Stories from the Sewing Room

It's been a busy week here. I've already completed this month's Marble Mystery clue. September and October clues are pictured.

This is only the second month we've been sewing and I've used most of my parts already. Hmm.

The local quilt shows were held over the weekend. My husband and I went to both on Friday afternoon. I found eight quilts I'd quilted at the guild show where I'm not a member. I had four of my own and five I'd quilted at my guild's show. I hit the treasure shops at both. I ended up with 10 yards of fabric for $40. The one I don't belong to had a lot of very current fabric on offer. The top row of fabrics are from the smaller show, the bottom stuff from my guild. Do you notice there's some Kaffe in there? That will be for my Tessellations quilt. I might use the purple polka dot for that too.

My husband decided to buy me a nice maple clapper--I've never used one before and I don't typically use steam, just spritz with water, so we'll see how it goes. I also bought two charm packs from one of the vendors. 

My guild has a raffle basket thing at the shows. I donated a basket at our last show that was all quilt-themed things for the home. This year I didn't have enough capacity to donate. They went with various themes that weren't necessarily related to sewing this year, such as a coffee basket, a sports basket, pet care, diapers and baby things, etc. My husband bought one card of 25 entries--you pick how you distribute the entries amongst the baskets. I let him decide what he was entering. He won two baskets--the Missouri Star and the state parks baskets. I'm not sure what we're going to do with all this stuff, but it was for a good cause.

I have quilted my RSC. I chose Over the Rainbow for the quilting. It seemed fitting for a rainbow scrap quilt. The block pattern I used is available for free from mmm quilts.

As you may recall, I pieced a backing using lots of old prints and a few new ones, as shown above. I generated a pile of scraps! It wasn't as bad as this pile looks because two of the pieces left over after trimming were about a half yard each, so those went back into the fabric yardage bins. And of course I removed the little strips of excess batting. I donate batting scraps to someone who makes dog beds. It usually takes me about a year to get a kitchen trash bag full.

The binding was made from leftover backing from a previous project. I had to use batting from my roll instead of the Frankenbatting I'd planned because I actually didn't have enough scraps to make a large enough batting. 

Linking my RSC finish here. 

I bound two very large quilts from last week's group of quilts and I've quilted just a few quilts. The first one is Amber's. She picked Sugar and Spice for the quilting and it looks so pretty. As you can see, it's a pretty large quilt. I couldn't get the white fabric to actually show up as white. 

Jae picked Cakewalk for her baby quilt. Sorry, it's pretty hard to see the quilting on this one whether it's on the frame or not. The thread blended into the fabric really well.