WIPs - Sooooo Close to Two Finishes in My Sewing Areas, and Baby Start-up

Making bits and pieces of progress around my conference presentation prep - enough for me to smile about, even though it takes all week to do what many of you can whip out in a half day.  :D

I got this super cool pin cushion from Elizabeth's giveaway at Pieceful Life. 

My husband is happy, I'm sure, that pins are no longer getting plopped onto the side table to occasionally fall on the carpet (and sofa. . . )!  In Florida, my hand-stitching was done on an old cloth sofa that I shamelessly used the arm for poking pins into. These sofas are also quite old and worn (came with the house - we upsized and have no funds for a while to replace them), but they're leather, so I had to act normal with the pins.  ;D

And that's where I sit each evening, stitching, as we watch our dinner-time TV show. Love that lamp. My great-uncle Rudy made that himself, and it looks great in this Colorado home with wood trim.

This station right now is processing my Amaretto Cottage! (Isn't Margaret's quilting LUSCIOUS??) Hmm, and I guess nobody could get this monster handstitched in just a half day and do a proper job. So I feel a bit better. 

My Hawaiian Etude is also SOOO CLOSE! It gets secondary priority at this station - being bumped every time there's a binding/label/hanging sleeve to work on. But the king quilt is just a little large for taking to appointments and wait-times when picking up Marissa at school, so the Hawaiian piece is still making progress. This is the first time I've attached a binding 100% by hand, and I'm almost finished putting it on the front.

My other stations in the "basement" got a good workout this past week to get Amaretto Cottage to the hand-stitching station.

The house is on a slope, so really there's only one small room around on the back side that's a true basement area. I love this sewing nook!!  I fight SADD, so that window bank is awesome when I'm sitting at my FMQ machine in the white desk (it's a Viking Sapphire). You see 1/3 of the window bank.

Having both desks there is extremely helpful when I'm quilting - especially if the back is corduroy or minky. The golden one is an old computer desk that had a hutch. Well, we haven't had a non-laptop for years, and the hutch was just overbearing. So when we moved here and I verified that the desk matched my sewing table's height, I placed them together. I'd intended to buy a white folding table to put behind my sewing table, but Scott came to the rescue by cutting down the supports of the hutch to make it match up. Perfect!

This side is my piecing station, which actually had nothing at all at it last week (a rare occurance, but I really wanted Amaretto Cottage to get full attention).

While we're here - a view of the rest of my sewing area. The ironing board is purposefully several steps from the machines. Sitting for long periods is really bad for anybody, and especially bad for us folks with Lupus and poor circulation. So I make myself have to get up and walk a bit each time pressing is needed. That door next to the iron? The storage room! And it's all mine! It's got fabulous shelves built in aisles, and not much of it is non-fabric related. Heavenly. 

Behind me is the pool table and some more of the basement. Yeah - We're not finished unpacking. I'd wanted to keep all boxes and mess in the garage, but Florida Girl soon found that the space is critical for vehicle storage in Colorado winters! One day this will all look pretty.

Back to sewing concerns. For Amaretto Cottage's 112" squareness, I had to dismantle my piecing station.

See why?! And that's all bunched up and tripled-over on itself!

There's no way I could have worked with all that getting piled behind the machine without the added space of the hutch extension. 

 

Meet Lionel Stitchy.  Love this guy. He's a little squished there, but the college girls gave him to me for my birthday, specifically to keep me company while I sewed. (Thus his name. Am I dating myself?  heh!)

So - now that Amaretto Cottage is upstairs for handwork, my machines are both back where they belong, and I'm getting ready for the next FMQ. Practicing a motif Wendy Sheppard shared at Ivory Spring. That's plexiglass with duct tape around it. Perfect for dry-erase practice and quilt design fussing. You just have to make sure not to get that ink on the quilts. Thus the tape. And when I applied the tape, I made sure the front is wider than the back so that I always put the same side against the fabric. Just to doubly ensure that no faint smudges get on the quilts.

The piecing station will soon get some attention after its break. These 10" squares are my first foray with the the 8-in-1 method for HSTs. Need a baby quilt for my youngest sister's first-born, due next month. Going to make the barn raising layout and practice some FMQ in the white diamond bands.

Found this fun "Owl and the Pussycat" fabric in my stash, along with some other blues to play with it. And man, that bolt of Kona Snow I got 18 months ago is still saving me with this stash-only restriction! I've got a nice hardcover copy of the book on order - it even matches the coloring/theme of this fabric - very cool! I hope to also make a book tote featuring this fabric to go with the quilt and book.

Thanks for letting me sneak in some journaling. I really love this new home. 

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Linking up at

Kate's "Share Your Space"

Lee's WIP

Applique Thursday

Esther's WOW