Time flies when you're missing deadlines.

My quilt was almost completely done by March 31st, and then I procrastinated for 11 days putting the binding on. Lots of reasons...we're expecting a new hostile youth in my household, so I've been milking that first trimester exhaustion for all its worth. Also, my sewing room is a great big mess that just closes in on me whenever I go in there.

Like lots of families who have little kids, we love the Cat in the Hat. I even dressed up like him last year for Halloween.

Complete with Thing One and Thing Two.

 

I've been wanting to try wonky piecing, and I figured there was no better medium to try it on than Robert Kaufman's Cat in the Hat fabric line. I originally planned to have this done to go with our Halloween costumes last year. Procrastination, remember?

I like the way piecing turned out, but I got discouraged with the way it finished up. It's much puffier than I care for, when I'm used to a much flatter work with denser quilting. I tried something new with the quilting and building my quilt sandwich - instead of putting all three layers together, I quilted just the front and the batting with an all-over free-motion pattern.

Then I added a piece of fuzzy black fabric to the back, sewing only around the blocks to attach it. I love fuzzy backs on quilts, so I'll definitely do that again, but next time, I'll create the whole quilt sandwich and quilt it like normal before attaching the backing piece. The quilting really needs that extra piece of backing fabric to stabilize it.

I finished it off with a red and white striped binding. I was originally aiming for a twin-size quilt, but I underestimated how much black fabric I had for the sashing. So instead, it ended up as a generously sized throw.

I listed this quilt here, in my Etsy shop. I've had better luck on eBay, so I might think about listing it there, too.

I'm not the only one expecting a baby. A friend of the family is having a little girl this summer, and my next project will be a quilt for her. But first, I need a few days to whip my poor sewing room back into shape.

That's five projects from stash.

February project: Valentine's Day treat bags

When I started to teach myself to quilt last year, I also started reading lots of quilt blogs. One thing I noticed among many of them was a subtle disdain for Jo-Ann Fabric and Crafts and for the fabric sold there. It seems that Jo-Ann is the Wal-Mart of the quilting world - it's the ghetto shopping destination for common folk.

Over the year or so that I've been immersed in the quilting world, I've started to internalize that opinion. I'll go to Jo-Ann or Wal-Mart and find myself looking down on fabric that's too rough, or too thin, or has a pattern that looks pixelated. I've ordered designer fabric, and I've been delighted at the feel of real quality. 

I live in Wasilla, Alaska, and there aren't a lot of fabric options here. There's a Jo-Ann. There's a Super Wal-Mart that carries fabric. There's one quilt shop in town that I know of, and a few more in nearby towns. Jo-Ann will always be my first stop if I'm looking for costume fabric, batting, thread, or general craft supplies, but knowing what I know now, I don't think I'll be buying a lot of cotton quilting fabric there.

But like I said in my first blog entry, I started out my quilting journey on a super-glut of fabric buying, and buying from Jo-Ann was no exception. The storage boxes in my sewing room are stuffed with fabric, designer and other. One of my goals of my year-long challenge is to not only thin out my collection, but to use up the less desirable fabrics.

And I found the perfect project.

My oldest daughter is in kindergarten, and Valentine's Day is coming up this week. Participating in school activities is still fresh and fun for me, so I've still got the motivation to do things like this:

I'm sure by the time my youngest gets to kindergarten, those kids will be lucky to get a lollipop taped to a grocery store Valentine. But for this year, I decided to whip up 27 treat bags, using this great tutorial.

Not only are the bags cute (and I hope the kids will be thrilled!), but the project turned out to be an amazing fabric killer. I got the chance to use up a few vintage fabrics.

I was also able to say goodbye to a few novelty fabrics that I didn't know what else to do with.

My box of pink fabric is almost empty.

I even made some special treats to go in them:

Cookies made to look like tiny cheeseburgers! (I used instructions that I found here.) In the background, you can see some wrapped Rice Krispie treats that I dyed pink and red and cut into heart shapes.

Making the bags wasn't hard, but it was time consuming, especially when I had so many to do. Now, it's halfway through the month, and I haven't even started a quilt. I think I might take up some more small sewing projects and save the quilting for next month.

That's four projects from stash.

January quilt: zig-zag throw blanket

In February of last year, I posted this picture to my Facebook, proclaiming that it would soon be made into a throw for my couch.

"Soon" wasn't really the best descriptor. After I took that picture, I planned out the quilt and cut out all my squares. In the nearly a year that followed, I moved, got a new couch, sewed a few squares at a time, and made eleven other quilts. But one good thing that's coming out of my no-fabric-buying challenge is that I really get to buckle down and finish projects that I've already started. And luckily, I still have the couch that matches these colors - it's in my den, and I managed to move enough clutter out of the way to get a good picture of the quilt in its intended environment.

And here it is.

The finished product is about 60" X 60", and has blue, green, yellow, and brown zig zags made from 5" half-square triangles. The fabrics were a mish-mash of fabrics that caught my eye at Jo-Ann and Wal-Mart, along with Kona Bone. (The periodic symbol paintings were inspired by this blog post. "Kraus" would be my married name, if my own name weren't already so awesome.)

Forgive the treadmill arm poking into the picture. I used a dark-brown binding, and I quilted along the seam lines using light blue thread. I ended up with a lot more tucks and puckers than I'm comfortable with. I'm still learning the art of straight-line quilting. Plus, I was working with blocks that I made when I was a newbie, but I had to forge ahead even though I could see the rookie mistakes in them. I find that a while after I finish a project, I can usually forgive myself for the mistakes I've made on it. If I were selling it or giving away, I'd feel worse about it, but since I'm keeping this one, I don't need to beat myself up over the oopsies.

This is the pieced back.

If I had known how well this flowered fabric from Moda tied the whole thing together, I would have made the whole back from it. Overall, the quilt is nice. It's a good size, and super soft. Puts me right to sleep, though maybe it's just the winter cold talking.

That's three projects from stash.

New and improved sewing room

When we moved into our house, my husband allowed me to take over one of the bedrooms and turn it into a sewing room. Until recently, the sewing room was the only one in the house that I hadn't decorated. More than that, the room was a nightmare. I had left up the blinds that were there when we moved in. All of the furniture pieces were leftovers from our previous house. The storage was inadequate and uninspired.

Now that we've been in our house for a few months, I know my sewing habits well enough to design a room around them. And with the new year and new blog, I was ready for a change.

Here's a before and after view, looking from the hall through the doorway. You can see the treadmill that became a storage unit - in the "after" picture, it's been cleaned off. That doesn't mean I'm going to use it, but at least it's cleared. I'm very pleased with the new curtains. I picked up a glass L-shaped desk on Craigslist: one side for the sewing machine, one side for pressing. I like that the sewing machine is no longer up against a wall - when I'm quilting something big, it can flop over the back instead of bunching up against the wall.

The room has built-in bookshelves, which are great for fabric storage. Another major change was the chair. The red Pier One chair from the "before" picture was cute, but it didn't allow for a lot of movement. The office chair is a big improvement.
   

Now, my mannequin is not only dressed, but standing somewhere where she's less in the way.

My fabric-cutting corner is much more tidy now.

My sewing room mascot is ready for some action!

My vision for the L-shaped desk was to have one side for pressing. For that, I had to make up a mat that would fit on the table.

I started with my old cutting mat, which was covered in scars and had a few holes in it. I also added a layer of cardboard.

Using a staple gun, I added a layer of heat-resistant padding.

And then I topped it off with a layer of fabric.

I always have the regular-size ironing board if I need it, but for small pieces, my pressing mat works just fine.

And even though it wasn't a sewing project, making my pressing mat used up fabric from my stash...I say it counts.

That's two projects, from stash.