Pincushions!

Last summer I went to the Quilt Kitchen in Exeter, Ontario, Canada.  This is a wonderful store full of all kinds of inspiration!  At the counter, they had a display of cute pincushions in a large glass vase and the book, "Pin Pals" by Carrie Nelson.  I bought the book and began to make pincushions from some cut offs from making stars, etc.  I also made some with selvages.  So much fun!  Last summer I found the perfect glass canister to store my pincushions in and it even has a lid to keep the dust out!  Last night I added four more pincushions to the stash.

These triangle squares came from the cut offs of a tulip quilt I made for a friend.

I found a scrap of Dr. Suess in my scrap basket that worked perfectly for the back.

Three selvage pincushions.

The backs of the selvage pincushions.

The pincushion jar.

The back of the pincushion jar.

Woven Selvages

Looking through my photos recently, I realized I'd never blogged about this selvage project which I finished in November 2017.   This had been my leaders/enders project for awhile testing sewing machines for Jake after he repairs them.  A great way of testing a machine on an actual project when precision isn't required.  I cut 5" squares of muslin or leftover light scrap fabric and covered them with the selvages aiming for lighter and darker for every other square.  This pattern is in the book "Quilts from the Selvage Edge" by Karen Griska.  

The wall hanging is the same size as the Glass Tumbling Cubes from the same book done in 2012.  This way I can interchange the hangings on the wall periodically.  I am running out of wall space ☺.

(click on the photo to enlarge for a better view)

close up of the selvages

The finished wall hanging

I added a navy border instead of the selvage border which I found a little too busy.  I echoed the woven design in the border with the quilting. 

The finished quilt is hanging above my coffee station in my sewing room

Selvage caddies

A few weeks ago, a friend was celebrating her birthday.  I came across these cute selvage caddies in a book (I lent the book out, so can't remember the name :-).  I dug into my special stash of Kaffe Fasset selvages and could not decide which colour I would use so I ended up making three.  I gave the blue one to my friend, and made the orange one for myself.  I decided to give the green one to my other friend whose birthday is in September.  But, I gave it to her already because by December I'll probably forget where I put it LOL.  I did sew a few dividing rows in one side of mine and stitched a row of stitching half way the middle section to stop my pair of little scissors from dropping all the way to the bottom.  The pouch on the other side holds my red clips.  It's the perfect little caddy to drape over the arm of a chair while hand stitching the binding down.

If you click on the photo to enlarge it you can see the stitched lines to hold the scissors and thread

Drapes perfectly over the arm of an IKEA chair.

Green and orange caddies.

I forgot to take a picture of the blue one so asked my friend to send me one :-)

They were a lot of fun to make.  Next time I will pay attention to make sure there are words or colour circles on the top of the pin cushion :-)

Having fun with Selvages

While I was rooting around for some photos, I came across some hot pads I had finished this summer and realized I had not blogged about these.  

We were invited to a friend's cottage for an overnight stay in July.  Another mutual friend also joined us. We had a fabulous time catching up and enjoying the beautiful weather, swimming, boating, playing Scrabble, etc.  I had to test a few sewing machines and wanted an easy project so cut out some 8" squares of scrap fabric and a square of batting and covered them with selvages quilt as you go style.  That worked slick.  I dug out leftover pieces of binding from other projects and chose selvages to match those colours.  After stitching the selvages onto the batting base, I added a backing and stitched the bindings on.  I joined a couple of friends one evening and hand stitched the bindings down while they worked on their projects.  I got seven of the eight finished and the last one was stitched at the cottage :-).

Found some fun leftover binding strips in my bin :-)

I started with a strip in the middle on the diagonal ones and added selvages to each corner

Half of them were done in straight lines...the navy blue one was not finished yet.

 I gave four of them to each friend at the cottage.  They had a hard time choosing the colours LOL.

More Pillows for Holland.....

Before going to Holland, I also made three Selvage Star Pillows for my two cousins and for one of my husband's cousins.  We stayed at each of these homes for part of our trip to Holland.  While I was at it, I also sorted out all my selvages by colours.  That really helped to make these pillows.  This is one of the patterns from Cut Loose Press. 

Here is the process of some of the selvage sorting :-)

I had three of these baskets...once you start stirring them they fluff up big time!

Grey pillow went to Jake's cousin, Martijn and Wilma

This one went to my cousin Corine and Bert

This one went to my other cousin Liane and Henk

Interestingly, everyone in Holland has these cute little chairs and each pillow fit perfectly with their decor and into their chairs!

New Leaders/Enders Selvage project

I spent some time this week cutting 5" squares of white fabric for foundations for the basket weave selvage quilt in Karen Griska's book on Selvage Quilts.  I made the cube quilt in 2012 and had a lot of fun doing it.  I didn't have a leaders/enders project on the go right now and decided this one would work well.  So, my little tray is all ready to go and I have three squares finished and 40 white squares cut out.  I will need to cut more later as I'd like to make it into a larger quilt.  My selvage baskets (3 of them!!) don't look like they've had anything taken out of them at all.  I even threw a whole garbage can full of selvages away that are too skinny or flimsy or ugly!  The big problem is they get stirred up LOL. 

leaders/enders all organized :-)

Selvage Quilt Finished!

I finally got my "Glass Tumbling Blocks" quilt finished from the book "Quilts from the Selvage Edge" by Karen Griska.  I finished on time to enter it into the London Friendship Quilt Guild's show in October.  Nothing like a deadline to get things done :-).  

Here is the finished quilt hanging in the show:

It's a little hard to see the quilting, but I did a swirly design with a variegated King Tut thread in the orange sections and straight lines through the cubes and the selvage border.  I'm thinking of adding two more rows of straight quilting to the selvage border, but am waffling :-)

Here is the straight line quilting in the cubes...hard to see on the photos as well:

The finished quilt ready to hang on my sewing room wall:

I can't remember if I ever posted pictures of the top I made for my sewing machine bench using selvages:

 

I used a different embroidery stitch on my vintage Bernina 830 for each strip and made the mistake of switching colours each time!!  I really got to memorize the threading sequence for that machine :-)

 

This bench matches my curved front Singer cabinet which houses my Singer 403.

 

 What's next???  I still have LOTS of selvages piled up.  Better think of a new project to use some of them up :-)

Thread Catcher

I made another thread catcher this weekend and finished stuffing the pin cushion today. I found enough Kaffe Fasset selvedges in my collection and had solid lime green to go with this fun print.

This snippet catcher will be donated to the Canadian Quilter's Association Committee for the Quilt show being held here in a few weeks.

Progress on a few projects....

I made some progress in the sewing room in the last two days. I had the blocks on the design wall for the selvage cubes and the One Block Wonder. I had bought an audio book last week and plugged that into the computer and listened to it as I sewed the rows and background together. That made a somewhat boring job a lot more enjoyable. Here is the selvage cube top so far. I decided to go a little bright with the background since it's going to hang in my sewing room. The next step is to make a selvage piano key style border around it and then a 2 1/2" orange border and then I can get it quilted and hung up!  Update:  The finished quilt can be seen here.

My daughter in law came over Tuesday afternoon and we did the final arrangement on the One Block Wonder. As soon as she left, I started sewing the hexagons and cubes together in rows then started sewing the rows together. This morning I finished sewing the last few rows and trimmed the bottom edges. I'm really liking this project. I hope to pick up some of the navy blue on Friday for a border around the whole quilt. I'm thinking of a gold lippy between the navy border and navy binding. I think that would frame it nicely.

...garbage goes high class!

I'm collecting Kaffe Fasset fabric to make an Indian Orange Peel quilt by Karen Stone in November. A group of us from our local quilt guild are going to take a class. I washed and pressed all the lovely colors and trimmed the selvages off. I decided to make a special Handy Snippet catcher out of these lovely selvages :-). How's that for a high class way of collecting garage eh? Here are the selvages sewn onto a foundation:

The thread catcher inside and pin cushion:
The outside:
The finished project!

...do I dare use this for garbage? :-)

Finally dug into my basket of selvages to make something constructive out of themmy collection. I have been saving them for awhile, inspired by Karen's blog! Make sure you make a coffee before you start browsing...you can get lost in this blog LOL. Here is my overflowing selvage basket:

I cut out a foundation fabric and chose selvages that were interesting and that matched the pink and brown fabric:
Here is the finished thread catcher with a pin cushion filled with plastic pellets to anchor it to my sewing machine cabinet:

The lining has pink polka dots and hearts :-)

At least my garbage will now look pretty LOL!

This is the second one I made last week...finally took some pictures today:
Close up of the wording on the selvages:


I used selvages for the back of this one as well, but used the ones with no words on it since you don't see much of it.


My friend, Gail, was busy with her selvages yesterday and covered this sewing bench with hers! Wow, that turned out cool too. Check it out here. I have at least 8 of those benches here and some could use a new cover. I started arranging selvage strips to make a bench cover this afternoon :-).