Quiltville Mystery - En Provence

Its been quite some time since I last posted.  I had a loss in my quilting mojo for a while and didn't enter my sewing room for more than a month.  The year has gone by quickly and its December already.

The day after Thanksgiving, Bonnie Hunter over at Quiltville started up her yearly myster quilt, En Provence.  I didn't participate last year, but decided this year I wanted to.  Its helped me want to get back into the sewing room.

Clue #1 was posted Friday, November 25th.  Its a fairly simple clue with 221 four-patches of neutrals.  Here's my first two pairs to make sure the ended up at the correct size:


As I was pulling strips from my bin of pre-cut strips from other projects and then sewing them into pairs, I ran out of thread on my prior thread cone.  It was a pretty hefty cone at 2500 yards of thread, but nothing like the Big Bertha of cones that I have next up.  Its a whopping 25,000 yards of thread.  I'm curious to see how long this thread cone lasts me.  Its from Superior Threads and I was able to get it on sale earlier this year.


I didn't have enough time to completely finish all of the four-patches.  I honestly don't know how some of the ladies keep up with the clues... other than that they may be retired and not have to spend 40-60 hours a week working for corporate America.

I was able to finish (and press) 100 of the little buggers.


And another twenty sewn and ready for pressing.  Only 101 left to go!



Hop on over to Quiltville's Mystery Link-up (for part 1) to see how the other quilters are faring so far.

Happy Crafting!
~Sarah at upstateNYCreations

Quilt #12 - Charmed Stars

In another trip down memory lane, here's a quilt that I made in 2009.  One of my co-workers was expecting a baby, and at the last minute I decided to make a quilt for them.  I had a bunch of 5" squares left over from a prior baby quilt and this was a good time to use them!  :c)

I laid out the pieces in a relatively random fashion and pieced them together into this sweet little quilt:


The quilt got its name from the 5" squares (charms) and the quilting design which was a free-form star motif.


It was a very quick design that I put together in a single weekend.  The backing was a lovely pink flannel with letters and shapes (i.e. w for whale, b for ball, etc).


Here's one of the final pictures as I was getting the binding sewn down...


And the finished...err... masterpiece? ;-)


Bad picture, but it shows the embroidery I did on the binding.  I've tried a few different ways for labeling quilts and so far my favorite is to just stitch the information right onto the binding before its applied to the quilt.  It makes it a bit less obtrusive, but still provides the information of who and when the quilt was made.


Definitely not my best pictures, but it was a fun little quilt to make.  The baby loved it and once she grew out of it, she started using it as a blanket for her dolls.

Happy Crafting!
~Sarah at upstateNYCreations

Whirlwind

This week has been a bit of a whirlwind for me.  I'm not quite sure how it got to be Friday (almost) already.  The past week or so has been primarily taken up by work items.  My work is going through a re-structuring....again.  By the time everything falls out, I will have had 6 managers in 6 years!

Part of this re-structuring is also some "de-layering", which essentially means that anyone above an individual contributor level needs to re-interview for our own jobs.  We have 15 people at the current level that I am at, and only 8 positions open.  In light of this, I decided to post for one of the new, open manager positions.  It took me several days to decide whether I even wanted to post for it.

At this stage, I've had the interviews (today) and I'm absolutely beat.  The interviews weren't especially long or difficult, but the whole stress of the situation seems to have taken its toll on me.  My quilting mojo is completely gone and I have very little desire to even get into the sewing room.  I'm hoping that now that the interviews are done and everything is essentially out of my hands, that I'll get some of that mojo back.  I'll know in about another 1-1.5 weeks whether I am selected over the other 3 candidates.  The other 3 have at least 5 years more experience than I have, so I'm not feeling quite so confident now about my chances.

Anyway, last weekend I did play with some new fabric in my sewing room.  I purchased a scrap bag just before Christmas and I'm going to make some fun and funky place mats with it.  I'm cutting the pieces into 4.5" lengths and varying widths.  Then those will get sewn into 12.5" long, strip pieced sets.  Everything will get sashed and the end place mat will be about 16" x 18".



Some of these fabrics are really fun, while some others are pretty ugly (see pieces being held up on the right side of the picture below).  I'm going to use Bonnie Hunter's method.... if its ugly, just cut it smaller.  :-)


I'm also thinking I should have taken a piece of advice from my cat over the weekend.  She had it right.... curling up on a soft blanket on a chair in front of an open window in the sun!


This weekend we're traveling a bit to visit my parents for Mother's Day.  Each year we visit them and with my siblings, we make a trip to a local garden center and buy my Mom more plants than she knows what to do with. :-)  Its a combination of Mother's Day and birthday for her.  Plus, my younger sister's birthday is also next week, so we'll celebrate that, too.

Happy Crafting!
~Sarah at upstateNYCreations

Stashbusting 2012 - Weeks 35 & 36

I missed posting last week, so its a double-post this week.  The biggest accomplishment is that I finished up Wildflower Fields!  This fabric was already counted, but I want to share the photos again.  The pictures don't really do the top justice.  Its so much prettier in person.  I'm going to have to try get really good pictures of it once I have it quilted.

Closer picture of one of the corners.

The other big news is that I officially have another commission quilt to make.  A woman my mother knows has a daughter who is expecting in January and she asked around for where she could get something special.  My mother happened to mention that I made quilts and this woman jumped on it.  We've already picked out the design and now its time to go fabric shopping!  Since this fabric will be used right up when I purchase it and its not for my own use, I won't be counting it in the stash reports.

I'm really excited about making this quilt and I hope the client loves it when I give it to her later this fall.

So I used a little bit of stash this week playing around with some blocks for the outer border of a scrappy quilt I'm working on.  I will have to wait to make more of the blocks though as I need more fabrics to throw into the mix.

Here are the numbers:
Added This Week:       0.0 yards
Added Year to Date:    18.54 yards
Used This Week:          0.12 yards
Used Year to Date:       21.12 yards
Net Year to Date:         -2.58 yards  

Go on over to Judy's post to see how everyone has done this week.


Happy Crafting!
~Sarah at upstateNYCreations

Wildflower Fields

Late last year, I started a mystery quilt pattern from Bonnie Hunter called Orca Bay.  I'm finally getting around to finish it.  This has been a labor of love and sometimes of annoyance.  It took a very long time to make all the string blocks and triangles.  There's too many individual pieces to count in this quilt.

Here's how it was at the start of this week with the center pieced and the inside border on.

I was finally able to get some time after work on Thursday and put the last borders on to finish this up.  While I still have to quilt it, I'm really happy that the "hard part" is done now.  It came out a lot better than I had thought it would.  I liked all the fabrics I originally picked (all from stash with a few supplements when I ran out), but didn't dream that it would look this good.  The pictures don't do it justice.  My husband thought it was ugly for the longest time, but now that its together, he thinks its pretty cool.

Closer picture of one of the corners.

I have a simple pantograph pattern of daisies that I think I'm going to use for the quilting.  Since its so busy, I just want something that will provide texture to the quilt.  Now...on to the next project. :-)

 Happy Crafting!
~Sarah at upstateNYCreations

Stashbusting 2012 - Week 31 - 33

The past few weeks have been a little hectic as my husband had knee surgery and work has been busy again.  I have gotten some sewing done on Wildflower Fields and I have a few more blocks made for my scrappy 2.5" square quilt.  I need 99 16-patch blocks for the center and I have 75 made so far.  I'm almost there!
 
Here are the numbers:
Added This Week:       0.0 yards
Added Year to Date:    18.54 yards
Used This Week:          0.35 yards
Used Year to Date:       20.49 yards
Net Year to Date:         -1.95 yards 

Go on over to Judy's post to see how everyone has done this week.

Happy Crafting!
~Sarah at upstateNYCreations

Wanna Know Wednesday - Scraps

Do you ever wonder what to do with leftover pieces of fabric from a quilt?  I know some quilters are very big into scrap quilting and will save every little smidgen of fabric for use in some future project.  I did this for a while and found that I had piles of little pieces that I couldn't figure out anything to do with.  Now I'm talking little...as in strips less than 3/4" wide, or pieces less than 1" square.

I've definitely learned that keeping those tiny pieces just don't work for me.  I do keep a small jar of those pieces and use them strictly for cleaning lint off my machine or wiping up drops of oil from oiling my machine.  That's about the most I get out of them.

What I have found that works for me is to actually "plan" for a scrap quilt.  When I have an idea in my head of what I want something to be or a quilt pattern that I want to make, I jot down the size pieces that I would need to make that quilt.  Then as I finish up an existing quilt, I cut up the leftover fabric into pieces to fit the scrap quilt pattern.

The first "planned" scrap quilt is actually very basic.  Its just leftover 2.5" squares and I just sew them into groups of 16.  Once I have enough blocks amassed, I will make them into a quilt top.  Since I always have leftover binding and I cut my binding at 2.5" strips, I just trim all that leftover down into squares.  All the squares are kept in one plastic bin and I semi-randomly pull out pieces (I usually make sure that no single 16-patch block has two of the same fabric).

I use these 2.5" squares to be my "leaders and enders" such that I never have to waste stitches on a scrap piece of fabric.  So far, I've amassed 70 of these blocks and I need to get to 99 blocks for the center of a over-sized Queen quilt.

One of the things I really like about this is that I have squares from EVERY quilt that I've made so far.  While I look at my blocks that I've made so far, I can pick out the fabrics and know exactly which quilt that fabric came from and who has the quilt now.  It is sort of like a trip down memory lane.

I think I'll post some more about handling scraps in the future as it seems like its a never-ending "problem" for quilters. ;-)

Happy Crafting!
~Sarah at upstateNYCreations