Satisfaction.

      Good morning from the western mountains of Maine, where it was 75 degrees this weekend! With that kind of weather, you'd have to ask why I wasn't outside, but I was killin' it in the sewing room, people! I had a beautiful week of cross stitch, machine embroidery, and quilting. And even some more unpacking, the never ending chore.

     I can't begin to even tell you how satisfying it was to cut 42 charm square into nine pieces each and then sew them back together into corn for the "Let's Pop Some Corn" table runner. If you are a quilter, you understand this! Yes, it's another kit, but oh, sew appropriate since we frequently make popcorn in this establishment. We even have the professional movie theater salt-- it's call FLAVICOL, and a really nice popper. 

     These are BIG corns-- I have to keep reminding myself to check the dimensions before deciding to make things-- this one is 18" x 58"-- that's almost taller than me. The large dimension also made me feel sad-- I don't have a dining room anymore, and it will just be six of us this Thanksgiving. 

     I got nine corns out of my charm pack, and plan to use the two extra for some cute pillows, but once the blocks are done, I'm going to lay them out on my various tables and see if I should make two shorter pieces. Or maybe just use the extra for a fancy backing like everyone seems to be doing these days. Hoping to get the husks on this week!

     I don't listen to music or watch TV while I'm working-- I just let the musings in my head wander about for entertainment-- such as this one that came to mind while I was stitching kernels.

    Now here's a little tip for you-- sewing patches of 4 x 10 tiny squares is never going to give you a straight edge along the perimeter. And there's probably very little extra to be able to trim them down to size, either. I just cut off the merest fraction to get the fuzzies and sewing thread off the edges. Then, on the other side, I draw a nice straight stitching line with erasable fabric marker. 

     "A Ribbon Runs Through It" did not fall by the wayside. All 888 pieces are stacked and ready for assembly on my handy, dandy Block Layout Sheet. Lots of rows to piece this week! After that, can you believe I will only have one more of the original star blocks to finish-- everything will be ready for final assembly. All my pieces are within 1/8" of where they should be, so I think assembly will go well, with just a little easing here or there.

     Cross stitch-- okay, maybe not hitting out of the park, but progress has been made. I might have this finished by next week-- I'm just doing the bottom strip of this lovely thing for now and making a mini bench pillow.

     Machine Embroidery-- I almost have another new set! It's more cute cross stitch-- these are sew fun to design and very easy to digitize. Tomorrow, I'm test stitching, and then I'll finish them off into some new Thanksgiving decor. It is so nice after years of machine embroidery to be able to pull out things I have made over the past years-- they are just like old friends! Not all of them have popped out of the boxes yet, but again, unpacking progress has been made.

     

     During some of my down time over the move, I learned a new software-- it's a cross stitch program that will let you machine embroider your designs, but also print out a chart for hand stitching. Often, I draw people into the site who think my work is for hand stitch-- should I start offering my designs as charts? There is a real glut of people jumping into that market now, but it is really beyond easy to just make a PDF chart with this software. Should I do it? I was thinking of starting a new brand on Etsy "Sugar Meadow Cross Stitch." I'd love to hear your input. 

     Instead of all these quilt kits I buy and work on, I also have been doing some of my own block designing. I really want to make an Autumn Sampler quilt, but don't see quite the right one to make. Another new brand for me... Sugar Meadow Quilts? Haha-- since change is in the air around here, let's change everything! Quilt designing is also a tough market since there is so much free content out there and I don't have any fabric to sell.

     Sugar Meadow Fabric?? LOL

     At home, the kitchen is starting to look like MY kitchen! It quite didn't feel right until I moved the silverware to the left of the fridge like it was in my old home. Makes me wonder if my silverware drawer has always been the right of my various fridges, starting with that first Brooklyn apartment and through all the moves, all these years. 

     It's such a mental boost when things get in order. All I need is a little more curation of the open shelves, and a storage place for my large crock pot!

     Now let's all get out there and start stitching!

xoxo

Carol

Quilt like a Fighter Pilot...

      Yes, I'm a day late to say Happy Halloween-- but I spent an uneventful evening doing what I do every night-- hacking fabric to bits in the attic. Quilters are a mild mannered people, so no one ever questions or worries over this impulse... MWAHAHAHAHA!

    It's baaaaa-ck! The sew jo has returned, big time. I saw this cutie on social media-- it's a kit that actually came out last fall, called "Let's Pop Some Corn," by Sandy Gervais. We make popcorn all the time here! Instead of tossing the kit in a closet, a frequent fate of new purchases, I started working on it right away. First up--- hacking 42 charm squares in nine pieces for the corn kernels.

     I'm really starting to try to work smarter, so I did chop up three charm layers at a time. To tackle the corn, I was thinking of sewing together rows of four at a time, but that doesn't allow for chain piecing. So I re-thought, and if I just grab two random squares and stitch them in pairs, then chain piece pairs into rows of four, it will go quickly. I'd love to have this by Thanksgiving. Let's see what happens!

     A Ribbon Runs Through It is the poster project for working smarter-- my strip set idea discussed in the last post went flawlessly, and I had sixteen of these ready in half the allotted month!

   Did you ever hear that saying supposedly made up about fighter pilots-- the job is "long periods of boredom punctuated by moments of sheer terror"? I believe the saying truly originated with quilters-- after all the time devoted to assembly, I had to take a rotary cutter to them and cut off the pink squares to make a straight line across the bottom. Yikes!

 It took all of my nerve, but I beavered on. I am proud to say, they trimmed up great, and to the right size!

        Next up is eight of these beauties: (the image is pulled from the Sew'n Wild Oaks blog)

I was really looking forward to making eight of the same thing-- the first sixteen blocks are all colored differently. And, my goodness, I LOVE a checkerboard! I confess I balked slightly when I realized the checkers finish at less than 1" each! Thank goodness, this time the pattern was written to strip piece them together, and I'm almost through created 96 checkerboards. These blocks have 111 pieces each. I think that's a record for me. 

Thank goodness for the layout sheets Lynn Wilder produced to keep us all organized! I'm concentrating on stacking 8 of each of these things on it. I hope to finish these by the end of November, and then assemble to finish on December 31st, and I'm feeling pretty confident! This will be an even bigger accomplishment than THE MOVE this year-- heehee!

     This is my cross stitch progress for the week:

    I foolishly thought I could finish at least one of the houses in the Halloween Town SAL by Fat Quarter Shop. Not even close. I have to tell you, I just got my eyeglass prescription updated, but even so the black thread on the grey fabric is killing me. I'll probably put this away until next year, and switch back to Autumn Love, which I do Love working on. I pretty much just have a star left, and then I'm making a mini little bench pillow from it.

     Just a word of encouragement-- I work on cross stitch for an hour in the morning and sewing for an hour at night-- it is amazing how much you can accomplish with just a little bit each day. I also spend a lot of time THINKING about quilts as well-- maybe every moment of every day really,-- I'm sure if you are a quilter you understand this. But thinking does not advance any of it! Unless you do spend some thinking time trying to "work smarter" like I mentioned earlier. Well, you'd be surprised how quickly things come together, when needle meets thread a few minutes each day.

    In between those morning and afternoon stitches, I have my day job-- San Francisco Stitch Co., and I am pleased to say, new work is starting to flow! These are my new Autumn Bowl Fillers just uploaded today-- should this be a monthly series? I'm thinking of it!

    And I'm also trying to settle in to a new home-- with a big hand from my DD, we got the entire vegetable garden cleaned out last week. You should have seen it before-- we couldn't do anything with it this year, only coming every 2nd or 3rd weekend. I should have taken a "before" picture, but honestly it was too humiliating-- the weeds were eye high. I have never had a large vegetable garden before-- we always lived in the woods. So I can't wait to get started next spring.

     We bought a sugar shack! Do you know what it is? It's where you make maple syrup. We have tons of large maples on the property and hope to get an ounce or two next spring as well!

    It's just a little garden shed, but we stained it and the maple leaf is photoshopped for now, but I 'm hoping to paint one over the winter. So many, many barn stars in this area-- I am taking pictures everywhere we go and I will share them in another post. But I think my Zen Maple will top them all!

     So that's my little life at present in the boondocks of Maine. The weather continues warm, but I see rain and maybe snow for mid-November. Hoping to keep myself busy, busy and see what the winter brings. Thanks for visiting me!

xox

Carol

Ideas for Strip Set Piecing

      There have been enough sunny and hot days here in Western Maine to convince myself we have really moved to the Deep South... that, and the fact that I have gotten back to a little bit of sewing add up to some high good humor in my studio!

     If you've been following my adventures, you know that I signed up for "A Ribbon Runs Through It" BOM through Fat Quarter Shop. I just got mailed my last installment, and though I got sidetracked this year with a move, I've actually finished six months worth, and there are only four to go. (It was a ten month program.) I'd love to just close this out before the end of the year, and I think I see some shortcuts that will help me move this project along.

This picture is taken from the blog of the designer, sewnwildoaks.blogspot.com.

Isn't she a beauty?!

     I'm skipping around a bit and decided to work on Month 9, which is sixteen of the same setting triangle block. The pattern is written as though you will make each individually, but I can see some opportunities to strip piece that will make this move along much faster-- I'm hoping I can get all sixteen done in two weeks instead of the allotted month. 

     What is strip piecing? It's a way of sewing longer strips of fabric together and then sub-cutting them into the width you need, as opposed to cutting and the sewing together individual pieces. If you consider the unit highlighted below, you see that a light blue rectangle has a pink and blue square attached to each end:

     If you sewed a "strip" of three pieces together, you could then just cut it into the correct width to get multiples of them in much fewer seams, with less cutting, less aligning, and less pressing of individual pieces.

     Anytime you are making multiples of the same block is a good time to strip piece-- you can also recognize opportunities to strip piece when a pattern calls for cutting strips-- then sub cutting them. My pattern called for 128 sub-cut tiny pink squares-- no thanks! I simply cut the strips called for in the pattern, and then looked for strip piecing opportunities. As you can see by the photo below, there were quite a few of them!

     Here is an actual "strip" sewn together, then cut-- note that I cut my width of fabric (WOF) strips into two lengths just for ease of sewing-- sewing 42" long strips together is not something I was interested to do, either.

     My pattern has pressing guides included and I made sure my strips were all pressed in the correct direction before cutting.

    I have plenty of fabric with my kit. Note that strip piecing does not use extra fabric, but it doesn't save you any, either! My suggestion if you are short on fabric-- cut the strips required for your pattern and then sub-cut only pieces that are individuals first-- then save the rest of your fabric for strip piecing. You can see my pattern has three small pink squares and two large light blue rectangles that cannot be strip pieced to anything else. I cut these individual pieces first.

     That included 32 of the large light blue rectangles (that's two pieces each for sixteen blocks) and 48 pink squares (three pieces each for sixteen blocks) before assembling my strips.

     I just worked away at all of my marked strip sets for very few minutes each day.

My pattern included a layout sheet for all of the pieces-- this has been a huge help in getting this far. Before I knew it...

Voila! 

(I'm probably really dating myself by using that phrase!)

I have sixteen of each strip piece unit stacked, making it sew easy to now just chain piece all of these together. Hoping to crush my sixteen setting triangles shortly and feeling like a BOSS!

Hope this helps you consider ways to streamline your quilting-- 

Have a great day, all!

xox
Carol

Embroidery in the Wilderness

     I promised I would show you my temporary studio space, and at the risk of losing all credibility for the internationally renowned machine embroidery company that is San Francisco Stitch Co., here it is!

     It's a beautiful, large, south facing space just needing sheet rock. Our first home was am extreme fixer-upper to put it kindly, (there were bullet holes in the windows) and I always remember the listing heading when we bought it was: "For the Buyer with Vision!" So I am keeping that in my heart-- that house was a showpiece after 17 years of effort, and so my worldwide headquarters here will eventually be the best space ever, in less time, I certainly hope!

     In the meantime, I have had the battle of the mice--won-- the battle of the flies-- won-- and now the battle of the lady bugs-- winner still to be determined. I'm doing my best to be a hearty wilderness machine embroiderer up in my attic. Yesterday, I finally unpacked my beloved Babylock Spirit-- I gave it a hug and actually said," I Love You!" out loud-- an it was just a very healing moment of promise for the creations that will be born and grow here. Today will be my first stitch out in this establishment-- the November Birth Month Mug Rug.

     To further encourage myself this week, I stopped by my new local quilt shop-- Pins and Needles.

     This picture is pulled off their website-- it's a bit fuzzy. I met the owner and she gave me her entire life story which started in British Columbia-- she still had a lovely accent to show for it. Then, of course, there was a good love story, and she was persuaded to spend many years in Maine, and the shop has been open for thirty years or more. Everyone here is just beyond friendly-- but I liked her even more after discovering her store was extremely well stocked with fabric, DMC floss, wool, batting, books... She warned me that people who weren't born here are know as transplants, and that may be so, but everyone I meet has totally opened up their home and hearts to Mr. SFO and I. 

     You can make a virtual visit to the store here:

Pins and Needles 

     Be sure to check out the Maine Birds and berries fabric-- I am definitely going back for it! Do we see more Cloud Club birds in the future? Heck, yeah!

Maine Birds and Berries

    There are other little retail shops along this block-- The Twice Sold Tales bookshop, the Mix It Up cooking store and a gift shop. I can't wait to go to those, too. It is great to live in a place where it isn't Barnes and Noble, Bed Bath and Beyond, and the Hallmark Store lined up predictably, one after the other.

     I was challenging myself between unpacking, to put an hour into my cross stitch in the morning, and an hour into quilting at night-- so I didn't quite make it, but progress has been made!

      One bit of wisdom I learned-- or probably relearned-- on days where I felt like I just didn't have time, it is better to just put in 15 minutes, than do nothing-- 15 minutes is the difference between having another UFO and potentially finishing something. If you skip a day, you tend to skip the next day as well-- but if you put in just very few minutes, you have made a placeholder for the habit the next day, when you may be able to put in your hour!

I am stitching along with Kimberly at the Fat Quarter Shop, but I am not stitching the whole Autumn Love piece-- I'm just taking the bottom and making a cute mini bench pillow. I found my Lori Holt Prairie fat quarters, and I'm going to make a scrappy one inch square border around it to make it a little bigger. I'm giving myself plenty of time, just hoping to have this done by Thanksgiving. I am having my family up for Thanksgiving here-- hee hee-- wow, that's a goal! There's not even a hotel anywhere near here where I could put people up! We will all be lying about on the floor!

For the quilting hour at night, it was also hit/miss, but those sashings are coming along...

I just about have 32 more of those zig zaggy things done, and this week's job would be to sew on the background strips to the top and bottom as shown above. Then, I get to pick a new task-- I think it's going to be the triangle setting squares-- they have fewer pieces and I think if I do them as strip sets, not as individual pieces as the pattern is written, I can save some time. Did I mention there are sixteen of them?

So that's been my week of sewing-- the middle of the day is filled with many other things and the post move to do list. I stumbled upon the last box of things I packed as I ran out the door of our sold house for the last time, so that caused a little angst, and I still wonder what I have traded my perfect home and life for. But looking at the beauty of autumn in this remote place, and the faces of my family around me, well, they all just look very happy, so I am determined to conquer this wilderness and will fake it till I make it myself!

xox

Carol

Settling in...

      This is the moment I have been waiting for and fantasizing about for months! The old family house is sold, we're fully moved into Western Maine, and the hikers are off the trail! Yes, finally settled! The only problem is, I just don't feel settled yet at all!

     Gypsy and Fern completed their 2,200 mile hike-- I cannot believe they walked from Georgia to Maine. Out of 2,500 that attempt the Appalachian Trail each year, only 20% of hikers complete it-- and only 20% of those are women. I could not be more proud. The season ends on October 15th, when Mount Katahdin closes for the year-- so the kids noticed a lot of people were skipping sections of New Hampshire to get to Maine on time. So frankly, you have to wonder how many of the 20% who finish really did the whole thing. My team documented every step of the way on YouTube-- again, I could not be more proud. 

     If you watched along, you may have expected this:

    

     By my daughter's expression, you can guess that she said, "Yes!" We're all very excited and now have a wedding to plan-- one that will be on top of a mountain, no doubt!

     We rented this wonderful cabin across a lake from Mount Katahdin to celebrate the accomplishment.

     This is my first Air BnB rental-- I'd definitely do it again! There were eight of us in all, and we were able to just be together with no distractions.

     Back "home"-- I put that in quotes because it is only just beginning to feel that way-- we have made a lot of progress fitting furniture in and unpacking boxes-- you can actually set foot in the garage now. Unfortunately, it does not seem that my Sewtopia space will be sheetrocked before winter, so I went ahead and just set up my big sewing table amidst the stud walls, and I'm also going to just set up the longarm, and I will just be patient with the current state of affairs. Mr. SFO did get us a TV up there! I'll post a picture of my humble space soon. I think it's good to do with a little less at times-- do you think so?

     I may make a schedule for myself to help focus and get things done and I did promise myself that I would allow my hour of hand stitching in the morning and and hour of quilting at night. The embroidery mojo is still MIA-- I think I just need to schedule time and just sit down and do it at this point. Is "Stitch it and the mojo will come" a saying?

  My Autumn Love cross stitch is coming along nicely! This is a relaxing one to do-- it's less like confetti and more regimented, I guess I'd call it. I let my mind wander and didn't stay glued to a chart, which was probably a mistake since I stitched the top gray border upside down, and I'm pretty sure my vase is the wrong blue. I'm leaving all of it-- mistakes are something I need to embrace at this point in life! I was also feeling bad about not stitching the whole piece-- I'm just making the bottom strip for now-- so I'm kind of glad it happened, because I feel more committed now to just making it mine!

     

    Here is my little needle minder I treated myself to-- I never had one before and I just love it! It's a super strong magnet that let me attach it to my project bag. My scissors need minding more than my needle, and I haven't lost them once now.

     

      Usually I would lose them on the couch, and Mr. SFO would end up sitting on them. So I showed him my new needle minder and how strong it is... he seemed less excited than he should have been! I think a little needle minder collection may be in my future, when I see ones I really like-- Fat Quarter Shop, who I'm stitching along with, has quite a few.

     At night, I have resumed A Ribbon Runs Through It-- I'm on the second set of sashings. I have never done sashing to this degree of piecing before-- usually my sashings were just one piece! These have twenty pieces each and I think there are 64 of them! It's been a battle to work through the steps to make them, and it does feel like I'm forcing myself to do it. As a matter of fact, it kind of feels that way with everything I am doing these days! Haha!

     I am usually filled with joie de vivre, so again, this spring and summer have just been a lot for my little heart, and I will just patiently await the return of joy. :-)

    On the business side, I am also just going to force myself to sit down and restart. I picked an easy task-- one that I've been wanting to do for a long time, and that is take the My Christmas Album designs and convert them to redwork. I'm doing this because I want them bigger, and faster to stitch, and also because I love them so much!

Two are done.

I found this fabulous free pattern from Moda for a Christmas quilt-- it was designed by Susan Ache, who has written and contributed to quilt a few books. I always love her work. She designed her own embroidery designs for this quilt, so, of course, it's tailor made for the job! Look, there's a space for all twelve!

Finishing up the Birthday Mug Rug series is also at the top of my mind, and a good project to work on right now. November is almost ready to be stitched-- that will be my first stitch out in Sugar Meadow-- that's what I'm calling my new home!

Here's our driveway-- yes, we are in the boonies!  In the future, I'll be sharing with you the wonderful people I have already discovered-- Donna, the mailperson, Dee from UPS, and Eldon, a Korean War vet who sells honey and maple syrup just down the road. Everyone is just so nice here. Thanks for sharing this new chapter with me!

xoxo

Carol