A Long Absence and Christmas Sewing

No excuses here for why I've neglected the blogging as long as I have. My dedication to regular posting has suffered terribly, and no worthy reason exists.

Just not much of a priority lately, I reckon. I do like that I've blogged for as long as I have, and I want to continue, so I must regain my verve for writing and more regular posting. I will try.

I owe myself a recap of November highlights, and I also have a little Christmas something to share. Let's do last month's wrap-up first. 

 

As I look at these 9 highlight pictures, I can plainly see why I do so little blogging - I do so little quilting! My highlights are more grandbabies and family than quilts and sewing.

TOP ROW: Little Cate came to stay for a weekend; we had such a fun time entertaining her - or more accurately, being entertained by her. The first two pictures are both from that weekend, followed by a picture of Reagan entertaining us while we watched the OSU-Purdue game at her other grandparents' house.

MIDDLE ROW: My one notable sewing accomplishment was the adorable Tilda hexie flowers I stitched during my knee recovery. I must do a post in which I share more of this darling little quilt. The middle picture is the best of my attempts to photograph the Northern Lights when they were visible in south-central Ohio. This is looking out one of the upstairs bedroom windows. And last in this row, another Reagan picture - she too got to stay an overnight with us, and we had the best time. She has the wildest hair!

BOTTOM ROW: We had Thanksgiving at my brother Mark's house and our matriarch Mom got some snuggle time with her great-granddaughter,Reagan, the youngest member of the family. Later in the day, we gathered all 5 siblings around Mom for a picture. I am directly behind Mom. In the red is Sandy, and in the green is Carol. Alan and Mark are behind us. Five kids in six years! I am the oldest; Carol is the baby. The final picture is Grampa Kevin and Cate enjoying a Disney movie with all the essential "stuffies" for comfort.

I truly have done so very little in the sewing room, but today, I accomplished quite a bit as Sharon was here for a full day of stitching and catching up. I worked on a secret Christmas gift, so I will share what Sharon finished.

 She put the finishing touches on this Christmas Tree wall hanging and it looks just magical! It will truly enhance her holiday decorating. I did not take pictures of some of the other items she made - finishing off several table toppers that she intends to give to family; and some Tilda 9-patches that she'd worked on earlier in the fall.

We exchanged Christmas gifts, and had a merry time this afternoon. I have a wonderful new project to dream of - I received a lovely collection of fabric by Sherrie and Chelsi of Moda Fabrics. A granddaughter quilt is certainly in order! Sharon is ready to entertain with a full compliment of charcuterie items for her holiday table. I found a scrumptious array of yummy goodies that just seemed too good to pass on. Sharon has a talent for entertaining in style, so I hope these fill out her feast table.

 As we closed down for the day, I snapped this photo that seemed emblematic of a successful day of sewing and merriment. We really did have a productive day with plenty of cheer of the season.

Happy Quilting, Friends!

Jayne 

Sewing With Sharon

Normalcy is slowly returning around here as my physical therapy and healing continues. If you ask me, I am ahead of schedule in the recovery department, and am impatient to get to full, unrestricted activities ASAP!

One bit of "normal" this week was my Tuesday sewing day with Sharon! Oh, boy, did we get a lot done! Sharon began her first few surrounds of her Kaffe Fassett Around the World quilt. It is going to be spectacular, if this initial portion is any indication.

 

Does this halt you in your tracks? Look at the movement in those flowers! Such a striking center panel and it could not be more perfect. A small border of pink dots on blue and then another wonderful floral with roses on a lavender background - this combination of fabrics is a wonderful start to her quilt.

Her next layer is this light blue "fans" piece; it contains just the right pops of pinks, purples, and greens to enhance those same pastels in the previous fabrics. If only mine will be half as gorgeous. Sharon has great fabrics from which to choose, and with her "eye" for just the right color and design, her quilt is gonna' be amazing.

She took this quilt to about the 4th or 5th surround, then felt it wise to stop. She wants to sift through her Kaffe Fassett stash a bit more thoroughly before moving ahead. Like me, Sharon has fabric all over the place. There might just be one random piece of KF in a stack in the back of the closet, or under the desk, or in a storage tub. We'd best pull all these random KF fabrics together so we don't miss anything!

She moved on to working with her Tilda remnants, making 9-patch blocks with a gentle off-white neutral. 

We remarked that two fabric styles could not be more starkly different - Kaffe Fassett and Tilda. One is bold and color-saturated while the other is soft and muted. One screams while the other whispers. And both are just as luscious to work with as anything.

So my task for the day was to continue making pinwheels for my Winnie the Pooh panel. Finishing the pinwheels led to making top and bottom borders, followed by side borders. All very straightforward. Attach said borders to the panel and VOILA! It's now ready to go on the long arm machine.

I acquired the Pooh panel when Jan was purging her stash awhile back. I acquired the green for the pinwheels just last month when Becky was similarly purging. I would even venture that the dotted fabric in the pinwheels came from someone's purge - we've all been feeling the weight of the excesses of our stashes. Anyway, this quilt totally has happened through the generosity of my dear quilting friends!

Let's hope all this productivity continues. I would really like to finish out 2025 with a flourish of quilting activity!

Happy Quilting, Friends!

Jayne 

Sewing With Sharon

While I don't often report on our sewing together, Sharon and I do still regularly meet to devote time to our projects. We both have plenty of UFOs, WIPs, new projects, and plans for new things. Typical quilters, right? UFOs (unfinished objects) and WIPs (works in progress), regardless of how diligently we work on them, seem never to totally disappear because the thrill of the new project or the project on the horizon is just too alluring.

And sometimes, the project of the day is simply something totally unplanned and spontaneous. Like the wall hanging Sharon worked on this week.

First, though, we need to revisit one of her projects from retreat a few weeks ago. She was in the midst of creating a small wall hanging for her daughter's new cabin. Using scraps from her stash, she came up with this sweet little piece, and stopped when she ran short on one of the fabrics.

While it is a scrappy project, she controlled the stem fabric and the borders. In the few weeks since retreat, she has finished this wall hanging and it looks spectacular. 

What a wonderful finish! Sharon's daughter will be lucky to have a freshly made piece for her new home. Sharon just sent this photo, and I will diverge from my topic momentarily to show you just how challenging it was for her to get a picture!

 

Any quilter with cats knows the uncanny way they gravitate to a project being spread out on the floor or the bed or a table! Their instincts are freakish.

 

Now back to Sharon's sewing - the spontaneous variety, in this case. After finishing this little leaf quilt, she still had so many fall-inspired scraps left over. What to do? Put them away for another day? Let them lay around begging to be used? 

 

NO! Make another quilt, of course! And this is what she worked on while we sewed on Tuesday. She was totally making up the design as she sewed based on a picture she'd seen online somewhere.

 

 

This would have used quite a good bit of scraps, wouldn't you say? She says she already knows where it will hang, and I am sure she is motivated to finish this off since autumn is fast approaching.

 

These 2 projects remind me of my own effort at fall-themed stitching. I had a quilt top hanging on the design wall for over a year, and just this summer quilted it. You may remember it. And yes, it contains a lot of scraps.
 

We all seem to have an endless supply of scraps. I always feel so good about using them; I just cannot stand the possibility of wasting fabric. And no matter how diligently we pull the scraps to use them up, they never seem to totally disappear. I didn't ask Sharon how deep her fall stash is now after these two beauties have been stitched. Hopefully she's seeing some stash reduction. 

 

Happy Quilting, Friends!

 

Jayne 

Sewing With Sharon

Isn't it strange how true it is that when we retire, we suddenly become busier than ever? We once thought that after removing the 9-5 from our routine, we'd be free to do as we please. The reality is that we - often unintentionally - over-fill that time with other activities and obligations.

As much as we want to sew together every Tuesday, we sometimes have to cancel. And lately, what with illnesses and basement floodings, we have been cancelling a lot.

Finally this week we sewed together and OMG!! I can't wait to show you Sharon's project!

She has a new grand-niece that everyone is in her family is excited about. For new baby Scotlyn (not sure of spelling), Sharon and her daughter Amanda are making a very special heirloom-quality quilt. Amanda cross-stitched 9 floral panels on linen. Gorgeous workmanship! So intricately delicate!

Now, Sharon is stitching borders around them with pretty Tilda prints. She selected colors to coordinate with the cross-stitched flowers.

Tuesday's efforts resulted in quite a pretty center portion. Sharon is considering option for a narrow inner border and then a nice, wide outer border. You just can't go wrong with those Tilda prints. Sharon is thinking that she will keep the quilting to a minimum, with stitch-in-the-ditch as her main option.

I am sure I will get to see the finished quilt with borders and quilting at some point. I will try to remember to share it here when I do.

Happy Quilting, Friends!

Jayne 

Sewing With Sharon

After a super-long hiatus, Sharon and I have finally had a sewing day together and it was wonderful! I honestly could feel myself regaining my quilting mojo as we got into the day. The sound of our machines chugging away, the soft wafting of classical music playing, occasional spring bird calls drifting in through the open window - ahhhh, it was all so very much NEEDED! 

We both have finishes to show for our time, too, which is always the boost one needs to get moving onto the next project. Here's what Sharon finished - a layer cake quilt that she started at retreat a week ago is now a finished quilt top.

 The layer cake was one of the recent French General lines. One can never go wrong with FG fabrics. She simply divided the entire layer cake into pairs, then cut off 2 2.5-inch strips. This left her with a 5.5" square which she surrounded with strips and corners. At retreat she finished this as far as stitching all the blocks into vertical rows. Here on Tuesday morning, she stitched the horizontal rows, and VOILA! a finish!

For my own finish, I finally took the baby quilt off the long arm machine. I loaded it onto the long arm back in mid-September, and had it nearly all quilted. On the last pass across the quilt, I began having issues with the top thread breaking about every 8-10 inches. It was so daggone aggravating. I just left it. And left it. And then Reagan was born, and we had the holidays, and then we left for Florida. Well, you see how things sorta' lagged there for a good, long while.

The quilt was intended to be finished by the end of September when Reagan was to be born. I could not solve the breakage issue, and I already had one quilt ready to give her, so I put off dealing with it. This is a sweet fabric line called Effie's Woods by Deb Strain/Moda. I was gifted a lot of it - including the panels - and I had it sewn up in no time. Here's the post I wrote 4 days prior to Reagan's birth in which you see the quilt on the frame.

I did the last of the quilting Monday evening (yes, I still had breakage) and Tuesday, I bound it. I hope to wrap it around our sweet baby Reagan very, very soon. I'll get a proper picture of the quilt as well as the baby in the quilt, too.

With those two finishes out of the way early on, we both moved on to other projects. Sharon continued with yet another precut project. After her layer cake finish, she pulled out a jelly roll project using Tildas! Oh, that scrumptious fabric! She has a fast and easy design that is a twist on the popular "race" quilt.

After binding the baby quilt, I moved on to a scrappy 4-patch project from last fall. I wrote about it here. I didn't realize I'd made so many 4-patches - I'd separated them into groups of 10 and had about 150 total, so it seemed as good a time as any to begin sewing them together. With Sharon's input, I decided it best to just keep it simple, so with a whole stack of a rather neutral Aboriginal Dots (iykyk; one of the KF designs) I am in the construction phase of a really awesome scrappy 4-patch Kaffe quilt.

 And I'm gonna have to come back with a picture for you. It's dark as I write this and I just know I wouldn't get a good photo in poor lighting. 

Now, about that thread-breakage issue on the long arm . . . I am not yet convinced that it is entirely corrected. I will soon load on another smaller quilt and fiddle with the tension. I do believe minor tension adjustments, a bit of oil, and a new needle will solve my quilting woes.

Happy Quilting, Friends!

Jayne

Birthday Party

While we were in Michigan, someone special had a birthday. Since neither of us are too rigid about much of anything, we celebrated yesterday while she was here to sew.

If you guessed that we were celebrating Sharon, you would be correct. Oh, there was wine and cheese and fruit and nuts! Wait, we do that most sewing days…well, add gifts and it becomes a party. 

We have been known to feed one another's habits, so I just had to gift her with some absolutely scrumptious yardage of this neutral by 3Sisters. We are both fans of the many lines of 3Sisters fabrics, she much more so than I. Now you can see what I bought while shopping in Michigan. The perfect neutral to feed Sharon's love of all things 3Sisters.

Here are some more random pics; While it is most definitely a neutral, it’s quite a busy print! There are so many elements to look at, to read, to study. We petted and pointed all over Collages from the new line called Favorites.

Initially, I envisioned her using this in a 2-color quilt - say red/neutral or navy/neutral. But the more I thought about it, those soft pinks or blues that 3Sisters is known for would also look lovely. Then as we studied this piece more closely, it became evident that cutting this into small pieces might be hard to do. Why not piece a quilt with large blocks of this? Well, Sharon certainly has some decision making ahead of her.

In the mean time, she might just stare at this gorgeousness for awhile.

Happy Quilting, Friends!

Jayne

Reveal! Sharon’s Paris Flea Market Find

All manner of events have taken precedence over my blogging lately, but I figured it was high time to prioritize an update. 

In mid-June, Sharon loaded her PFMF quilt onto the long arm machine and the plan was for her to quilt it that day. As good-intentioned as that plan was, the machine had other ideas. As she got just one row across the quilt, threads were breaking or, in this case, running out, tension became touchy and timing went wonky. 

All the long arm problems! That day we experienced every single one of them, daggum it!

Below is her quilt spread out on the bed. Believe it or not, as much time as it spent on the long arm, I never stopped to take a picture of it all loaded up.

I believe I've share these three photos before, but who doesn't love having a second look at a beautiful quilt?

Back to the troubles...Early on, try as I might to fix things myself, I just couldn't do it. The timing was tripping me up. I obtained a phone number for a repair man who makes house calls - some of the Frankfort Girls have used him. I was so fit to be tied that would willingly absorb the cost of a house call if I could get things straightened out. 

Shane, the ever-so-blessed-repairman, walked me through a fix over the phone! Turns out, I had done everything properly, and just one small correction was all that I needed. I am so grateful for his willingness to assist me - free of charge! After all was said and done, I had a big  "well, duuuuhh" moment because I should have known what was wrong. Each little glitch ends up teaching me something.

So with the Tin Lizzie all set for action, troubles began on Sharon's side of things. First, she had a particularly bad migraine episode that put her out of commission for several days.

Next her mother fell and fractured a bone in her leg. Gracious! Hospitalization, additional complications - Sharon and her mom have had a plateful of worries. Needless to say, returning to finish her quilt wasn't a top priority. (Much like my blogging!) 

She was apologetic about tying up  my machine for so long, but truly, with all our bedroom remodel, I was not inconvenienced in the least. Not having the long arm available through those days forced me to attend to some of the less glamorous parts of the remodeling process like purging and cleaning. I got a lot done without the temptation to quilt!

Finally, this past Tuesday, our schedules meshed and Sharon came to finish her quilt. And oh, it was so worth the wait!

I snapped this picture without her knowledge. Once you get into a rhythm with free-motion quilting, you don't need to be interrupted. Sharon's large, sweeping circular designs really accentuate her quilt.

Ta-Da!! This quilt is SOOOOO Sharon! To those who know her, that gorgeous floral border and the bright red star points are clearly ‘trademark Sharon.’ She wrapped it up to take home for trimming and binding. No doubt very soon, it will be on her bed!

In an effort to be more timely with posting as we head into the final week of July, I have couple more posts almost ready to share; hopefully I will follow through.

Happy Quilting, Friends!

Jayne

Revealing Sharon’s Version

You all know that I’ve finished my PFMF (Paris Flea Market Find) and now Sharon is about to have hers finished, too. When she comes next week for our sewing day, we are going to load hers onto the long arm machine, and I will turn her loose with quilting it.

Do you notice much of a difference between hers and mine? (click here for my version) Sharon's choice of 3 Sisters fabric was Etchings. The reds in that particular line are much more vivid and the other colors have more intensity. The other major difference with Sharon's is her spectacular choice of border. Just look at that gorgeous floral. So lush with tremendous impact.

I like that the red star points show up so well on Sharon's version. I was not mindful of where I placed the red squares on my version, so if a 25-patch block has a red corner, then I've lost some of the impact of the stars. I wish I'd had the forethought to realize this when I was constructing, but alas, I did not. Oh well...

Sharon is already stitching together another Paris Flea Market Find! I guess if you love a pattern a whole bunch, then making multiples of it isn't a terrible thing, right? 

Happy Quilting, Friends!

Jayne

Christmas-Time Sewing

This time of year is so packed with shopping, decorating, cooking and baking, family gatherings and all other manner of Christmas preparations. It is no wonder, then, that Sharon and I have had precious few days we could get together for sewing. We did manage one last session before Christmas - this past Wednesday.

Sharon put the finishing touches on these gifts for a Pioneer Woman fan. These fabrics are from the Ree Drummond/Pioneer Woman line at Wal Mart, and Sharon has made two place mats and a small table topper.

They are as simple as can be, but so exquisitely pretty! I just know her friend is going to love them!

While Sharon made these table accessories, I made two more Scandinavian Stars (pink, this time!) and then I proceeded to make 9 churn dash blocks. I have saved a picture of a little quilt I've wanted to make for years, so I just decided that I should go for it. Make the blocks!

I cut out all 9 blocks, but just made this first one. It measures 4.5 inches and will be set on point with red setting blocks. I hope to find a few pockets of time in the coming days to finish it.

Happy first day of winter! Are you ready for these long dark nights ahead? Here's a thought for us to ponder.

"May you find peace in the promise of the solstice night, that each day going forward will be blessed with more light." ~unknown

Happy Quilting, Friends!

Sewing With Sharon

We had a productive day of sewing yesterday - Sharon was making pine trees and I stitched a baby quilt.

Alpine is a pattern that I bought last fall and it appealed not just to me but to Sharon as well. I made mine with more of a darker fall feel, while Sharon is using a bright spring green background for a totally different look.

We didn't do a precise count, but Sharon thinks she is getting close - maybe over 50, for sure. The pattern calls for 64 trees. It won't be long before she's stitching rows!

What a lovely variety of cheery trees! She has one print that is very dark and she's debating on whether or not to use it. I say forests come in all colors, so throw it in there! We'll see what she decides. Click here to see a picture of mine.

On Sunday evening, I cut a layer cake into this stack for a baby quilt. Our extended family will be welcoming a baby girl in January, so I am (for once) being proactive! I am making a carbon copy of this quilt I made in January and just recently gifted.

On Monday, I made all the blocks, and laid them out in a pleasingly random way.

By the end of the afternoon, I had it all sewn together and pressed. I will share all the details as well as a good pic of it soon. Since I didn't really have a plan for that layer cake, I also didn't have a backing ready to go; I am thinking about that for awhile.

I just love sewing days. It was good to catch up with Sharon, and it almost seems as if we fuel each other's creativity. I had so many quilting ideas percolating as the afternoon wore on. It's exciting to be excited about making more quilts.

Happy Quilting, Friends!