Finally free motion quilting

I finally took a trip to Ball Mart and bought the cahones I needed to start quilting the cheery squares quilt. I had a couple shaky starts, so I developed a system to quilt beautifully.

1. Find wax paper

2. Pin a piece of wax paper to the quilt

3. Draw pattern onto wax paper

4. Quilt on top of drawing

5. Peel off paper

6. ???

7. Profit!

I feel so sneaky and so happy because it's WORKING!! I'm free motion quilting!!

Finished it Up Friday

What I love about the quilting community is the creativity that everyone has. I love scrolling through photos on Fridays and seeing all of the beautiful things that everyone has made during the week. It gives me inspiration and makes me proud of everyone, because we all know that the craft we chose is not the easiest.

I am very proud to announce that I have a finish this Friday. It's not a quilty finish, but it is the end product of months of hard work, late nights, and physical labor. And now that it is finished, I can finally get back to quilting!

This year in school, I was part of the design/buildLAB. We worked together as a group of 17 to design and build a pedestrian bridge in Clifton Forge, VA. We conducted interviews with townspeople to assess the needs, we spent very late nights making the construction documents, and we fabricated every piece of this bridge ourselves- cutting and welding steel, electrical wiring, and planing and routing the wood. There is a little piece of all 17 of us in this bridge, in the design, and in the hard work that went into it.

My big contribution was the stairs. Another boy and I worked together to design them :)

It's a little early right now, so my brain isn't working very well, but if you have any questions about my project, feel free to ask!

The supports for the bridge, and the cladding under the bridge

Our happy family!

Now I can FINALLY catch up on my Sister's Ten BOM blocks! I'm way behind, I only got one of May's done and I haven't touched June... sad face.

A Hiatus

To all five of you who read my blog, I apologize for my lack of a quilty life as of late. Because of the semester ending, the bridge project NOT ending, and general end of the school year business, I have no time to
A. quilt or
B. blog about quilting.

It's a sad, sad life. I did knock out ONE of the blocks for the Gen X BOM, but haven't had time to finish the other. I even took photos with my faux chenille blanket, but Flash hasn't given them to me, so I don't have those to post either.

I honestly don't anticipate being able to quilt much until the bridge project is finished. It's progressing nicely now, after a lot of hold ups because our steel wasn't delivered on time, but it is still taking a long time to get everything put together.

I do have the Cheery Squares baby quilt to finish, and a BOM block to finish, and I had an idea for a new quilt, so hopefully I can get the ball rolling on those soon. But I'm doing construction from 9-5 now, plus I'm going on vacation to Disney World on May 20-24 (I KNOW RIGHT, IT'S GONNA BE AWESOME), so my blog will not see much action probably until June.

For those of you that I am disappointing, I am very very sorry. For those of you who don't really care, well, fine, whatever. And for those of you who will miss me, here is a photo of me dressed in welding gear.

Welding is a sexy business.

QUILT ON, MY SISTERS. 

Finish it up Friday, FINALLY.

It's been forever since my last post, life just got in the way. The bridge project continues to be set back- we had a huge fiasco this week where, apparently, our drawings were uglier than a pile of poop and therefore unusable, so I pulled a VERY late night on Wednesday to get them reorganized. Oh yeah, and I picked Flash up from the airport on Tuesday.

HE'S HOME HE'S HOME HE'S FINALLY HOME SWEET JESUS I'M VERY HAPPY.

We went to the park on Wednesday to watch the sun set together.

Also, his mustache did not come home with him, which was a surprise.

These past couple of weeks, while school has been a freaking nightmare, I worked on a faux chenille blanket. There are a TON of tutorials online, but Moda recently featured one on their bakeshop website.

Back in November, I bought two yards of a great flannel print- it has mooses and bears and other wonderful woodland things on it. I knew I wanted to make a sweet blanket with it, but didn't really know where to start. But I realized two weeks ago that I wanted to make this faux chenille, so I bought more flannel and got sewing.

It took like a week to sew all the lines on it, but that's because I didn't have much patience.

BUT HERE IT IS ITS FINISHED.

I'm quite chuffed with how it turned out.

Nice and fuzzy :)

Ripples!

In the process of washing and drying, though, the blanket warped a bit. You can tell it's longer at some corners. But honestly, it's going to keep me warm just as well as if it weren't warped, so I'm ok with it.

Essentially, you sew 4 or 5 layers of fabric together with straight lines. It has to be on the diagonal, or it won't fray. Once the entire sandwich is quilted, you cut the top 3 or 4 layers between the lines. Then, you wash it and dry it, and it magically gets soft and beautiful! I completely filled up my lint trap doing this, which made me laugh.

But it's exactly what I needed: something quick, easy, mindless, and calming, in order to make it through the last two weeks of a long distance relationship and a crazy time in school.

Linking up to Finish it Up Friday!

PANIC

I woke up this morning and said to myself, "Couch, you are going to quilt that baby quilt today. TODAY IS THE DAY." I ate a big breakfast, pumped myself up, and sat down at my machine to practice the pattern I was going to use.

I was thinking of quilting small daisies, to go along with the floral theme of the quilt. But once I sat down and tried free motion quilting for the first time, fear grew in my heart and everything I did looked awful. Then I saw Cluck Cluck Sew's quilting flowers post, and she made it look much simpler and less scary. So I practiced today on a piece of scrap fabric with a minky back, and it turned out fine.

getting better!

Why minky, you ask? I'm using minky on the back of the cheery squares quilt. So I need to make sure that I can quilt with it, you know? My practice went fine, but I noticed that there was some fuzz peeking out from the stitching. I dismissed it, and prepared the quilt to be loaded onto the table.

Lookin' good, quilt!

AND THEN EVERYTHING WENT HORRIBLY WRONG.

I don't know why! But whenever I sewed, the backing fabric got pulled up to the front of the fabric. Hot pink fuzz all over the cream colored border. I changed the tension setting on my machine, I got a thinner needle, I tried using my walking foot instead of the free motion foot. BUT NOTHING HELPED.

SO MUCH FUZZ.

I don't know what I'm going to do. I'm at least going to ask the friend who this is going to whether she likes it or not. If she does, then I'll just have to be extra careful with my stitching (because now, every move I make is painfully obvious). If she doesn't, well, then I need some major help.

This didn't happen with the other minky quilts I've done. But then again, I wasn't trying to sew white cotton to hot pink minky. GAAHH

Finish It Up Saturday

Today was a wonderful awesome day, which is exactly what I needed after a crazy week of school. We had LOTS of drawings to do, and there was a possibility that our bridge would get axed, but all of that has been fixed and we should be good to start construction soon!

My friend and I went to the New River Brewfest this morning. I won tickets on the radio to the event, which was AWESOME. And it was really fun! The weather was nice, the beer was delicious, and I got a free glass out of it. 

Then, once I got home, a friend contacted me about some fabric at a yard sale. Bags of fabric for $2. Guess who is now five bags of fabric richer? THIS KID.

yaaaaaaaay!

I found some beautiful squares that I will need to make something out of.

And this adorable rooster print!

Also, today, I finally got the courage to clear away the coffee table and start laying out the t-shirt squares I had cut for my uncle's t-shirt quilt. It turned out to be a really big quilt, but I started and finished it in about 5 hours!

squares laid out.

And sewn together!

I knew I didn't have the space in my sewing cave to spread this quilt out, so I took over the living room and made a tiny sewing table out of the coffee table. I used my friendly apartment bear as a chair and busted out my tiny ironing board to put on the floor next to me. Goodness knows this is NOT how my grandmother taught me to sew, but I am young and driven and I really wanted to watch Bones while sewing, so I found a way.

Now I have THREE quilts to quilt! YAY. Plus the other baby quilt not pictured, so that makes 4...

This is Normal

This is my life when I'm not sewing. Drawing building sections and detail sections and learning about windows and doors and roofs.... 

The machine gets pushed to the back of the desk and the notebooks come out. 

Thankfully, I can draw straight lines pretty well and I've got a good handle on construction details. Hopefully these drawings can help me get a job someday.