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I love it anytime I can finish a project in just a couple of days. My quilts always take so long to do, that it’s almost like a race for me to finish a small project as fast as I can. I bought the materials to make a messenger bag on Friday, and I finished it up late last night. It’s gray corduroy, with wool felt flowers tacked on with buttons. For making it in just over a day, it’s not too bad, and it’s cheaper than any of the other bags that I had been looking at. I only spent about $15 for the materials, instead of $60 for the bag in the store that I liked the best.
And here’s the details of the flowers:
Now I can take my quilting with me in a semi-stylish bag!
I’m stuck here at work, with no work to do (okay, I’m actually waiting for a soundbite from the Howell Melon Fest to come back to the newsroom before I finish my last story tonight) and I can’t sew since I left my thread on a table in my living room. My philosphy is that even if they don’t have work for me to be doing here, I might as well at least be working in some sort. So I guess I’ll blog instead.
(Oooh…people are jumping on big trampolines on the Olympics right now. At least the Olympics are recording on my TiVo right now.)
I did want to mention that I really think it’s cool how people have started to notice this little website of mine. In the last couple of weeks, I’ve gotten mentions or permanent links on Material Girl, All Too Quilty, Quilt Reflections, In A Minute Ago and Albedo Designs. I’m really excited that I’m not the only quilt blogger out there, and that people are actually reading about my work. I think there’s a lot more really great quilt work that’s being documented online than I know about, and everytime someone leaves a url with a comment, I’m excited to check out what they’ve done, or like to do.
Awww….swimming is on. I’ll be so glad when I don’t have to work evenings or weekends again.
Time for a quick post before I head off to work for this evening (only 11 more days left at Fox, yay). I’m about halfway done with the blue scarf, and despite several finger sized holes where I’ve dropped and picked up stiches here and there, it’s not looking too bad. (I’ll post another picture of it when I finish it up.) I really like the soft boucle yarn I’m using, since it doesn’t seem to show my mistakes as much. I also picked up another ball of rosy colored yarn at JoAnn’s this week. It think it looks like a pink angora bunny all balled up right now.
I took a few shots of the parties going on out in my yard right now too. My sunflowers are huge, and doing really well. Aside from the wilted looking one in the front, they look great for planting them from seed earlier this year. I’m going to have to put them up again here next year too.
My Black-Eyed Susans are cool too. I spilt this plant this spring and gave half of it away, and it’s already grown back to as big as it was this spring.
Okay, I’m off to work. But my quilting is going with me too!
I didn’t want knitting to be fun, I really didn’t. So to prove to myself how much I’d hate knitting, I bought a ball of yarn, and had my mom show me the knitting basics. Turns out, I don’t hate it. In fact, it’s really pretty cool. I’m thinking that by the end of the winter season, I’m going to have a scarf to go with every outfit I own. This one with the blue yarn is going slow, but I suppose you can’t expect much from your first attempt at knitting.
But that’s not to say that I’m giving up my quilting anytime soon. I’m almost done cutting the pieces to the new wedding quilt, and I’m working on piecing what’s already cut up. I just have three more prints to cut, and I’ll have the whole top of the quilt ready to sew up. I’m getting excited, since I think it’s really going to turn out well, at least color-wise. It’s one of those things that once I see the fabrics next to each other, it just makes me so happy that I don’t stink at combining fabrics.
See! I’m still quilting!
So I’m still cutting pieces for the latest round of wedding quilting (when will you people stop getting married?!?) but I couldn’t help myself and I started sewing. After a while I just had to do something else but cut. I know I ought to use my rotary cutters to help out, but I feel like I have more control over the fabric when I use scissors. It’s probably the same reason why I don’t like machine quilting either–I get a feeling of controling what I’m doing when I sew by hand. It’s also the old lady in me creeping out. You know I’m actually a 56-year-old in the body of a 23-year-old. It’s weird.
But when I’ve been stuck here at work (only 21 more days left until the Channel 10 takeover) in the evenings I’ve been on the search for new good quilting websites. Is it just me, or is there really no good quilting websites? Everything that I’ve found has just been pretty useless. Although, in the past couple of months I have found that All Too Quilty, and more recently Quilting Reflections, are another two quilting blogs that are good sites, that are written by people who are actually good quilters. But overall, I’m really blown away by the fact that quilting is hardly represented on the web. They’re all knitters! Where did all the knitters come from?!? Knitters make me jealous because I wish I could do it. It’s just another thing to add to my book of things to do after I finish the projects I’m already on.
Good news for me! My nearest and dearest friend Kate, is visiting from North Carolina this week. I see a shopping road trip in the very near future for us!
I’ve been cutting pieces for the next wedding quilt I’m making for several days now, and I was in the mood to take a break from that. Unfortunatly, it feels like it’s 90 degrees in the house today, and keeping a quilt on my lap to work on just doesn’t excite me too much. But I did pull out the Apple Core quilt that I’m making for my parents. I’m hoping it’ll be much cooler by the time I get home tonight from work to do some sewing. But I was pleasantly suprised by it. I hadn’t worked on in in some time, since I wanted to get Wedding Spectacularrr ready to go. Turns out, I’m on row 20 of 30. So with that said, I’d like to try to have the top completly pieced and ready to quilt by the end of October. I think that’s pretty reasonable.
But while my sewing isn’t loving the heat, my flowers sure are. I moved a lily that was in a weird spot next to the shrubs in the front of the house to along the side of our fence this year, and it just finally opened up. I was afraid I had hurt it when I moved it, but apparently it was okay. It’s now one of my most favorite flowers in the yard.
So I’m pleased to report that all went well with the quilt giving. It was a mighty traumatic weekend and all, since it was very much like giving my child up. (Okay, so I don’t have children, and I’m sure it would be worse to give up an acutal child, but it was pretty hard.) I spent much of my evening strolling by the gift table to make sure that people were still looking at it, and it hadn’t been pushed aside or buried by the plethora of presents surrounding it, as seen here:
We went to watch the newly married couple open presents the next day and got to see them open it. I, of course cried. They spread it out for everyone to see and they all started clapping. I was emotional, and I felt like a big dork. But it was all good, and we had a fun day.
See? We know how to have fun and look good, all at the same time.
But now, you may be asking, “Sarah, now that you’ve finished this quilt, what will you be working on next?” Now that’s a pretty stupid question. The big project now is to get the next round of wedding quilts started, along with about five others already in progress. I’ll post pictures of everything, minus Laura and Steve’s quilt since I know they think they’re going to be sneaky and try to find out what it looks like here!
It’s finally done! Last night my quilt was offically finished at 10:11pm. Today I washed it, had a photo shoot, and wrapped it up. The wrapping is actually really cool! I wanted to let people at the wedding see it, but I didn’t want people putting their sweaty, dirty hands all over it. So I bought some cellophane wraping, and put it in that, so you can see a section of the quilt, along with the patch with their name, the date, the title, and my embrodered name on it. That way they don’t have to worry about it getting nasty, but people can still see what it is.
So anyway, here’s a couple pictures of the finished project. It’s just a few, and I have more up at AvenueB in my quilting photo gallery.
(Sorry Dad, I know you didn’t want to be in the picture, but it was the only one that showed the quilt completly.)
It’s got the date, the couple’s name, and the title in the box, along with my name embroidered below.
It’s all done! I can’t believe it.
I’m not so much about writing about the problems of my personal life, but I have to say, I’m pretty mad about what’s happening at work right now. Not only did everyone that I work with get fired on Monday, but I promise, no one is jumping up and down for joy about it. Yesterday in the Lansing State Journal, our station’s General Manager made a few comments that I thought were just horrible. “The mood is just great here” and “I’m just tickeled.” Whatever. I guess she’s not the one trying to comfort the on-air talent while the show is going on. No, I can’t say as though my life is over with since I lost my job. I was looking for other prospects. But no one likes to have the security of having a steady job taken away from them before they’re ready to. So, although I know no one from work will read this, and the only people that I suppose will are my friends and a few others out there on the Internet, I wanted to make sure, in some way, I’m not giving my soon to be former employer good press, since I don’t think they deserve it.
Okay, I’m off my soapbox and I promise I’ll go back to writing about my usual stuff next time.