Shoo-Fly Don't bother Me!

  Hello Friends!

Its New Years Eve!  Do you have exciting plans tonight?  My evening has been fun-filled with Mickey Mouse Go Fish with the kids and working on a quilt after they went to bed.  May not be real exciting to some, but its the perfect evening to me! Wanna see what I'm working on?  Say "Please."  Well, since you asked so nicely,

Its my Shoo-Fly quilt!  I'm using the Urban Zoologie and Remix fabrics from Ann Kelle for Robert Kaufman and some white and orange solid cotton fabric from my stash.  The white is the background on most of the blocks but some of them will have orange as their background because the background of the print fabric is white.  It sounds a little random to not use the same background color for the whole quilt but I saw it done on a different quilt with a different block and it was pretty.  Added some more interest to the quilt.  I'm really liking how this quilt it coming out.  I've got 9 of the 24 blocks done, so I'm a little less than half way on it. (I've got a friend coming over in a couple of days to craft while the kids play so I should be able to make a lot of progress on it then).  I'm loving the colors and I love how well everything lines up!  I usually don't get things to line up that well, ever!  So this makes me happy!  

Well, my New Year's Eve is coming to a close (I almost never stay up long enough to watch the ball drop!  New Year's or not, my kids still wake up around 6am!)  I wish you all the best in 2013, may you be SEW happy!  See you next year!

Shelly

The List

  Hello Friends!  

As promised, I'm back with my list of quilts to finish in 2013.  I started out with a list of 20, seems reasonable, right?  Especially considering that when I say finish a quilt, I'm talking about quilted and bound kind of finished.  I can usually piece a quilt in a fairly short amount of time, but it takes me longer to get it quilted and bound.  So, anyway, as I was saying, I started out with a list of 20 but I've had such a quiet productive week that 2 of the items on my list are now finished quilt tops waiting to be quilted and bound.  So, I decided to add two more to the list, it now has 22 items on it:

1. Brick Quilt-using Pink and Green Chair fabric 

See, the quilt top is done.

2. Stacked Coin Quilt using pink and black fat eigths(WIP)

3 Flying Geese Quilt (finished quilt top)

4. Shoo Fly Quilt using Urban Zoologie and Remix fabric by Ann Kelle for Robert Kaufman

5 Tumbler Quilt using Candy fabrics

6. Roller Rink style quilt using lace print FQs

7. Concentric Diamonds Half Square Triangel Quilt using pink, brown and green floral pring FQs

8. Patchwork quilt using pink, yellow and floral print fabric from JoAnns

9. Hexagon quilt using Moonstruck layer cake by Whistler studios

10. Star quilt using Serenade by Kate Spain for Moda

11. Christmas Tree Skirt using Cherry Christmas from Moda

12. Concentric Squares Scrap Quilt

13. Foundation Paper Pieced String Quilt from scraps

14. Uneven wide stacked coin (saw this one on Pinterest, don't know how else to describe it)

15. Twister Quilt using rainbow colors in diagonal stripes

16. Friendship Braid

17. Modified Log Cabin table runner using Oriental print FQs

18. Plus Sign Quilt

19. Snowball Quilt

20. Postage Stamp Scrap Quilt

21. Stick and Strips Quilt using Happy Trails Batik from Moda (this one is for Hubs.  I made one for each kid, now he needs one too)

22. Churn Dash Quilt using Picadilly by Sparky and Marie

So, there you have it!  Stay tuned!  I'll be sharing progress pics of these quilts and you'll definitely get to see photos of them all finished!  Have a great weekend and do something that makes you SEW happy!

Shelly

Christmas is over!

  Hello Friends!

I love Christmas, but I sure am glad its over!  We have a lot of fun at Christmastime but I also get really stressed out!  The task of getting the house clean and getting everything ready for people to come over is just a lot, and it was even more this year since there was so little time between the end of school and Christmas (I'm a preschool teacher so if school is in session that means that I'm working).  To add to my stress at Christmas is the fact that in order to host Christmas I have to take down my craft room, my tables get called into service as a place to seat 12 people for the holiday meal.  This is a real problem because crafting is a major stress release for me.  As soon as everyone left our house, the hubs helped me put my craft room back in order and he ordered me to go sew!  Things are alot calmer around our house now, momma has her craft room back! 

One benefit to having to take down my craft room is that in the process I have moved my craft room to a different room in the house.  I got to move from the formal dining room to the large room on the back of our house.  It has no windows but its almost twice as large as the formal dining room and its tucked away from the main traffic flows of the rest of the house and it has a door, which means when I've made a big mess no one has to see it!  I can just close the door and act like it doesn't exist.  Of course I now need to make a curtain for the window in the door to truly hide the mess but that won't take too long.  In moving my craft room I also ended up with a room with more wall space.  The formal dining room had two doorways, a large window and two built in corner cabinets, leaving little wall space and what there was, was in small chunks.  More wall space means that I've been able to fulfill one of my quilting dreams:

A design wall!  And I love it!  This design wall is made from a large piece of felt (the local craft stores had felt by the yard on sale right before Christmas!), hung over some metal rods that are secured to the wall using eye screws. The felt is secured to the rods by binder clips.  Easy and low cost and makes my quilting life so much easier.  I can layout my blocks on my design wall and I know exactly what order they go in.  When doing something that has a random quality to it, I can make sure that the randomness is still pleasing to the eye before I sew it all together.   Well, I'm off to spend the gift cards that I received as Christmas gifts, I do believe a new iron and new quilting rulers are in my future!

Until next time, I hope your day is "SEW" happy!

Shelly

Setting Goals

  Hello Friends!  

I know the new year is not yet upon us but as the current year approaches its close I can't help but think of the goals I'd like to set for myself in 2013.  (I say goals because for some reason the term 'resolutions' just doesn't sit well with me).  I have the typical goals that are at the top of the list every year: lose weight/be healthier, spend more time with my family, be a better mom, be a better housekeeper, etc.  This year I'm going to add blogging to the list.  I've dabbled in the blog-o-sphere for a couple of years but I've never gotten serious about it.  I'm going to change that this year.  I aim to blog at least once a week.  The topic will probably center around my crafting, specifically, my quilting, but I'm sure to share bits and pieces of my everyday life with you as well.  I don't expect to have hundreds of followers (though that would be fabulous), I just want to put a piece of myself out there and pray that God is able to use it, even if He only uses it to change me.  As a means to this end, I'm working on a quilt list that I will aim to complete during 2013.  I will share it with you soon.  If you are joining me on this little journey, I hope that something I share will be of value to you.

The gingerbread my kids decorated for Christmas, one of our traditions.  

Until we meet again,

Almost there!

Check out my free motion Quilty-ness! I'm almost done with a quilt of firsts. This is the biggest quilt I've ever free motion quilted (it measures approx. 65x65), it's good practice for quilting the twin size quilts I'm making my kids for Christmas. It's the first quilt I've made just for me. And it's the first quilt that I haven't used the same quilting motif for the entire quilt, this one actually has four different motifs on it. I'm hoping to get the whole thing done by this weekend so I can spend Saturday night curled up on our new mattress (which is supposed to be delivered on Saturday!), under my new quilt catching up on the backlog on our DVR, I know I live an exciting life, don't be jealous!
Have a happy day!

Menu Plan Monday

Hello Friends!

I hope you all had an amazing weekend!  Ours was filled to the brim, but that's starting to be the norm so I'm getting used to it.
Here's my menu plan for this week:

Monday-Chicken Cordon Bleu, Rice, California Mix Veggies
Tuesday-Grilled Steak, Mashed Potatoes, Green Beans
Wednesday-Spaghetti with Meat Sauce, Garlic Bread
Thursday-Brown Sugar and Balsamic Glazed Pork Loin, pasta roni, broccoli
Friday-Cajun Turkey tenderloin, crock pot mac and cheese (mmmm! mac and cheese!), peas

I always have the best of intentions with my meal plans but sometimes it just doesn't pan out and we change the day we're having things or switch around the sides, but that's okay, it all works out in the end!

Have a great week!

Work in Progress Wednesday

Hello friends!
From now on, hump day will be work in progress Wednesday. I will show you what projects I'm working on right now. This week my WIP is a pair of zip pocket pouches. I've been doing a lot of quilting recently but I've got a craft fair coming up in early November so I've really got to get going on some of the smaller things that will be available in my booth.

Menu Monday

Hello Friends!

It is a personal goal of mine to be a better blogger.  One of the was that I desire to improve is by being more consistent in my posting habits.  To that end, I have decided to try to follow a schedule for my posting that would lead me to 4 posts per week: 1 for each of my loves.  From hence forth, I declare the first workday of the week to be Menu Monday!  On Mondays I will share with you my menu plan for the week as well as any new recipes I have come across (usually courtesy of Pinterest). So, without further ado, here we go!

This week the things I have to menu plan around are: soccer practice on Monday and Thursday, church on Wednesday and Sunday, and a 1:00 soccer game on Saturday.  We also have plans to visit friends Saturday evening.

Monday-Baked Fried Chicken, mashed potatoes (we like the ones from Betty Crocker that can be found in the freezer aisle), green beans
Tuesday-baked tilapia, pasta roni, peas
Wednesday-Baked Shrimp in a Lemony Garlic sauce, couscous, green beans (the kids will have chicken nuggets because neither one of them will eat shrimp)
Thursday-Crockpot Bacon Cheeseburger Soup
Friday-Meatloaf, Macaroni and Cheese, Broccoli
Saturday-Lunch-Corndog Bake
                Dinner-out with friends

I also made crockpot sugared pecans for snacking on this week (though I don't know how much longer they'll last, those things are addictive!)

Have a great day!

Sneak Peek

Hello Friends!
I'm just checking in to give you a little sneak peek of my next quilt project. Stay tuned for the finished quilt top. Also, did you see who stopped by my sewing room for a visit this week? I've been visited by both Princess Aurora and the red Power Ranger this week, how special am I?
See you soon!

Call of the Wild

I'm well on my way to completing my next quilt. I found a design that I really liked on Pinterest. On their quilt, they use multiple different prints in the center of their blocks, I chose to use only three. C was with me when I purchased this fabric and he picked it out. Actually he picked out the tiger and the cheetah, he also picked another spotted print that was close in color to the cheetah, I later decided to replace it with the black and white giraffe. The neutral for this quilt is black, that's a little different for me because I usually use white or cream. I've got all the blocks put together, I now need to press them and put them all together to make a quilt top. I'll be back to show it off when it's done!

New obsession

I've got a new obsession: quilting! I always said I'd never quilt, I don't have the patience for it, well, I was wrong (don't tell my husband I said that). I've got quilts flying through my head pretty much all the time! I'm going to have to find a notebook to write them all down in (maybe one of those covered composition books I made way back when). This quilt is the first one I've made start to finish that's actually big enough to cozy up under. I made a couple of smaller ones to practice but the only one who could snuggle under those is my daughter's baby doll. This one is called a sudoku quilt. You use a finished sudoku puzzle for the layout. I found the concept on the blog for my local quilt store (www.sewflakesfabrics.com). Eight of the fabrics used in the blocks came from a fat quarter super stack that I purchased at Walmart. The ninth fabric as well as the fabrics for the sashing and the border came from my stash.

A lot from a little

I love fat quarters! I love getting just enough fabric to do the small projects I enjoy and I get to bypass the cut counter completely! I also like that fat quarters can be purchased in bundles so I have several fabrics that all coordinate, I don't have to think about it. So check out what I did with one fat quarter bundle: 2 gathered wristlet clutches, 2 wristlet mini pouches and 2 key fobs. I even have a full fat quarter left over! So much fun out of so little fabric!
Hugs!

New blog!

Hello Friends!
Well, its summer time and I think its a great time to start blogging again.  I figured the best thing to start with is a little recap of what I've been up to.  The school year was definitely one of adjustment.  I had a kindergartner and I started teaching again, 3's and 4's.  Two age groups, both older than I've taught before, a lot to take on.  It left little time to create, so my craftiness kind of took a back burner.  When I did have the chance to create, I have been using a lot of fabric, purses and bags have been my thing of late.  But now, I'm getting back to paper a bit, both cards and scrapbooks.  I have however decided to simplify things some.  I'm taking on the ProjectLife scrapbooking philosophy starting this week, making sure to remember the little things as well as the big, and when doing the big events, I'm still using the project life style, photo pages, to scrapbook them.  Keep an eye out and I'll show you what I'm up to.
Hugs!