All done! Ready for next project!

Well, I can't believe it's been a week since I posted....well considering the week I had, it's really no surprise!! Thank goodness it's over! But, one good thing came out of it! Another project completed...and actually hanging on the wall!! :-) I finished the snowman wall hanging including lots of button embellishments and a scarf! It was a fun project and if my day job didn't get in the way of my sewing, it could have been done so much quicker! I quilted holly leaves and berries in the long green rectangles and some echo and ditch stitching in the rest of it. You can buy this pattern from the Clotilde website.

Well, let's say a big "AMEN" to having a 3 day weekend! Yessssss! I am sitting in my big red recliner with my sweet Westie Yogi snuggled on my legs and a cup of hot coffee at my elbow while posting this.

I do have an agenda for the next few days! Today I will make a sample purse for a class I'll be teaching at the quilt shop in the spring, then start a quilt with a Kaffe Fassett "jelly roll" my bee friend Lorraine gave me for Christmas. I love his fabric and have almost all of them... I actually took a class with him at the Artful Quilter shop here in Centreville, Virginia a few years back. What a handsome and charming man with a keen eye for texture and color! I'll take a photo of the quilt from that class ands post it soon! He actually signed my label for it!

Anyhoo, last Thursday night, my quilt guild had Pat Sloan for our speaker. She is a terrific speaker and showed some of her many famous quilts. What a nice husband she has, too. He has quite a system for displaying her quilts as she speaks about them... he must have been exhausted when it was over! She is giving a workshop here for our guild on Sunday afternoon on her "Crooked Cabin" quilt technique and I can't wait!

I'll take a photo to post! I think I'll be doing mine with Kaffe scraps from my stash. I'm always happy to find projects to thin out my scrap drawers! I am trying to organize a scrap quilting club here at my local quilt shop starting in the spring. I would love to hear what you do with your fabric scraps.... leave me a comment and share your strategies for thinning out your scrap bin!!

So, here's the purse I'm going upstairs to my sewing room to make-

It seems like a pretty quick project and I love the look of the large grommets...which are actually made to use on shower curtains! I'll let you know how it goes! Hopefully tomorrow!! Wish me luck!! God bless! Polly

Superbowl Sewing

My hubby and I are watching the Superbowl as I write this. We are N.Y. Jets fans, so really don't care who wins....although we tend to hope the underdog wins! Speaking of dogs, my Westie Yogi is doing better today after his ACL surgery 5 days ago! Whew! It's really hard to see such a feisty active dog laying around and limping on 3 feet, but he is beginning to put it down more often and is actually putting some weight on it! YESSSSSS! :-) Here he's snoozing in my sewing room!

Every Sunday, we go to 7:30 am mass then on to breakfast at the local diner...it's our weekly "date"... he reads the paper while I read whatever novel I'm into while savoring steaming mugs of coffee and pancakes and eggs! My two sons (23 and 27) tell us we are becoming old folks!! :-) But we love our Sunday mornings!!

I hit the sewing room mid-morning and finished cutting the 2" squares for my snowman wallhanging I'm making using the fusible Pellon quilter's grid. This is what it looks like when all the squares are fused onto the grid.

Next, you sew all the seams going in one direction. I sewed all the horizontal seams first. Here's what it looks like from the back.

Now, before I can sew the vertical seams, I have to clip the sewn folded seam allowances up to the stitching. Hope you can see this in the photo.

This is as far as I got today! Hope to do more tomorrow evening after work. I've done some sewing and piecing since my shoulder surgery on 12/24/08, but have not done any quilting....that takes some serious shoulder moving for sure, so doing this small piece will be a good experiment.

Hope everyone is having a fun evening and is cozy warm! They are forecasting snow here on Tuesday....so maybe we'll get a snowday and I can finish this project! Keeping my fingers crossed! God Bless! Polly