Not FNSI, but...

So Friday Night Sew-In isn't for another few weeks...but I may or may not have had my own FNSI by myself tonight. I was originally planning on going to my real-life quilting friend's house for dinner (leftover tacos) and a movie (who knows what) and probably some quilting or at least drooling over the Hancock's of Paducah catalog. But with this cold, I didn't want her or her two little boys to get it (little kids are even more miserable than grown-ups when they're sick!). I'm feeling much better, but I don't want to risk it. To top it off, I ended up having to stay at work until just late enough that I had to choose between checking the mail just in case Pop-Pop's quilt backing and batting arrived and getting gas in my car. Needless to say, I chose the mail. Unfortunately, there wasn't anything there. :(

So back to my evening. I had leftover tacos anyways, and hand-quilted on Heather's baby quilt while watching Pride and Prejudice. It's my all-time favorite movie, and I really wanted to see it. There's just something about Lizzie and Mr. Darcy...it makes me smile. And, since I haven't made any progress on the sewing front beyond the hand-sewing (which is extremely slow and I won't bore you with pictures until I'm done with that quilt), I wanted to share with you all the evolution of my plan for my mom's quilt.

It started off with me just wanting an Autumn quilt. So what's more Autumn-y than falling leaves, right? Right. At this point, I was living in a hotel, so my resources were very limited and I didn't have any graph paper. My first attempt at figuring out the quilt was this:

Pretty impressive picture-taking skills there, right? And pretty awesome artistry too. It's hard to get a picture of a piece of paper that small....but if you look, there's a tree with a knot hole and leaves falling in the air. As soon as I had drawn this (on the back of the hotel's pad of paper), I realized that the quilt would need something to help anchor the right side. The left side would have the tree, but the right would have a lot of air. So I took a lined notebook I had, tore out a sheet and used it to mark up another piece of paper and made my own graph paper. Sometimes you just have to make do! So I added a hill on the right side - that would provide a bit more vertical interest on that side and make the base of the quilt visually more heavy. The solid green down there would weight it and make it seem more...real. Does that make sense? Here was my next version, on homemade graph paper!

Again, sorry for the flash. Taking pictures at 9 at night isn't easy. Originally, I didn't have as many leaves as you see here. I thought that I wouldn't want leaves directly next to or diagonal from each other, nor would I want the touching. My husband, as you can see, threw that out of the window! He also re-did my leaf color scheme. Aren't I lucky to have a husband who's willing to get involved in my quilting? I love him!

And then, you've seen my final design. I did this when I got a pad of graph paper, and I made the quilt a little bit bigger (about 6 inches wider). I did this because I'm a fan of quilts that are more square than long, skinny rectangles, and I didn't have enough room on the original homemade graph paper to fit any more width. I also added some leaves, since I made so much more room (my blocks will finish to 6 inches wide...if I can manage to sew correctly, which is always a big if!). Finalized design is here:

Don't be afraid to change your design...or to make a quilt that scares the living daylights out of you! I'm not afraid to admit that I'm terrified of this quilt. The leaf blocks don't line up in the least, which will make sewing everything together a pain in the rear end, I'm sure. To top it off, there are a TON of seams per leaf block, which is a TON more places where I can mess up my blocks. So far I've managed to keep my blocks big enough to at least fudge size-wise, but I'm nervous.

What scares you most as a quilter?

FNSI Results, and a bunch of overdue pictures!

So, my Friday Night Sew-In didn't encompass any sewing at all. But that's just fine with me! I started off with finishing cutting out squares for my mom's quilt. The plan for the quilt is here:

Each of those boxes is going to be a maple leaf block. The letter in it (Y, R O, G, B) corresponds to its color (yellow, red, orange, green, brown). On the left is a tree and the bottom (where you can see the line sloping up to the right) has a little hill of grass. You can see all of my progress as I cut out the blocks because I crossed out how many of each block I needed and replaced it with the new number needed...I can't keep track of numbers in my head very well (short attention span) so I write down how many I need to do. I needed over 800 squares for this quilt, most of which were 2.5", but there were some that were 2 1/8" (to make the sky on the stems of the maple leaf blocks) and some that were 2 7/8" (half square triangles).

I finished cutting out squares on Friday, leaving this:

Yes, that's a TON of squares to cut, but I did have a bit of a break. I had made a baby quilt a while back that was various blues and greens in 2.5" squares and I did have some leftover. I know some quilters cut their squares ahead of time, but I use all sorts of different sizes of squares and fabric pieces (most of my fabric is either fat eighths or fat quarters) so I'd never have any larger pieces of fabric if I cut anything less than 1/4 yard!

After I finished cutting, I then reorganized my scraps into their color bags. That took a while, because I try to make everything nice and neat in the bags. That result is here:

Then, because my fabric was literally strewn all across the couch and living room floor (I didn't take any pictures of that!) I folded all of the larger pieces of fabric and put them away neatly into my fabric basket.

Hooray for a neatly folded stash!

Then, on Saturday, my swap partner for the Brown Bag Quilt Contest and I met up. She came over to my house (I was cleaning as my mother-in-law was going to call me on Skype that evening, so I had to clean...she's one of those people who has to clean the house for a week before guests come over) and we were both totally surprised when we realized that we were less than 10 years apart in age! Hooray for that! Here's a picture of the fabrics I gave her (the pieces were 1/4 yard or 1/8 yard cuts...most of which I cut myself).

And, tied up in a bundle with a bit of leftover ribbon:

She was certain that I would hate her for the fabrics she gave me, but how could you hate anything as cute as these?

I have no clue what I'll make with them, but look at the adorable (homemade) bag they were in!

She also gave me some (what I thought were) white chocolate truffles. When I bit into one, I quickly realized that these were alcoholic truffles! They have Marc de Champagne brandy listed as an ingredient...they're good, but the flavor is a bit strong.

And, just to share a bit of my life with you, here's a picture of my landlady's cat, Felix. He has a brother named Tommy, but I've only seen Tommy from a distance once, whereas Felix loves to rub all over my legs and try to trip me. He's really friendly, and it's like I have a virtual pet (since I can't have any in the apartment).

He's awesome...and about a minute after I took that picture, he rolled right off of the step. Classic!

And one last bit of my life - here's a picture of Mr. Rooster and his harem! Mr. Rooster and his ladies live in the house behind mine, and while Mr. Rooster isn't overly loud, you can definitely hear him challenging the rest of the world to a fight every half hour or so.

Then for some sad news...Jenny the Janome is broken. I was in the middle of sewing some of my maple leaf blocks for Mom's quilt and suddenly the machine seized up. I took off her needle plate and cleaned out the lint (I haven't cleaned it out in a LONG time), put her back together, and she still didn't work. I took the needle plate off again and hand-cranked a few stitches, and the thread from the spool is getting caught on the hook that goes in a circle around the bobbin that lets the thread catch on the bobbin thread (I don't know what the name of it is) but it never gets OFF of that hook and onto the bobbin thread. So the hook circle thing (anybody know what that's called?) goes around two or three times, and then the thread somehow manages to get looped around the feed dogs, which is when it seizes up. I think it might just be a timing issue, but we'll see.

The good news is that I found a repair place (in all honesty, I think it's an old guy who's mechanically inclined...his daughter says he fixes all kinds of sewing machines) that's less than 10 minutes from work for me, so I am dropping it off on Monday. I'll try to get a cost estimate beforehand, because the machine wasn't very expensive, and if the cost of the repair is more than about $125 (half the cost of my machine), my husband gave me permission to not repair it, but instead replace the machine. I'll probably go into Nürnberg to the Pfaff store and get a Pfaff if that's the case but I will see ahead of time if I can sell the machine to the old repairman since I don't know how to fix it, and it's probably silly to keep a not-working machine. Maybe I will keep it, though, and get it fixed when I go home to the states. Luckily, my quilting friend (the one who was the subject of the "I have a real life quilter friend!" post) is in between projects and she said that I can use her Husqvarna until mine gets fixed or replaced. I had one seam left to finish my 4th maple leaf block too...figures.

Anyways, long post with tons of pictures! Hooray! Hope you enjoyed all of that, and good job for making it down to the bottom!

FNSI and other exciting news!

First of all, Friday Night Sew-In is back!









You know, Friday Night Sew-In! Where we as a quilting community all stay home on Friday night and sew our butts off! Not that it's any different than what I've been doing on my last few Friday nights, but hey - it's a good excuse to use to stay home and sew. It's taking place this Friday, September 17th.
As for me, I got my email matching me up with my Brown Bag Quilt partner this morning. The Brown Bag Quilt project is being run by JoyLyn, a poster on Stash Manicure (link goes to the BBQ post), and basically you get matched up with a partner, exchange 2 yards of unwanted fabric, and make a quilt using 90% of the fabric given to you by your partner in it. You are allowed to buy a backing, though, and add as much of your own fabric as you'd like. The best part about it...well...it'll take a mini story to explain.
As you know (if you've read this at all), I live in Germany, but I'm not German. I'm just here for a few years. I live in a German town, but I work with other Americans. When I signed up for the BBQ contest, I gave JoyLyn my American address. APO boxes are fantastic for those of us living here, because shipping isn't any more expensive than sending something to New York City would be. So families can send you care packages without having to pay tons of money. I had to explain how that address worked to JoyLyn, but in the end she was happy and everything was finalized about my address. When I got my partner email, imagine my complete shock when I saw that my partner lives less than a mile from me! JoyLyn didn't know what city I lived in here, but she somehow paired me up with someone who lives in my town! I mean, seriously - how cool is that?
Karin (my partner) and I are going to meet up in person to exchange our fabric this weekend (hey - we both work full time, so give us a break!). I am going to have another real-life quilting friend! She's interested in maybe hanging out and sewing together sometime too. I'll have to clean my house thoroughly (I think the excuse that I just moved in is starting to wear off a bit) and find homes for some stuff before she does, but I'm so excited!
In other news, I finished Pop-Pop's quilt top. I don't have a picture, mostly because it looks exactly like it did in my picture. I have a package that I'll be getting tomorrow - I really hope it's the backing and batting for this quilt! I ordered it about a week ago-ish, so maybe it is. :) While waiting for Pop-Pop's quilt pieces to come in, I've been working on my next quilt - the fall quilt. Surprisingly, I've cut out all the squares except for the tree (I'll post the design hopefully by this weekend...tomorrow and Thursday are busy for me, so I doubt I'll get it done before then) using just my stash. I did get a bit of help, since I had a few leftover squares from a baby quilt I made. I purposely cut out extra squares for that baby quilt since I was doing a scrappy trip around the world design (it was made of blocks of trip around the world, so I didn't need to have a bunch of any one fabric) and wanted to make sure that I'd have enough blocks to complete the design. So some of my sky blocks and some of my grass blocks are leftovers from that, but I've cut almost 600 squares in the last few evenings. I'll have to get a picture of my living room for you - it's a total mess! I have fabrics literally strewn all over the couch and floor! Most of them aren't folded, and the piles of squares on the table are really impressive!
Anyways, I hope you guys are having a wonderful day/night/whatever it is for you! It's almost bedtime for me (almost 2030 here!) so I'm off to finish cleaning the kitchen and make my lunch and dinner for tomorrow. Tschüss (that's German for bye, and it's pronounced kind of like tchewsss)!