Sewing, Gardening and a Quilt Show

 Good evening, friends. It's been a while. How are you? We are doing well here in the northern most part of Ohio. I have gardening and quilting on the brain, and so that's what I've been doing a lot of.

I am still working, but a little closer to home these days. Not that this has given me much more free time, I do have teenagers and small children after all. But it has made the drive home shorter and allowed me to sleep in just a little bit longer in the mornings. 

I have decided to be intentional about making time to sew. Last month I returned to the local quilt guild after nearly a decade away. There are new faces, and some more familiar, but the overall feeling was very different. The same joy and love for sewing, and a new excitement for gathering in the name of quilts. But it was just different. I enjoyed it tremendously. I made new friends, and they have inspired me to sew more. Having a monthly "quilting commitment" has worked its magic. I sewed a quilt top! I must, after all, sew a little bit, if I'm going to participate in a sewing group. Tonight I hope to add borders to this.

Hopefully this image doesn't give you vertigo. I cannot seem to rotate it. (I might be too tired to try.) Memorial Day is on the way and the Fourth of July too. So red, white, and blue are my current colors. This top is very simple, made from scraps in my stash, but if you know me, you know it's all about the quilting anyhow. I'll be quilting this on my Juki TL2010q. Eventually.

And I said that I have been gardening. Oh, have I! Situated prominently in our back yard is a garden bed. The back yard feels more like our front yard because it faces the main road, where just beyond that is an expansive view of Lake Erie. When we purchased this home three years ago, the garden bed was unruly. It housed a beautiful purple iris, an overwhelming amount of ivy, a holly bush, two unknown trees, and was filled thick with lily of the valley. Each summer I thinned the lily of the valley, removed a few things more, and put in plants. This year, it feels for the first time, like a garden.

I planted another iris, this one pink, and I have one more to plant waiting patiently in the driveway. I planted lilies, creeping phlox, delphinium, daisies, echinacea, mums, and foxglove. Oh, I cannot wait to see how these plants fair!

I'm also going to try a few dahlias this year. I planted six in pots. This one I picked up on Mother's Day at a plant sale. So beautiful! I hear these get very tall. I can't wait to see!

Oh yes, and I've taken up a new hobby. Cross stitch. I had no idea how much I would love it. There are so many new patterns these days! And wonderful designers! I am loving these.

There are a few errors, and maybe you'll find them. I don't really mind though. These are for the fun of stitching. I love to have a hand project now just about everwhere I go.

I went to Lake Farm Park's annual quilt show a few weeks ago too. See how sewing intentional I am? It was wonderful! I took many pictures. I think I will save them for my next blog post, though. I am being intentional about my blogging too, see? So sorry if you visited to see the photos! You will just have to come back...

If you are out there and still quilt blogging, I would love to hear from you. The online quilting community has changed so much in recent years. I really enjoyed these small little private spaces where people share their day-to-day quilting life. Is anyone still out there?

Until next time!

Slow Stitching Hexies and Garden Musings

 Well, friends, it seems that I am saying hello once again after a long absence. For the few who still visit, all these years later, you know that much has happened in the past ten years. I spent time recently scrolling through old posts, and I cannot believe that this blog began in 2008. That's getting dangerously close to twenty years ago! What a different world it is today. Not only for me, but the blogging community. It is very different from when I began blogging, as a way to stay connected and talk about quilts and gardening while staying home with my children-to now. I don't come across nearly as many personal blogs anymore. I miss those! I did eventually grow into long arm quilting as a business, but this blog primarily was a diary of those days and remained a way to document my quilting and gardening life over the years. Even the quilting community online has changed dramatically. Facebook and Instagram seem to be where everyone connects now. You can find me on both of those platforms, but I think I still have a place in my heart for the personal connection only found in silly little personal blogs. 

I have been sewing. Can you believe that? And not just a little bit of sewing. I've been my regular obsessed self with sewing. Right now, my obsession is English paper pieced (EPP) hexies.

    

I started these primarily because it was difficult to get myself in front of a sewing machine with a toddler in the house. It's still difficult, but as small children grow, things become easier. I paused on my blue and cream quilt mostly because I wasn't sure how I was going to piece those diamonds. Now I think I will EPP them. What accuracy! I used cotton thread because I had a dwindling spool of it for piecing, but then later read how wonderful bottom line works for hand piecing. While it was basically invisible from the front, I also couldn't see it very well for stitching! I resumed using the cotton, and though I can see the stitches from the front, I think they will disappear if I stitch in the ditch. I also tried some Glide thread that I have an abundance of laying around from my long arming days. It also stitched up nicely and the best part was-I could see it! I am undecided if I will hand quilt or machine quilt this though. It feels like it should be hand quilted, doesn't it? If for nothing else because it is hand pieced. I did buy some pink Perle cotton and wide-eyed needles to stitch it with if I go the hand quilting route.

And if you've visited my blog before, then you know I love gardening almost as much as I love quilting. I'm a plant collector. Some of you who collect fabric can probably relate.

There is no rhyme or reason to my plant collecting other than I focus on perennials and just a few annuals. I just love that you can throw a small baby little perennial in the ground, and it will grow back twice as big the next year and the year after that it will have given you more baby plants of that same perennial. So, what I'm saying is it's a thrifty way to grow a garden, if you care to be thrifty.

This beautiful iris was already living in this wild and sprawling garden bed when we purchased the property. It is blooming and absolutely beautiful! I love irises and have had many over the years in all the different homes I've lived in. I think I need a few more, don't you?

I went back through posts, and it looks like it was ten years ago that I planted pumpkins in my back yard! Initially that was why I named this blog "pumpkin patch quilter." Because I love to quilt, and I think I had the most fun growing pumpkins of all the things I have grown. There is something special about growing pumpkins with small children too. They don't care nearly as much about the flowers, but the pumpkins! Those are special and a symbol of fall fun! So, this year I'm trying my hand at it again. I planted Jack Be Little's, mini pumpkin gourds, and lemon-yellow sunflowers in this patch below. I'm going to plant some container zinnias in those pots, but I just haven't gotten out to do it yet. At this rate I won't have blooms until October. I better get planting. Today I spent most of my garden time pulling lily of the valley from the aforementioned sprawling garden bed. Boy does that stuff spread!

I think that is all I have to share for now, but rest assured, if you are still blogging out there and talking about your quilts and gardens-I'll be reading! I have really been enjoying playing in the garden and hand sewing. I won't bore you with pictures, but I've been organizing dozens of bins of fabric too. I'll share more on that later. There's a very long way to go on that front!

Well, hello there! What a busy couple of months our family had. So much has happened in my life since last October. I passed the bar exam, moved, had a baby...and that was just through the holiday months. Things are quieting down and I'm now turning to a bit of sewing.

I bought fabric for the quilt design I showed you in my last post. 

I was able to match the colors pretty well to what I chose in Electric Quilt. These are all Kona solids purchased from Missouri Star Quilt Company.  I ordered black printer ink today (because I'm currently out of it) so I can print out my patterns and start piecing this quilt. All the fabrics have been prewashed and dried since this photo, but they are still waiting to be pressed. 

If you follow my page on Facebook, you might have already seen some of the other projects I've been working on. I'm setting up a permanent sewing space in the new house and so as a result, I have been going through boxes and boxes of sewing supplies. I found some old blocks I made years ago, and you may have even seen them if you've followed this blog that long. I think I made these with the thought of completing a Sylvia's Bridal Sampler quilt. I must have lost steam and moved on to something else, and good thing, because my piecing wasn't all that phenomenal here. The seams are bulky, and I must not yet have really been into machine quilting because now that I know better, I put a lot of effort into minimizing bulk. I picked a few of the better blocks and squared them up, which inevitably means I will lose some points or create some floaters. But it will still be a fun short project to put together so I can get to the part I love the most, which is the machine quilting.

Today I have some housework and errands to run, and then I'll try to squeeze in sewing time. The plan is to get this machine quilted on my Juki, but I've been having some trouble with thread looping on the underside during free motion quilting. I had it serviced recently but it's still giving me trouble. I suspect it may be a threading issue. That will take some experimenting to resolve. Regardless, I have to decide if I want to add borders with applique, or whether I forgo the applique knowing this piece doesn't have the best piecing to warrant so much effort. 

In the meantime, if you want to see more frequent updates as I go along, you can watch for posts here.