Tuesday, June 23, 2020

Stocking #2 Week 2

After I ripped out the house that was in the wrong place it took me two evenings of working on it to have it in the right place. 


It looks so much better down where it is supposed to be.


I hate mistakes, I turned it over to bury my thread when I found this thread crossing over. I was lucky and able to pull it over and stitch it to the stitches in the curve and hide it. 


This is how much I was able to finish this week. 


Here are the two stockings by each other. 
Yes, I have a lot more to do.

Happy Stitching!


Monday, June 22, 2020

Stocking #2 Week 1

I had decided to take some time off between stockings and I had planned to start the second one on June 1st. 
I didn't start it until Friday, June 5. 


Here it is at the very start. Leti had picked different colors than what we did on Nick's and I was making sure this is what she still wanted what we planned on. Yes, she was happy with her choices.

 I had this much done by Sunday.


By Thursday I had gone this far, I was so happy with my progress. Until I noticed that the fourth window was too high. I kept checking and I thought I was in the right spot. I was to the branch, it was just the wrong branch, I needed to be one branch down. 
I decided to pick it all out, every last red stitch. There isn't enough fabric to move it up, so out it came. 


And this is what it looked like on Thursday night before I went to bed. I did work on it Friday but I forgot to take a picture that night to mark my first week.

Happy Stitching!



Sunday, June 21, 2020

Other Projects Card Making

Some other things I have been doing is making cards. I wanted to give my cousins in England some homemade cards for thanking them for letting us visit with them. Unfortunately, we had to cancel our trip because of the coronavirus. Not happy about it but it is the best thing to do. 

This does give me more time for making these little treats. Especially since I was behind in my original goal. Maybe if I made simpler cards it would go faster. But that isn't my style. 


I love this quilt design like die, with 4 colors I can make 4 cards. 


Then I added a flower, each piece was cut by hand, except for the middle circle and all inked by hand, I like them. 
They are blank inside. 


I also made four more, I used a couple. 

We had eight kids from our ward graduating from High School who weren't going to have graduation so we did a drive-by parade. 
I made cards for each of them, three different high schools were represented. 

For Heritage Academy, red, white, and blue.


Mesa High, had the most students, 6. Purple and gold.

For Westward High Blue and orange.

The insides were all the same, just colored in their school colors. 

I also made some birthday cards.
Outside fronts.
I did make the second front smaller which I like better but I didn't center it right. Oops, my friend won't care. 

Inside for one friend.

The middle. 

Inside for the other friend. 

The middle for the other. 

I also learned to make this fancy card front. I wanted to try it out before I made it for real for someone. Very fun technique. It is an interactive card called a Magic Iris by Lawn Fawn.

Magic Iris closed.

Magic Iris opened to show a message..

Happy Paper Crafting!

Yo-Yo Quilt Uodate

Here are all the corner blocks finished, t was really hard to pick out fabric I liked and I thought would look good with fabric for borders I hadn't picked out yet. 



Here I am previewing all the fabrics I will use for the Yo-Yos.


On May 1st I was able to go into my favorite quilt shop for a private shopping spree. Kathy the owner and I had a great time finding fabric for my borders. It was a lot of fun.
Here are the results of that shopping trip. 


I won't tell you how many bolts of fabric we previewed but it was a lot.


Three of the Yo-Yo's on the border blocks are sewed down and all 12 are tacked on. 

Close up of border fabric.

I put this away for a while because I have wanted to do other things. 

Until next time Happy stitching!

Wednesday, April 29, 2020

Yo-Yo Quilt Update

I don't think I ever mentioned the full name of the quilt or the designer. Let me fix that. It is Welcome Wagon Yo-Yo Quilt by Kim Diehl from her book, Simple Graces. I can't find her website. 
There are a lot of websites that carry her books and patterns. 
This how the quilt looks like in the book. I found this picture on the web, I tried taking a picture from the book but you couldn't see the whole quilt. 

When I am working on a quilt I frequently design it 
in Electric Quilt software for designing quilts. 
Originally I had visions of a purple border like the one below. 


Then I thought maybe lighter would work. I usually prefer
 a darker resting border with a darker binding. 


When I looked at the book again and saw the red border, 
it started to grow on me. 


Just as I was sewing the last row on I notice a mistake in the last three blocks on the last two rows. If you look hard enough you can see it. It is supposed to be light to dark triangles and I have light to light and dark to dark instead. 
And yes it would have bugged me if I hadn't fixed it. 



On April 25th all the rows were connected and the center was constructed and I started previewing fabric I had in my stash. None of my stash fabric is big enough to do the job, so I have to wait until the quilt shop is open again to buy my fabric. I won't buy it online because it is too hard to determine the color. 


Above are the two purple samples I have and then I found a red I really like. Let me say there aren't many reds I like. But I like this one below and the picture doesn't do it justice. 


Since I was dragging out fabric, I started looking for 12 fabrics to make the corner blocks. My room still hasn't recovered from that adventure. Here are the winners.


And these were the ones I had chosen but were eliminated 
as I found others I like better. 


Previewing the corner fabrics. I am happy with these. 


Previewing borders and corners together and yes it is on my floor. 


I can't decide I will just have to wait for my favorite quilt shop to open again. 

Happy Stitching!

Stocking #1 Week ???

I need to go to my calendar to determine how many weeks I have been working on this stocking. I didn't work on it at all last week. 
Those little individual snowflakes were a pain. I almost didn't do them, I wasn't sure it would add anything to the design, 
but I am glad I did. 

On April 19th I started making the Confetti Stitch for the individual snowflakes. This is the website where I learned how to do the Confetti Stich. Here are the pictures from that night. 


The very top of the stocking.


Close up of the middle.


Starting the toe section. I showed these pictures to my niece and she really likes them. 

I took a break to make more masks and work on my Yo-Yo Quilt and came back to do more. These little stitches are tine consuming and use so much thread. I don't travel on the back. 


This is how the look on the back.

So last night, 28th of April I made the last one!!!!


The middle section, you can enlarge to see better,


The Toe section.


The whole Stocking, you can see the individual snowflakes if you enlarge the picture.

The only things left to do are to sew on buttons on the snowmen and stars on top of the trees but I have to buy them. I also have two little white birds to do. but I can't see them to make them.


Where the needle is sticking up I have stitched half of the bird but I can't see my stitches to know where to go next. Frustrating. I will try one more time with a light brown and if that doesn't work I will have to do something else. 

It is 14 weeks since I started but I haven't worked on it every week. 

I am so glad to be at this point.