Josiah's Quilt finished

Finally got Josiah P's quilt quilted. I didn't have a chance to sew for the first six weeks of summer. I finally got into the sewing room and finished off a couple projects. Josiah is Micah's youngest brother. It's been a lot of fun making so many I spy quilts. Josiah's Mom had asked for flannel backing for his quilt, so I made the quilt to fit the piece of navy blue flannel I had in the closet. I have lots of blue I spy fabrics so I raided the closet for more blues and found enough to do a whole quilt in a blue theme. I really had fun with this...OK, I did buy a few more, but at a quilt show in the spring, they had FQ's in the sale bin for $1.00! And, they had really cute motifs in blue and suitable for a boy. What can you do? They just jumped into my shopping basket :-). I tried for a colourwash effect from top to bottom, but didn't have enough lights, so started in the middle and did a spiral around and around the center two squares.

The traditional swirly quilting on the border with a light blue, slightly variegated King Tut thread which I got at the Marsh Store. I need to learn a new pattern for sashings and borders :-).

This quilt got stippled all over in the center:

Here are all four quilts for each of the kids in order of age. Joshua's quilt:


Micah's quilt:

Natalie's quilt:

Josiah's quilt:

Yard sale find and display shelf

We stopped at a yard sale Saturday morning and spotted this gem LOL! Of course that came home with us and is displayed with our sewing machine collection.

I thought I'd post a few pictures of my knick knack shelf in my front hall that displays all our miniature sewing machines and irons. It's amazing how many of these miniatures there are. These have been collected over a period of about 12 years. The top shelf has the tiniest items:

Second shelf (the silver coloured sewing machine with the clock really works and is made by Timex):


Third shelf contains the plastic mini's and the two tea collectibles. The little blue plastic one is a Barbie machine and has a little windup handle which actually 'runs' the machine :-):

Fourth shelf..now what's wrong with the Singers in this picture????


Bottom shelf:

If I get too many more of these, I'm going to have to start another shelf unit :-).

Oops, missed a couple Vintage Thursdays!

I totally forgot about posting another Vintage Thursday item. So, since I have time today and will be away on Thursday, I thought I'd post it today.

This is a Singer 185J made in the Singer plant in St. Jean, Quebec Canada. It dates to the 1950's and is really retro looking. It's a totally straight stitch machine and is wonderful for quilt piecing. Children also love these little funky green machines :-). Oh, and it even has reverse! It hasn't been serviced and cleaned yet, so that tape on her case will eventually disappear.

My 50th Dear Jane block

We had a get together with 5 of us in the area to work on Dear Jane blocks and I finished my 50th block!! This is K 2 Grandpa's Chickens. I thought the polka dot fabric would be perfect for chickens :-).

The official count is now 50-0-0-802 meaning 50 blocks finished, 0 triangles, 0 corners, 802 pieces.

Another Psalm block..thanks to the Olympics!

I finally finished hand piecing this block for my Psalms quilt. It's been prepped for ages, but finally sat down to watch the Olympics a little bit this week and got some hand sewing in. This is Psalm 66, Fireside Visitor.

Vintage Thursdays!

My quilt buddy, Nancy mentioned an interesting blog on her site Confessions of an Apron Queen and since I love vintage items, I thought I'd try and post a few items on Thursdays. Now, this is not strictly a vintage item, but a reproduction fabric print which I picked up at Cherished Pieces. As soon as I saw this print, I fell in love with it and bought a yard of it. I haven't a clue what I'm going to do with it!

Since that's not technically a vintage item :-), here is a sewing machine that I recently received as a gift from a fellow collector. It's from the 1950's, 1960's era and sews very nicely. It's a basic zigzag and straight stitch machine with a drop in bobbin and also has the capacity to insert cams in the top for different embroidery stitches. I have lots of cams in my collection and hope to sit down one of these days and have fun with them.


I just love the curved front cabinet and the detail on the cabinet legs. There's also a matching stool with the same detail in the legs.

Next Thursday, I'll post a picture of a green sewing machine :-).

Strawberry Lemonade

Finally got to sewing this week and made a table topper for a wedding gift for a colleague of my husband. The pattern was in the Fabric Trends magazine Summer 2008 issue. It took me awhile to find the fabrics for it, but I'm happy with the results. I bought some Amy Butler fabrics and then had quite the time finding some tone on tone fabrics to blend with them...this topper definitely is not from one line of matching fabrics :-)! The center square, the background of the appliqué leaves, the striped inner border and the yellow squares in the outside border are Amy Butler. The red is a civil war, the yellows are 30's repro, the dark outside border is a batik and there's an XOXOXO my kitty fabric in there as well. It was pieced on a 1952 Singer Featherweight and quilted on my trusty 15-88 treadle and my vintage Bernina 807 minimatic.

If you do attempt to make this table topper, there are a few mistakes in the center square. I emailed Fabric Trends and they were going to put a correction on their webpage. If you can't find it, email me and I can let you know which pieces are wrong.

The yellow on this picture is a little washed out:

Forgot to mention the green print in the corner square..it's a Japanese!

I had this basket weave fabric in my stash which worked perfectly for the backing:

I found these napkins and straws at IKEA a few weeks ago and figured they'd go with the table topper perfectly! The flash distorted the colours a bit, but the colours are actually almost identical to the fabrics!

The top before it was quilted:

After quilting: