Sewing on the Train

Last weekend, I took the train to visit my daughter.  I spent most of my travelling time working on the sheep wall hanging that I am making for my MIL for Christmas.  I managed to finish the buttonhole stitch on the sheep bodies, the hearts, all the flowers and the stems and leaves of three of the flowers. 

The people sitting beside me on each train all asked me about my project. One man told me about his mother who had died recently and who had made crocheted doilies.  He was not sure what to do with all the doilies.  He had children and grandchildren to give them to but he did not want them to just get put in a drawer and forgotten.  I suggested he have them framed and then his family members could hang them on the wall.  He thought this was a great idea and was going to look into it when he got home.  

One evening this week, a friend came over to knit and I sewed on the faces, heads and ears of the sheep.  I also worked on some more stems and leaves.

Only a few more stems and leaves to go!

I hope to put some more stitches in tomorrow for slow Sunday Stitching.  There are some little buttons to add for the eyes too.  Then, it will have to be quilted by hand too.  It's a good thing this is a small wall hanging!  My deadline for this project and other gifts is looming! 

I made another snowman pillow this week for a special order for a friend's friend to give to his wife for Christmas.  The buttons and the mouth are hand stitched so they count for slow stitching this week too.

I am linking up with Kathy for slow Sunday stitching.  

Slow Sunday Applique

One evening this past week, I spent a couple of hours tracing and cutting out the pieces for a wool Applique project which will be a Christmas gift for a family member.

There are a lot of little pieces in this project!

I am keeping all of them in a ziplock bag for safe keeping! 

Today, I am staring to sew the sheep bodies in place. 

I don't like having the pins in place while I am doing blanket stitch Applique, so I hand baste each piece down first using matching thread.  

I have vast quantities of embroidery thread in many colours and found a gray to match the large sheep.

I had to watch a YouTube video about how to start my first stitch...I have not done this for a while! 

I am off to the races now... We will be doing some garden clean-up today and I hope to do some sewing later today.  I will be linking up with Kathy for Slow Sunday Stitching. 

A New Wool Project

Several years ago, I bought a kit to make a small wall hanging.  I've pulled it out with good intentions to start it several times, but it always ended up getting put away again. 

This week, I found the kit again, and decided that it was time to get going on this project.  I have seen lots of wool projects on some of the blogs I read and was inspired to stitch along with them.  I put the background together and hope to cut out the wool pieces today in preparation for hand stitching.  

I am linking up to Kathy for Slow Sunday Stitching.  

At long last, a SEWING DAY!!!

The Elgin Piecemakers got together today for our annual winter sewing day.  I have not had my sewing machine out in two weeks...yikes! I packed up everything I needed for the day last night so I could just load the car and go this morning. I started out by making three charity quilt blocks for our chemo quilts.  The brown, green and tan block above will be handed in this Thursday at our February meeting.  I also made a black slab block:

I made this block 12.5" square and was reminded by another member of the guild at the end of the day that it was supposed to be a 15.5" square so I will have to add some more strips to this block to bring it up to the right size.

 

 

I also made a block from my collection of 30's prints.  This is my own design.  No pattern used! 

 

After the three blocks were done, I pieced a couple of flannel backs for our charity quilts.  We had some flannel leftover from previous quilts that I brought home from the last meeting, hoping to be able to piece two or three backs from them. There is still more fabric left and I will check my flannel stash to see if there is anything I can add to make a third pieced back.  Sorry, there are no pictures of the flannel backings.

 

After lunch, I dug out my improvisational piecing project from a Jacquie Gering workshop last summer at Quilts at the Creek.  I laid my blocks out on the floor in a taped grid, as suggested by Jacquie.

 

 



I ended up making one more block before putting everything together.  I still had a couple of seams to finish off by the end of the day but you will get the idea by looking at the picture below.

I moved some things around as I sewed this together. I will likely quilt this myself and may try using some variegated thread that I have in my stash.

For Slow Sunday Stitching tomorrow, I hope to finish off the hand quilting on my wool applique wall hanging. I am using black thread on black material to add some texture to this little project.  I started this one at a workshop over a year ago...

Just in case you are getting worried that I won't have anything to sew once these ufo's are done, I have at least three more workshop ufo's to finish as well as other projects floating around in my mind waiting to be made.  Until next time... Happy Sewing!