Thursday 30 October 2014

Sisters' Sew day

Last week, my sister and I enjoyed a looooong overdue sewing day together.  Eva had started an iPad cover a long time ago and we never had a chance to get together to finish it.  She also brought along some UFO's and we made some great progress on a few of them.  

A sampler quilt Eva made in 1999.  She didn't like the borders so took them off and we did a little brainstorming on possible borders.  We will go shopping together one of these days and get this quilt to done!
A little paper pieced project that needs binding

In no time we had a total disaster on the tables :-). 

Eva is making a cover for her iPad

A needle book that our other sister made for Eva years and years ago

Eva used one of my little Featherweights to quilt her iPad cover

Eva's version of our Sisters' quilt
That triggered a memory and I dug out my matching quilt from the bottom of the closet!  I have since been working on handquilting it again and am making progress :-)

A great sisters' day in my sewing room.  We'll have to do it again soon!


Friday 24 October 2014

Quilt show Fun

I have several quilts I still need to blog about, but have been gallivanting all over the countryside lately!  Last weekend, my fairly local guild, London Friendship, held their show.  Since we were holding it in a new spacious venue, they had asked my husband and I to put up a display of our antique and vintage sewing machines. We set up a treadle to work on as well as a Singer Featherweight and a few other vintage machines.  There were some pictures hanging on the wall behind the tables, so we hung a few quilts over them to cover them up and arranged a couple of quilt stands to display quilts made on the antique and vintage machines.  Here are a few pictures of the display (click on the photos to enlarge):

Singer 15-88 treadle machine

an assortment of Featherweights and Singer toy sewing machines and two Singer irons with a "pressing guide" produced by Singer

Singer 301 and accessories and toy machine which slides in a little worktable

Canadian machines and toys and an Elna toy machine
Our oldest Canadian hand crank machine


Basic set up.  We had a lovely large space to display the machines

Christine R took this photo on Friday when I sewed on the Featherweight.  My treadle belt broke and I had to wait for Jake to fix it.

I sewed on the treadle on Saturday.  I worked at piecing the rows together of a Kaffe Fasset scraps thimble leaders/enders project.
My Bonnie Hunter Easy Street mystery was hanging in the show

My Kaffe diamond quilt was also in the show
 We had a great time chatting with people of all ages about memories of their ancestors' machines.  One older lady in a wheelchair sat watching me sew on the treadle with tears coming down her cheeks.  Awesome hearing the stories and inspiring people to dig out those old machines and get them up and running.  I do all my piecing on my 15-88 treadle and even some free motion quilting on it.  Most of my quilting is done on my vintage Bernina 830.