Friday, April 6, 2012

Fun Friday!

Several years ago I found a pattern in a quilting magazine that I decided I had to make! It was for a purse and it used dishtowels. I purchased the necessary parts and pieces, but life happened and I never made the purses.

Today, I was cleaning out the shelves in the garage and found more handles I had purchased along with a couple of towels. I continued putting things away and purging others. I found a couple of dozen quilting magazines that needed to be purged. So after finishing the shelf I was on and putting things away, I sat down and went through the magazines.

I was diligent in keeping magazines that had two or more patterns in them and then pulled patterns from those that only had one pattern. As I went through them, I found the original pattern for the purses. After I finished with the magazines, I sat down at the sewing machine and finished two purses.



The taupe one had issues, the towels were shorter than the pattern called for and it made for a tight fit for the handle. But I loved how they turned out.


Fun Day!!!

Sunday, April 1, 2012

Things I've Learned

Today, I decided to work on a quilt I started the winter after mom passed away. I learned several things. First, I shouldn't piece anything complicated when I'm depressed. The blocks aren't the best I've ever sewn, as you can see even when I put the rows together I made constant mistakes. At the time I didn't realized I was in the state I was in. I was trying to get back to normal and thought this class would help.



Second, I've done more unsewing than sewing today. I also shouldn't work with biased edges. As I recall working on this quilt in class, a few people commented about the bias. But I was in a zombie zone and didn't think I was having problems at the moment. But now that I'm working on the final part of the quilt, I realize that I had major issues with all of the biased edges. 

I would love to start over on this quilt but I have no more fabric. :) I will make this patten again but with a totally different piecing technique. I have several more rows to put together before I decide on borders. I think I originally decided to just border in the background print.



The last thing I learned was not to wait so long between piecing and putting the top together.  I have another quilt that is partially pieced and I've lost the directions putting it together. It was the first mystery quilt class I took and I have no idea where the directions went. I thought they were with the fabric but when pulled the project out t see how much work needed to be done, there were no instructions.



As you can see, I had a lot of help from the quilt inspectors, they were really taking their job seriously. ;)

Have a great day,
Tracy