Tuesday, June 30, 2015

Vortexing along...


I am slowly working away on my quilt vortex project.  Sewing, trimming, more sewing, more trimming. 

 
After trimming, I sort the pieces into piles of approximately the same size and shape and then I start sewing them together.  It is fun to revisit scraps from projects of the past.  The fabric with the hexagons is a scrap leftover from my daughter's university quilt. I made the quilt for her when she started university.  She graduated a couple of weeks ago and is now gainfully employed.  Later this year, she and I are going to pick out fabric and a pattern for a new quilt for her apartment as a graduation gift.  The purple batik scraps are from my purple "Yellow Brick Road" quilt. I am hoping for a good sized lap quilt at the end of this process.
 
Stay tuned for more progress reports, maybe later this week.


Sunday, June 21, 2015

Today's Slow Stitching and Quilt Vortex update


Last week, I finished hand quilting this little sheep wall hanging and today I will be hand stitching the binding down.  This is a gift for my MIL for her birthday which was in May.  I gave her the unfinished project in a bag and then took it back to finish it. She likes sheep so I thought this would be a great little gift for her.

My husband was out last night so a friend came over--after a long walk, she did some knitting while I did some sewing on my quilt vortex project. We drank iced tea and chatted while we knitted and sewed.

 I had a pile of pressing to do first. Then, I just chain pieced and randomly joined the pairs together.

More pressing. More sewing.  More trimming.

Soon, I had sewn up all the scraps that I had put into my bin.  I laid everything out on the design floor and took this picture:


Quilt vortex is a quilt along project with Crazy Mom.  I am not quite caught up but progress is being made! I am hoping for a lap sized quilt in the end.  I may need to dig through my scrap bags and bins for more scraps for more blocks to bring it up to this size.  Lucky for me, I have a few more scraps lurking about in my sewing room to chose from!

Happy Slow Sunday Stitching to everyone at Kathy's blog!  Happy Father's day to all of the Dads as well.

Tuesday, June 16, 2015

A New Project...

I have been sorely lacking in time to sew in recent months.  I have been busy looking after a sick relative and all that that entails so sewing machine time went by the wayside...  I have been trying to get my sewing mojo back and decided that starting a new scrappy quilt might be just the ticket!  Crazy Mom just started a new sew along at her blog a couple of weeks ago.  She is giving step by step instructions to make a scrap vortex quilt to use up the small bits of fabric that breed in sewing rooms everywhere.
 
 
 
One night last week, I gathered up all of my bags of scraps, mostly sorted out by colour, and grabbed a bin.  I went through all of the bags of bits and pieces and picked out all the brightly coloured ones and threw them into the bin. 
 
 
 
 
The next step involved taking two pieces of fabric from the bin and just sewing them together.  I chain pieced as many as I could in one evening and came up with this pile.
 
 
Tonight, I ironed them and laid them out on my design floor. I was surprised how many I had made!
 
 
 
Last week's instructions were to sew pairs together, creating bigger chunks of scraps.  I hope to find some time this week to do this.  I also still have lots of scraps in the bin --as I said before, they do seem to breed when I am not looking!  I will have to sew them into pairs too. I don't want to have to put any scraps back into the zip lock bags.