The Mod Squad, starring me and Bruce the Avenger

The quilt is progressing nicely. It is so very relaxing to piece. And I have to say, all of the advice and instructions included in the Mod Sampler quilt-along totally rock. I feel like my rotary cutting and my piecing skills increased just by reading them, let alone following them!

The fabrics I am using (Just for you BeeBee!). The colors are prettier in real life, relaxing blues and greens and aquas.


Work in progress. I love the organizing cards that Oh Fransson recommended in the quiltalong...all those little pieces would be really hard to sort out otherwise. I am about three quarters done with the blocks. I plan to pick out the sashing on Thursday and maybe finish the top this weekend.


My new best friend.

Makes it soooo much easier to square up finished blocks when I just have to center this little fellow on it and cut around rather than measuring from the center out on each side.

The fancy machine is in the shop, so I have been doing this on the industrial, Bruce.....and what a pleasure it is! I am still a little askaird of him, but putting together this quilt has meant some quality time spent with Bruce the Avenger (I am not sure what he is avenging.....poor stitch quality perhaps?), and I am slowly getting used to him. And he makes such pretty pretty stitches and is so smmooooooooth. I think I love him.

When I get the fancy machine back, I will do the scary part of this project...free motion quilting. ACK!

Parting shot: Seriously Fred, how does that even begin to be comfortable? He slept this way for several hours.

A Little Tour

Now that I have two new machines, I am in a bit of a chaos situation in the sewing room shifting things around and making room.

I thought I would publicly embarrass myself with some "before" pictures in order to inspire me to clean up and post gorgeous "after" pictures. :-)

To begin the tour of my space, here is the always closed door. Very often there are little kitty arms under the door. Behind the curtain is the closet (doors removed) full of shelves with my stash. That one mirror is actually a three fold-out mirror that I LOVE as The Husband is not very helpful at looking at the backs of my projects and finding mistakes. There in the corner is my masking tape me sitting on a stool.



Moving clockwise, here is my adjustable dress form and another ginormous mirror that I got for free at the dump. :-) Some vintage dresses that I am altering for a fellow swing dancer are hanging there begging me to finally do them. In the bottom of the mirror, you can see two large containers of knits, all from Gorgeous Fabrics all rolled and waiting for me to make room in the closet for them. I am trying to reorg my stash by rolling it and taking swatches and creating index cards, but it is a slooooooow process.



Around the room, we see the corner with my computer, an inspiration board, and bookshelves full of tailoring/fashion books and my old art history textbooks for research and inspiration. Those plastic drawers you can see a bit under the table hold all my patterns. I have two three drawer sets and they are filled to capacity. Yeah, maybe I need to do some weeding there...... On the wire shelves there are boxes of projects in progress and bits and pieces of supplies. Somewhere on that table is probably where the coverstitch machine is going to live, but I need to make room for him first!



The back wall with a huge window that I keep open in nice weather as it has a very nice view of my garden. Right under the window is a bench with shelves where I store threads and some other supplies (you can see some threads there on the left) Three machines visible in this shot: in the foreground is Sven, my Viking Designer SE; midground is The Beast, which is the Juki industrial's temporary name; and on the right is Heidi, my Huskylock Serger.



The shelves in this shot are all fabrics that I pulled from the stash, matched up with a pattern, but never got around to actually doing anything about it. I need to go through these and reintegrate most of them into the stash. There are some plastic tubs with zippers and elastics and such. And of course a TV to watch House and girly costuming movies.



And finally, the cutting/ironing table. On the table is the newest addition to the sewing family, the coverstitch machine, waiting for me to find him a home. Above are shelves with silly stuff (Yay Tim Gunn! Yay Chococat!) and a bunch of stabilizers for embroidery. Under the table are bolts with linings and all weights of interfacing. And of course, the closet full of stash on the right, which I will not show in its before state, because I do have SOME pride. :-)



And that ends our tour for the day! Hope you enjoyed it and I hope it lights a fire under my bum to make me organize it!

I did it.

The coverstitch is on its way to me now.

But I didn't buy it for ME. No no no!

When Laura commented that it was my responsibily to buy one to rescue the economy, I humbly agreed to do my part.

Thank you Laura for the excuse...er...I mean for reminding me of the opportunity to create work for the UPS man and the folks at the sewing shop and who knows how many others I may have helped with my selfless purchase!

;-D

Meanwhile, the industrial is all hooked up and scaring me. I stitched on it a little but it is making a noise that I am not sure is normal or not. Kinda a computer-y beepy noise when I start sewing. So I stopped using it until I can investigate further.

A New Baby!

Not the human kind! The sewing kind!

Yesterday I (and The Husband) went to pick up the newest addition to the sewing room, an industrial sewing machine! It is a used Juki DDL 5500 with automatic back-tacking and thread snippers.

I bought it from Robin and I couldn't be more excited. Robin and her husband are just the nicest folks you could ever hope to meet. They both took so much time to figure out how to get the durned thing in the van and showing us all the bits and pieces of the machine, even taking pictures of things before disassembling for transport and emailing them to me. I swear if there had been any room left in the minivan I borrowed from my friend, I totally would have packed them up and taken them home too! :-)

One snafu in the whole deal. Here is the machine in its current state...or perhaps I should say states.

Machine, on the floor in the sewing room


Table, resting in the entryway downstairs (with Fred inspecting it)


Yeah, we got the table this far and my back gave out. Obviously I need more time at those core muscle classes at the gym! And you see those stairs behind the table...it needs to go UP those. So for now the table sits in our entryway, and the machine is safe from kitty paws in my sewing room, until our friend can come over tomorrow and help The Husband with it up the stairs.

I can't wait!!!!!