What I've been up to lately.

The last few days I've done more sewing than blogging. I think that's a good thing. This past weekend one of my friends came down from Northern Wisconsin and brought some fabric to make cloth napkins! I think they turned out really well! And I pulled some red out of my stash and we used it for the backing of one set. Those are my favorite! We used the "French Seam" method. You first put wrong sides together, yes, wrong sides together, sew around the outer edge with your 1/4" seam, leaving about a 4-5" section un-sewn so that you can turn it right sides out. Then turn, poke your corners, and iron. Iron the edge with the hole so that the raw edges are folded inward and match the rest of the napkin. Then adjust your machine to a 1/8" seam and sew around the entire napkin. Voila!



I've also put some of my finished photos on facebook, and my sister commented on the purse I made....so I had to make her one too! Even the purses look like sisters! :) The bottom one is the original, and the one on the top is her "copy"! I just inverted the colors. She's a purple fiend!


The other day I thought about summer up North and laying on the lawn after swimming in our lake....and how good it would feel to lay on a quilt! Since I'm making (well...it's on stand-by at the moment) the Single Girl quilt with the solid gray, I realized that I like gray! And I thought a darker color would soak up the sun so the quilt would be nice and warm by the time I laid on it. I found the fat quarter bundle on the Fabric Quarter website and I had to buy them! The only thing is, I got a half yard bundle of 7 different prints, and when I measured them out they were 18" exactly at the fold, and about 17 3/4" at the selvage edges. So if you were planning on cutting two 9" squares out of the width, that wouldn't work. The solids I pulled from my stash.



The pattern I'm going to use for the gray quilt is from Oh, Fransson! You can find the tutorial and pattern here if you'd like to try it! I'm also going to try her mosaic floor pillow one of these days also! I'm just waiting to get the right amount of scraps....

Head on over to this Oh, Frannson! webpage for more great free downloadable quilt patterns! Enjoy!

And coal wins.

It was always going to be this way. Today I unlocked a deep dark need in my soul to have a predominantly gray quilt. I now realize that it's always been there, I just needed to discover it. And now that I have it within reach, I'm really, really, REALLY excited about it! I'm not really a pink person, and blue just didn't seem to go with Sunkissed, green or the orange/yellow would have been good and I like those colors, but I couldn't handle a king sized quilt of them. Gray has always been the right choice for me and this quilt.


Here's 1/4 of one of the Single Girl rings on the gray. I think I like it because it makes the colors pop, and won't show dirt like white would have. And since it'll be on my bed eventually I didn't want the sheet fuzzies and lint to show up on something even darker, like a black. I've been excited about other quilting projects before, but nothing like this! It's perfect!