Sewing Room

The Stashbuster topic of the week is sewing rooms. I'm fortunate in that I have a fairly large space to work in. The space I use is an addition to our home that was, evidently, once a screen porch. The room was closed in prior to our purchasing the home so we just added vinyl flooring and it works great for me. It faces south and overlooks the pool and canal behind our home. Lot's of windows let a lot of light in (also heat!) which is great during the day, but the room is poorly lit at night. The two biggest drawbacks are the lack of electric plugs (only two) and no vent for the air conditioner. It's a long and narrow room which is perfect for my machine quilting frame. I'm including two photos of the room. Viewer beware - I did not straighten up prior to taking the photos! There is no closet so I have my stash in old dressers and storage drawers. There is a long shelf under the quilting frame that I store my batting on. I mostly buy batting in the package as I have discovered that one of our cats likes to nap on batting.

UFO's

The Stashbuster topic of the week is UFO's. I procrastinated blogging about this topic almost as much as I procrastinate finishing those UFO's! Anyway, my oldest UFO is a photo memory quilt that I started for my parent's aniversary two years ago. I had just started quilting and it was my second completed quilt top. I (as usual) didn't allow enough time to finish it and showed it to my parents as a work in progress (WIP). I don't have a scanner, so I gave my niece the photo transfer fabric to scan the photos. Unfortunately, I didn't realize that I should just square up the photos and add them to the quilt. Instead I ironed the photo transfer fabric to another piece of fabric and used this in the quilt! Now these fabrics feel like cardboard and the probability of my being able to quilt them is zero. The only thing left to do is take the whole thing apart and redo the photos. To make matters worse, my Mom died just after I presented her with this WIP and now I am even less interested in finishing it. However, after digging it out of a drawer tonight to take this photo I feel the need to finish it and give it to my Dad. Maybe in April....

As far as other UFO's are concerned there are several. Four from last year - a signature quilt, a Crown of Thorns, a funky pink & green quilt for my youngest DD and a "Bears in the Woods" from Quilt in a Day (quilt in a day my foot!). The quilts I've started this year are all in various stages of completion and I am making progress on them.

That's enough confession for one night. Here on the home front I am working on the "Turning Twenty" for the riding instructor and will add the borders tomorrow and get it loaded on the quilting frame. Will post a picture of it when it's closer to being done.

Donation Quilt

I started this "Scrappy Trips Around The World" about 18 months ago. The pattern is from Bonnie at Quiltville (thanks Bonnie, I love your site!) and I finished the binding on Monday night to donate to my children's school for a silent auction. The pattern was fun & easy to do, but when I started it I was quite new to quilting and self-taught, so I had problems lining things up and had a shortage of scraps. I made a few blocks but put them away and didn't get them out again until last fall. I finished the quilt top and practiced machine quilting with a meander stitch. Since I hate binding things and always procrastinate this step, I put it aside again for 4-5 months! In the end, I hated to part with it. I'll have to make this one again now that I have a scrap collection and fabric stash!

Quilt Top Complete

I finished the top for my great-niece's first birthday on Sunday. The pattern is "Crazy Eights" by Bits 'n Pieces and was a quick, enjoyable quilt. I still need to quilt it, though. Hopefully I'll be able to load it on my Pfaff Grandquilter and Next Generation Frame one evening this week and get it done. It will only be the second quilt I've done with the new set-up. The first was a disaster. One of those situations that make you understand the manufacturer's directions to practice on plain muslin and not a quilt top!

I've started a "Turning Twenty" today as a gift for my daughter's riding instructor who is leaving the state. I bought a few horse themed fat quarters today at the LQS and finished the rest of the fabric from stash. It's probably a bit darker than I would have liked, but wanted to use some fat quarters that have been hanging around a while.

More Pictures

I'm practicing my photography skills by taking pictures of the canal behind our house. The first picture is another picture at sunset. The second picture is taken from the opposite direction and shows the east end of the canal and the Banana River. I live in Merritt Island which sits in the Indian River on the east coast of Florida. On the west side of the island is the Indian River and on the east is the Banana River. We are about 10 miles south of the space center.