garden and we were really surprised to find out we had a few pepper plants grow and produce peppers! I had planted a few seeds from a generic bell pepper colorful mix. I didn't think any made it beyond tiny seedling stage. We got really tiny green bell peppers, like cherry tomato size, and some banana-pepper like yellow ones. 

The yellow pepper picture didn't turn out so well. Oops.

The dog was dressed in a sleep sack. So darling!

Last week I attended a day retreat put on by a somewhat local quilt shop. There were quite a few people there, maybe 50? Six of my fellow small-guild members were there and I sat with four of them off and on as work and family schedules allowed. The other two members sat at the complete opposite end of the room from us. Those of us in the back were the "rebel youngsters". LOL. I am not young other than in comparison to many of the attendees.

Anyway, I sewed and/or socialized from 9 - 4 or so each day and then drove back home to be mom. {I am not at all a night person and by late afternoon I am done.} It was so incredibly relaxing. I didn't realize just how much I needed that!

I got almost all of the Malted Mystery pieces sewn. I just have to trim down tons of flying geese units. I own very few specialty rulers. I did happen to have the correct flying geese Bloc-Loc ruler for these, so it should go quickly.

Then I started working on the Log Cabin Stars (Emily Dennis) quilt blocks. I spent some time trying to sort out my fabrics into blocks as best as I could. This is probably one of those projects where you spend a bunch of time rearranging your blocks until you just give up and sew it. 😄 I got five of them sewn, so there are 37 more to sew. In the pattern, Emily recommends using Studio 180's Wing Clipper ruler. I didn't have the correct Bloc-Loc size and I liked that the Wing Clipper can trim many sizes. So I ran down to the quilt store and purchased the ruler. I think I'm in love! My flying geese came out so nicely. 

Both the Bloc-Loc and obviously the Wing Clipper are fairly recent purchases for me. I would have typically used my standard 6.5" square ruler, but since I have been so absent -minded lately, I think specialty rulers are good for this shape since you easily maintain the points and the corners with these tools. 

I've trimmed my Buttercups mini quilt. I'll try to get the binding made and attached to the front this week.

Monday my husband and I ran into town for lunch and a trip to Menards. While we were in town, he decided to take me to the surplus store to see if they had anything that would work for the base of my dress form. We were originally thinking of buying a wheeled office chair and just removing the chair portion. Well, they wanted $20 - $25 for a chair and most of them were in very poor condition. So we decided to wait. 

Before we left, we walked through the rest of the store because my husband likes to look in the tool/equipment section, which is on the opposite side of the store from the office chairs. While he was checking out some sort of cabinet, I noticed they had a few coat tree-type things. Coat trees are suggested as possible bases in the pattern directions. There was one thing that was metal and very clean that I thought would work. The wheels were pretty clean and rolled well. 

Meet my new dress form base, a steal at $15. We think it is actually an IV stand, but it seems to be perfect for what I need. The hook things on top come off, so this should be ready to go. 

I have just two/three quilts to share with you this week. The first one belongs to JoEllen. She requested African Foliage for the quilting.

The next one is Barb's quilt. It's actually two identical quilts that currently share a border.  She picked Mod Dotz for the quilting.

Not much else is happening around here. We definitely transitioned from summer to fall last week. Thursday I wore shorts to the retreat and by Saturday I was wearing jeans and a jacket. We had to turn on the furnace yesterday. One of these days I'll get around to cleaning up the gardens a bit--at least pulling out the weeds and removing the dead vegetable plants. Maybe. Oh, I get to park in the garage again! My husband's been busy cleaning up his mess! Now to get them to pick up the robot parts that are strewn across the living room floor...

See you next week.

Linking with For the Love of Geese, My Quilt Infatuation, Alycia Quilts, and Confessions of a Fabric Addict.

I can share one of my secret projects with you today. This is my pumpkin pillow, made using  Yellow Umbrella Quilts' Homegrown Harvest pattern. 

I quilted it using Simple Orange Peel. I had a bit of a miscalculation on the size. I was trying to get the circles to be about 1.5", but they ended up much smaller. Best I can figure, I had the wrong grid scale set up on my screen and didn't notice. I saw that it was stitching out tiny, but since there was quite a bit of overstitching on it, I didn't feel like ripping it out and just went with it. It looks cute. It's pretty stiff, which is probably good for a pillow.

I made the front using things from my stash, but I did have to buy some backing. I ended up getting this cute little Moda print. I'll be sending this to my mom when I get my act together.

I've been quilting a ton trying to clear my schedule enough to take off the extra day this week for the retreat. Here's what I've accomplished so far.

Linda's next IU quilt, quilted with Stipple again.

Linda's mom's quilt, which is entirely HAND PIECED, quilted with a smaller-scale stipple.

Sara's KC Chiefs quilt, quilted with Diagonal Plaid Bias Cut.  I felt so on-trend working on this one as all the Taylor Swift stuff was hitting the news. 😆 This quilt is very big and ended up being really heavy when I was done.

Hannah's first quilt! She requested Denali and orange thread. She did such a nice job; it was very square. I also bound this one.

Lauren's quilt. This is the first larger project she's done. She used a lot of African prints and we decided on Triangle Meander for the quilting, which ended up adding really nice texture without competing with her blocks and fabric. I also bound this one. She provided me with scrappy binding and it was so fun! The background fabric is black; I probably should have tried to adjust it to better reflect that.

Jess's quilt, quilted with hand-guided loopy meander. This one has a fleece back and Warm & Natural Plush batting, which is thicker than the normal. It should be really warm. I need to get this one bound today and then I will be done with my planned work for the week.

While I was working on all the binding, I threw my little Buttercups quilt on the frame and quilted it with Knit 1, Purl 2. Now to find time to make and sew the binding on. I think I'll do hand binding to finish this one since it's small.

I heard someone speak and they were talking about copyright. They claimed that you could take someone else's pattern, write your own instructions and take your own pictures while you are making it, and then sell it as your own--and that was okay. I don't think that sounds right. Maybe it's allowed under a legal definition or interpretation, but it doesn't seem the least bit okay morally to me. What are your thoughts on it? 

Linking with My Quilt Infatuation, For the Love of Geese, Alycia Quilts, Confessions of a Fabric Addict, and From Bolt to Beauty.

It's time to set your October goal. If you're here for the first time, welcome! Let's set some goals and have some fun!

New to One Monthly Goal?  Welcome!  To join, share a photo of your project plus some words about what you want to accomplish in a blog post or Instagram post and add that photo to the link up.  Return at the end of the month and share your results.  (Results link up opens for the last 7 days of the month.)

My goal this month is to get caught up on the Malted Mystery quilt. I need to do August (cutting), September, and October's clues. October's clue releases on the fifth. The only thing I've done so far is select the fabric. The nice thing about Cheryl's mystery quilts is that they are very easy to get caught up on if/when you fall behind.

I'm also working on my version of the Log Cabin Stars quilt by Emily Dennis. This is a QAL I joined in on without reading through the timeline. I had a fabric pull that looked like it would work, so I thought, why not? Then the emails started coming. Oh my. 😅 I won't be finishing this one on time, but it's more about the journey, I guess. 

If I can get caught up, I'd also like to sew the remaining Grassy Creek border units. 

One thing that may help me slightly is that I'm scheduled to attend two (daytime) retreats this month.

A stretch goal is to get a few more of my to-be-quilted tops quilted. I'm entering my busier season of quilting, so this will probably be unlikely. 

I also have my dress form pieces waiting to be sewn and some clothing to make. I don't know about you, but I never run out of things to be sewn.