DH and I volunteered at the Sawdust Shop in December to make wooden toys for homeless children. It was so much fun we asked for the patterns so we could make more at home. Nephew Calvin’s Christmas present will arrive a bit late, but hopefully it’s so much fun he won’t mind the tardiness.Here’s a few pictures of us working in our little “workshop”. The “car carrier” is made out of a single chunk of “2 by 4″. We ended up using absolutely every wood working tool in our new shop! And obviously Julie’s excellent painting skills really moved from this “toy” into “work of art”.

Pretty neat, huh?

In 2004 I appeared on a Carol Duvall Christmas special and presented my package pillows. These are pillows that I created in the shape of packages that I put under my Christmas tree each year. I usually make them out of scraps of fabric that I have lying around. Basic instructions for the pillows can be found on my website. After the show appeared, I had every intension of making pillows for my family, but always seemed to run out of time. Last year, I was able to put together several pillows for my mom and sister, but then ran out of scraps. So, the day after Christmas my dh and I braved the crowds to hit JoAnn’s for their after Christmas fabric sales. We picked out 5 fabrics to use for pillows for his parents and sisters. I spent the next several days cutting and sewing pillows. I even when so far as to stuff a bunch, but unfortunately, that is were the progress ended.

December 2007 rolls around and I say, let me just pull out those pillows and pop them in boxes for gifts this year…. Oops, I forgot, I didn’t actually finish them. Now we are on a mad dash. I know if I don’t get them done this year, they will just get pushed into a corner and not be seen again for another year.

With a little bit of late night sewing and packaging help from dh, all the boxes when out in time for Christmas delivery, or at least close.

A friend a mine in southern California put out a call for quilts. Her house was spared in last months fires, but many of her neighbors homes were not. I took the leftovers from Mom’s quilt and made another lap size quilt. When I was done, I still had 12 blocks left over. I decided to make a baby size quilt with those. I found enough blue fabric lying around, that coordinated with the other fabrics, to make a border. I had two quilt tops in the closet that I had never completed. One was left over from a class and the other was a mystery quilt. I scrounged through the closet for coordinating fabric for these 3 small pieces. I didn’t have enough of any one fabric, but with some simple piecing I was able to make backs for all 3 of the smaller quilts from my stash. I did some simple quilting and was able to get these done in the last week. I still need to quilt the largest one, but I am happy with this weeks progress.

My mom came to visit this week. She is a new quilter. This summer when I visited her, I helped her pick out fabrics for 2 quilts. We picked out a simple pattern  for her to be able to complete them on her own.

She decided that she would rather work on them together. So she filled a suitcase with all the fabric and hopped on a plane.

The pattern called for fat quarters, but the store we were purchasing fabric from for the first quilt didn’t have fat quarters of what she wanted so we calculated yardage. I must have been tired because I calculated five eighths of a yard of each fabric and we really only need three eighths.

That means that we had enough of the block fabrics to make 2 quilts. I am making charity quilts for the fire victims, so she donated the fabric to me to make one for the cause.

We got the first quilt top completed while she was here. The second quilt top just needs to have the squares sewn together and the border put on.

I will have to have her take a couple of pictures of them because we ran out of time and I didn’t get any photos.

Today I completed my first commission. It was for 2 flannel rag edge quilts using my hand-dyed flannel and photos of the cheerleaders. I am very please with how the quilts turned out. I hope the recipients are as happy with them as I am. I pushed to get them done so that dh could hand deliver them. I hated to put them in the hands of UPS.

Last week I had decided to start paring down my class supplies. I haven’t taught classes in a couple of years and I am not using my duplicates. This created some free space to help organize what is left.

Back in March I started a spring cleaning project on the Studio. I am happy to say that for now, it is in acceptable shape. My friend Linda came over today to go shopping in my excess supplies. I am not sure if it was pity or insanity, but she started putting things away. We spent several hours this afternoon working on the wet side of the room and it is looking good. I have a couple of shelves to hang and the closet to pick up. But it is in a usable state.

This week was a fabric dyeing week. I looked over the samples that I made last week and decided which of the samples I likes best for my current quilt project. I dyed 6 yellows and 6 greens. I thought I would like shades of a single color, but I determined that using several shades of two different colors of dye gave me a better color match to the samples that the client provided. I now have about 20 yards of fabric ready to cut up and assemble into the two quilts.

Below is a picture of the greens lined up during the batching process. The little buckets of dye and fabric are quietly doing their job to finally end up with a stack of fun fabric shades.

I needed another woodworking project so I signed up for a router table class at the Sawdust Shop. Actually I had Bill give me the class for my birthday.

I am now 95% done. After the landscaping is finalized for our November company I can work on finishing the table and attaching it to a base unit. Of course, first I have to build a base unit.

My new Accucut came in. I haven’t gotten my custom die, but I did get some others. I played around with a new quilt design that I have had in my head that just happened to use the same size units as the ones that came with my starter kit. I am hoping that I will be able to get it sewn up soon to see how it looks completed.

Timing is everything. Turns out that Accucut is having a sale on their die cut machines and you can use them to cut fabric. I called around to the local quilt stores to see if anyone had one. What luck. One local store had one. I cut some strips of flannel and headed over to test out the rag edge die. It worked wonderfully. I took the squares home and sewed them together. I thought the fringe would make it difficult to sew, but that was not the case. The only problem was when I washed the quilt I didn’t like how the finished quilt looked. When I make my rag edge quilts I use a half inch seam. The Accucut die uses an inch seam. The good news is that Accucut has a program to create custom dies. I was able to order the GrandMark machine and a custom die to give me exactly what my customer wanted. It should arrive just in time to create the quilt.