Thursday, December 24, 2009

White Christmas Eve in Oklahoma

I finished my sewing...gifts for Josh, Mimi, Katy, Gabe, JoeE, RoseE, Johnny, Ginger and Jim and Gail. We were going to go buy a few things today when Denny got off work, but it had started snowing, so he went to do it himself and called me for consultation on gifts. But he wasn't able to get to Wal-mart for the groceries I wanted. And he isn't able to get home! He's staying with friends tonight. Masses have been canceled for tonight and we are hoping we can get in for Mass in the morning. Fortunately the Astro has 4 wheel drive....




Note the depth of the snow by the minivan...that's a lot for Oklahoma! And we have plenty of firewood to keep us warm.

Wednesday, December 9, 2009

"Reversible binding"

I was asked how I did the biding on JoeE's quilt and since I had some of the binding left over I took a few pictures to help explain.

First I joined a 1 3/8" strip of the turquoise to a 2 5/8" strip of the navy along the long edge and pressed the seam open, resulting in this 3 1/2" wide 2 fabric strip.
Next I pressed that in half to form a folded binding one side showing only the navy, the other both fabrics.The folded strip was then attached to the back of the quilt using a 1/2 inch seam. In the picture the orange fabric represents the quilt. Pins represent the stitching line at 1/2".
Binding is then folded away from the quilt

and then wrapped around to the front and stitched down as desired.

JoeE's quilt is done!


I decided to make Christmas presents rather than use credit and asked the kids for gift ideas. JoeE requested a warmer quilt. Since his present would take the longest to make I did it first. First I checked my stash of blocks, but found nothing that was appropriate for him, so I started from scratch. I decided to do quilt as you go string blocks and use up some of my smaller pieces of batting and the strips and strings of which I have bins full. For the backings I grabbed things out of the bin waiting to be cut into the scrap users system...the only yardage I cut into was for the joining strips/sashings and bindings. I did the binding in 2 fabrics so it shows one on the front of the quilt and the other on the back, and I am really pleased with how it turned out. This gift will not be a surprise...he has seen it during construction and helped hold it up for the picture taking. I guess that is a disadvantage to homeschooling...the kids are almost always home and it's hard to make surprise gifts! No one else asked for a quilt, so the rest of the gifts should be faster to make. I hope they all turn out as well as this did. Amazingly, I am really not feeling stressed about getting gifts done....maybe I'm delusional?