Tuesday, May 14, 2013

Latest Happenings

Some time ago my husband went through his closet and tossed out several shirts - which I promptly caught. They sat in a pile for a long time. Finally I took a trip to the thrift store and headed straight to the XXL men's long sleeve shirts. I searched only for 100% cotton ones, of course, and I didn't want to spend over $2.00. There was a sale going on, and I think I even got one for $.50. I took several of them home and washed and dried them. And then *they* sat in the pile with my husband's shirts for a few more months. I found a book with just the right pattern I wanted for the shirts, so I spent many evenings cutting up these shirts while watching TV. I stacked them up all neatly and waited for my chance to begin. That chance came when we took the month of April and went back to Kansas to our little (2nd) house. Here is a picture of one of the blocks.


The machine pictured here is my Bernina 830LE that I'm using to sew a blanket stitch around the edges. I'm working on that now that I'm home. What I took to KS was my workhorse 1001, because the 830 is not a very portable machine.  My plans in KS were to sew, sew, sew!  But I ended up doing lots if running around, and didn't get nearly enough sewing done. What I did get done that took much longer than I thought it would was make cafe curtains for 4 kitchen windows.  Here's the before and after pictures of those windows. 
 



After I finished these, I was then able to get on to the fun things - like starting the blocks using the shirt fabric.  I'm used to working in my huge quilting room at home (in AL) with lots of space to iron and cut.  In the LR house, I had just a tiny little work space, so it took a lot longer to cut any fabric.  I got another small quilt sewn together, but I'll have to take a picture of it, and then I can post it here.