The studio is the original 1930’s garage for the house, so is just an oil stained concrete floor beneath the carpet. One option would be to just clean and paint the floor and call it good. Easy maintenance, but a big bummer on the legs and back when standing to cut or dye fabric.

This is what happens when a dye bucket springs a leak

Option 2 is to get some kind of laminate. Options are more limited in this front, since I don’t want to install a sub-floor. This also is a problem because of the unexplained water that comes in near the sliding door when we get a blowing rain from the south. Not an unusual occurrence in the winter. We have made some strides in reducing the flow, but still haven’t gotten it stopped. We removed the carpet several years ago and installed some 2×2 plastic backed sub floor tiles that I remove when it rains hard and replace with Sham Wow towels. This works, but means that any new flooring option needs to be waterproof or removable until we get the water issue solved

Option 3 is to install those 2×2 sub floor tiles in the whole room. They are tongue and groove so they would be easy to install, but they are very pricey. They are raised plastic backed so water can flow under them.

The final option has turned out to be a winner. Very inexpensive, easy to install, easy to clean and easy to remove if large amounts of water spill or come in. What is this mystery material you ask? That would be anti fatigue mats that go together like puzzle pieces. They are easy to cut with a utility knife or scissors, they are gray, so they won’t show stains as easily, and I can buy an 8 pack at Costco for about $10. What a steal.

I decided to tackle the room one half at a time starting with the sewing half. I moved the bookcase and all of the storage bins to the crafting side of the room. I moved the tables and chairs outside. Gotta love that I can count on no rain this time of year.

Sewing supplies condensed into on corner of the room

It was a fairly quick process to do this half of the room. Most of the items are in large bins that can be moved without emptying. That was a huge time saver.

Moving the paper crafting side was a lot more work. Shelves of paper and stamps are very heavy and required emptying before they could be moved. There are lots of small items on this side of the room. But in the end, everything made it to the sewing side of the room so I could get the carpet out and the new floor down.

Paper Crafting supplies piled on the sewing side of the studio

As each side was emptied, the carpet and padding was pulled up, tack strips removed, and concrete patched. Once the carpet was up, it was time to get rid of it. Freecycle to the rescue. A single post to the list, provided 4 takers in less than 12 hours. Then the new floor was put in place. It went down in no time. Super easy to cut to size and fit together.

Interlocking floor tiles

Now that it is done, I am very happy with the results and how it is working.

]]> http://www.juliebdesigns.com/blog/2010/08/18/a-new-day-a-new-floor/feed/ 1 http://www.juliebdesigns.com/blog/2010/05/12/value/ http://www.juliebdesigns.com/blog/2010/05/12/value/#comments Thu, 13 May 2010 04:42:12 +0000 julie http://www.juliebdesigns.com/blog/?p=284 Late last year I noticed a new book on skinny quilts. I was immediately drawn to the quilt, but in looking at it, I determined it was something that I could do. Showing up at my weekly Friday sewing group 3 of the other 4 members saw the same book and were also drawn to the quilt. Fast forward to January when the designer of the quilt visits our quilt guild and has a workshop to create the quilt from the book.

I didn’t really feel I needed the class, but I knew that if I signed up, I would actually get the quilt made. That turned out to be true.

This quilt required lots of different pieces of fabric. I used 4 colors and I dyed 4 shades of each color and 6 values (light to dark)  of each color so that made 24 pieces of fabric for each of my 4 colors for a grand total of 96 pieces. Thankfully I only needed a small amount of each fabric. I ended up using fat 16th’s (9×10 inches). That said, the quilt probably only uses only 40 of those pieces of fabric.

This project also got me to dry dyeing yarn. I’ve always wanted to try it, but have never gotten around to it. It was a lot of fun and it turned out much better than I could have hoped for in a first try.

Now that it is temporarily hung in the bedroom I think it needs to be a triptych. I don’t like the light just at one end. I think I will make a second one and cut it in half and hang one above and one below with the light on the opposite end. That way I visually get light at both ends. Hopefully it won’t take me another 3 months to make that happen and see if it matches the vision in my head.

I designed a quick layout of squares and rectangles. Two squares and one rectangle make up the quilt blocks. I played around with sizes and decided to make quick work of the project, bigger was better. A good size turned out to be based on 16 inch blocks.

To ensure that it was nice and cozy, I used flannel for both the front and the back. The colors didn’t come out exactly the way I wanted, but it worked for the purpose.

I have been working to complete some of the projects to give to the grand kids. My goal is to try to divide up what I have so that each family gets a lap size quilt. Since I only need 7, I think I will have enough pieces to work with. All but one of them are scrappy quilts. The projects that she was last working on were simple one patch designs using 5 inch squares of scrap fabric. I have one completed and she has enough squares cut and started for at least 1 or 2 more.

Another box contained scrappy 9 patch squares. She saved her small scraps and using a piece of cardboard and a pen, traced squares on her scraps and cut them out with scissors. Many she already had sewn together, but there are several fabrics left in the box to make squares out of. I think if I put some borders around the squares I can get 3 or 4 quilts out of these squares.

So the question is, do I border the squares in Light Tan or Black? Click on the pictures to see the full view.

Light Border Option

Dark Border Option

Dye Cups

My hand dyed fabrics work great for gradations of value, so I was excited to get started. We needed 4 values; light, med light, med dark and dark. We needed 10-12 pieces of fabric for each value. I wanted to have 4 colors, so that worked out to a minimum of 3 different hues of each color. I decided to do 4 just to have some extra to choose from. I also decided to do 6 values of each color. Just in case I didn’t like the lights and trying to get as dark as I could.  So off to work I went. The first step was to cut up 96 pieces of fabric. We didn’t need much fabric so I died Fat 16ths of fabric. For the non-quilters a fat 16th is a piece of fabric approximately 11×9 inches. Then it was on to the dyes. Mixing fun colors and putting everything in tiny cups. I know it looks like they are all black, but really they are each a different color.

Rinsing Fabric

Purple floors

Everything was going well until the rinsing began. I did my usual quick rinse in the sink and then ran buckets of hot water to let the fabric soak. While it was soaking I called mom to chat and began cleaning up a bit. At one point I noticed one of the buckets didn’t have enough water in it. I figured I was distracted and just didn’t fill it up, so I added about 2 gallons of water to the bucket. Time passes, the room is looking better, but ….. The purple fabric bucket doesn’t have any water in it. Now this time I know I had water in there. Sure enough, one of my favorite buckets cracked and let all the water out of the bucket and on to the floor. It leaves a lovely purple circle on the carpet and takes 3 days of fans and heaters to dry out…. Not so much fun.

Just in case there are some doubters, I took the following pictures on January 14.

Today I packed up everything that was laying about the house and carried it out to the studio. When all was said and done, this is what I was left with.

I started the cleanup today and made some real progress. I hope to have it finished by Thursday. I need to begin dyeing some fabric for a class I am taking at the end of the month. Unfortunately I can’t dye with the studio this messed up. I would end up with dye all over everything.

The really funny thing is that this happens almost every year. This year Bill asked me on Sunday evening if I would like his help straightening. As much as I would have loved the help. I don’t know if I could have even begun to tell him how he could help.

I have been busy the last couple of months on some surprise Christmas gifts. They seem to be taking me a lot longer to finish than I had thought that they would.

Unfortunately that means that I haven’t been working on other projects like Christmas cards and a baby shower gift.

I am hopeful for a very productive next couple of days…. We will see.

I decided to follow the zig zag patter of the braid across the quilt. I started with the middle row and quilted from one side of the quilt to the other. I then worked my way to the top and bottom of the quilt by quilting every 4th row. By only quilting every forth row I got the layers sabilized more quickly and it enabled me to give up sooner, if I ran into a lot of problems. I can’t say that I was super speedy, but it really wasn’t difficult. I was able to use my walking foot, since it was straight lines, so it wasn’t stressful at all. I ended up quilting every other row. At the top and bottom border I just continued the same quilting pattern.

I’m happy to say it is complete and it looks great in the guest bedroom.

I sketched out my design and starting cutting fabric. I decided to put the heart on with a fringed edge so that I didn’t have to worry about fraying flannel applique. I’m not sure that I loved how that came out, but it worked for this project.

Update: Grandma is out of the hospital and doing well. Our hug from California was a huge success. If you know someone who is going into the hospital I highly recommend something like this to let them know you are thinking of them, even when you can not be there.