Completed: Quilted Sewing Kit

Ok, let's get real here for a second.  Is there anybody out there who sews or knits who doesn't have some obscenely large collection of scraps shoved in some dark corner somewhere?  That's my goal.  To have them all fit in one corner.  Ugh.  So.many.scraps.  And I'm really not feeling up to a whole quilt right now.  So I'm trying to think of smaller projects that can utilize piecing/quilting that maybe I can even try out some new techniques on.

TRIANGLES!!!  Do you see that?!  Are you impressed?  No?  Well, don't be.  My squares came out crazy wonky and I had to cut them down to a size.  Le sigh...

However subpar my quilting might be, I'm still overly proud of the outside of this sewing kit.  It's sooo hard to sew triangles together!  They stretch.  Boo.  Even though there was some <ahem> evening of the squares I think they look really nice.  I'd love to have a whole quilt done in this pattern in shades of pink, but I don't know that it'll ever happen.  I do have more, slightly larger triangles cut out and I've started sewing them together.  I'd like to either make some market bags or a quilt like this.  I can't seem to link to the site directly atm, but I've viewed the page and the quilt is sooo pretty.  

The inside is pretty cute as well... continuing with the pink theme, obviously.  I mostly followed this tutorial, but my pieces ended up much smaller and my scissors ended up slightly larger so I had to improvise.  By the way, I thought that was wool felt but my iron disagreed.  Be advised that your long piece of felt can easily become one small, square, thick one.  You've been warned.  

The only real problem I have with this kit is that things won't stay in the vertical pockets (the ones facing the open edge).  So the scissors and my seam rippers are always falling out.  I have a few simple ideas on how to fix this but obviously can't be arsed as I haven't done it yet.  I'm also not quite convinced about the spools of thread on the ribbon....  I usually use whatever I have left on the bobbin for handstitching and that seems a lot more portable to me.

I'm just really psyched to have pieced together something other than squares for a change.  FTW!  And just look how tiny it wraps up to be. 

 I definitely love the idea of this little sewing kit, now I just need to figure out how useful it really is (before I start thinking about making more, as I am so wont to do when I finish a project).  At least it used up some scraps and was pretty quick.  I used to use an empty (clean) glass peanut butter jar with the lid on as a sewing kit.  I liked it because I could throw the buttons, thread, needle, pins and even a tiny pair of scissors in without worrying about anything falling out (or anyone stepping on a stray needle, yeowch!).  I'm curious, what do you use as your sewing kit?  

Completed: Pink Potholders

Just in time for Valentine's day: exceedingly pink potholders.  I needed to replace my old (missing, thanks baby girl) potholders.  I've seen lots of cool scrappy potholders on tha interwebz and even have a few tutorials pinned.  I pretty much ended up winging it with these, though...

I won't bore you with construction details as there are tons of tutorials out there and, let's be honest, you can probably figure it out just by looking at it.  Instead let me just say Happy V-Day!  I hope you got to celebrate with lots of chocolate and wine instead of Tylenol cold and tissues (as I did at home sick today).

Diamonds & (herring)Bones

The herringbone quilt is finally finished. This was a present for my mom for her birthday (which is at the end of February) and I just finished it on Easter Sunday. Clearly I am behind. This whole work thing is really cutting into my sewing time :(

This quilt may be a little... Shall we say imperfect and leave it at that? There are some puckers here and there, especially on the back, but I'm having trouble caring. Truth be told I'm pretty well chuffed with it. And of course my mom loves it and it is highly soft and cuddly so I'm calling it a win.

I found the tutorial for the herringbone pattern online. You actually just sew all the little strips together at an angle then cut out rectangles from your long line of strips... Which is pretty ingenious but for one thing: how does one make it so that all the rectangles end up with the same angle? In theory it's not that difficult to figure out, but for myself, master of meandering seam allowances, in practice it didn't work out so well.

All the little strips are actual scraps (as if you couldn't tell!) and the border is just the big pieces I had left of that sheet after hang it for a skirt and a shirt. It was a really big sheet. It's really soft but it's pretty freaking slippery and distorts easily. I knew it would be a pain to use on a quilt but it was just laying around with no clear purpose so in it went!

That means that this whole quilt top was basically lying on my sewing room floor. I would tell you that it's nice to be able to walk through my sewing room again, and it was while it lasted. But remember I said I finished it Easter Sunday which means there are already lots of brand new scraps impeding progress.

For the back I bought this incredibly soft, thick cotton sheet... From goodwill for $2 of course. The colorful floral sheet I originally bought to back it accidentally turned into a dress (so sorry I'm not at all sorry mom!) but I like this better anyway. The front of the quilt is so busy I think the low volume on the back works better.

The binding is a dark purple cotton (sheet again) that's I've already used to make a skirt and a dress. I already told you: I use all the parts!

For the quilting I did a sort of random diamonds and zigzag thing for the border (is that called sashing? I don't even know) and a slightly less random diamond and zigzag thing on the herringbone part. I feel like I need to read up on my quilting terminology before my next quilt... But that'll probably be a long time coming so I won't worry about it just yet.

Just how long did this quilt take? I started cutting and sewing the strips before baby girl was born and she's almost 9 months now so... A long ass time basically.  I wasn't actively working on it that whole time, but I knew it was there unfinished the whole time.  What, you don't feel like your WIPs are lurking in the background, waiting??

But anyway, I feel like it was worth it though and I will definitely make more quilts in the future. It does not seem likely, however, that I will become one of those people who buys fabrics specifically for quilting. Maybe one or two fat quarters here and there, but I have waaaay too many scraps to justify that sort of thing. Quilts to me are just a warm, cuddly (&useful) way to clean up my sewing room floor. In case you hadn't noticed I never throw anything away so I'm a big fan of scrappy projects.

I've already started thinking about my next quilt so I guess you can be looking for that in another 9 months or so :P It will almost certainly be another string quilt so don't get too excited haha!!