sea of blue - complete!

It's finished! I can't believe I did it. And on time! And I got my house clean too! Woooohoooo!

I last left you with a half finished design on the wall and piles everywhere. So here's how it all went down.

After I wrote that post, I had some lunch and raced off to the dealership to get the car serviced. After waiting TWO AND A HALF HOURS for something that was supposed to take one and a half hours to be completed, I was out of there. I ran home, and Mike (our new, wonderful roommate) and I cleaned the house and welcomed out guest for the night. I did a little bit more trimming of squares and then ran out again to go pick up my husband. (Oh the joys of sharing a car.)

I went to bed at 10 that night because I was exhausted, and woke up at 7am the next morning to keep working. (Obviously I was bent on keeping my proposed deadline because not much can get me out of bed for 9am.) Luckily, I had managed to finish my trimming and put up a preliminary design before bed the night before.

I made some slight adjustments to the design and then I got cracking on the sewing. I worked like crazy from 8am to 4:30 pm with a break only for lunch. In all that time I managed to piece the top and back, quilt and attach the binding. I took the quilt with me to work to bind (and to show it to my boss who is the one who ordered the commission) and got a little bit done.

This morning I realized I had missed one line of quilting so I unattached the binding in 2 spots, quilted, and reattched the binding with a little tag and finished hand finishing the binding. The it was off to the washer, dryer and the yard to be photographed!

So, without further ado, I give you "Sea of Blue".



I am in love! I know I keep saying I love quilts (even if I hate them in the beginning) but this one I have loved from start to finish. I wasn't feeling super inspired to begin with, but after I started pulling all the delicious blue fabrics from my stash I started drooling. The colours are so rich and this is a palette I haven't worked with yet.



The back was an adventure for me. I have been sticking to solid backs mostly, but I decided to try something a little different. I had some half square triangles left over and some bigger chunks of some other fabrics, so why not?



Over the fence, as usual. Finished size is 50"x50", bound mostly in some of the deep teal with a couple little bits added in.



And there it is, all folded and ready to go. I added a little tag to it, with my info on the front and washing instructions on the back.

***

Now, onto the next challenge. I am going to try and make a set of wedding garters for a friend. Her wedding is next weekend, but the lingerie shower is tomorrow. (Sexy lingerie already purchased!) And I want to include the garters she asked me to make in the bag. Here goes nothing!

in progress (or, how I neglect everything else in life when a quilt needs to get done)

I've started a new project. Unfortunately, I didn't leave myself much of a bumper with this one, so I will lucky to be able to get it done on time let alone snuggle it and stare at it for 2 days before it's delivered. What is this project, you may ask?

It started as this:



A pile of 120 6" sqaures cut from 14 different blue fabrics.

Then it turned into this:



A pile of 120 pairs of half square triangles waiting to be trimmed down to 5.5" (my least favourite part of HSTs.)

Now it is this:



Slowly going up on my impromptu design wall. (Two pieces of left over batting tacked to the only remaining wall space in my basement.

Of course when I have a turn around time as short as this one (4 days) not much else gets done around here. Which is a real shame because our house has resembled the streets of Calcutta for about 2 weeks now. And we have a visitor coming tonight. And I have other things to do like work and take the car in for service. And eat and sleep.

So, this is what I'm neglecting:



Both folded and unfolded laundry including the nice clothes my husband needs for his internship.



An over flowing pile of fabric, batting scraps and other junk all over the floor. Also included is a thick layer of dust on EVERYTHING.



And of course the ever-present piles of bits and pieces, fabric and electronics littering my sewing area. A real bonus to not taking care of this mess is that the cats run off with pins, pens and parts of my sewing machine whenever I'm not looking.

Oh yes, and all of that is just in the basement. There's a whole other floor of disaster to be dealt with! Yikes!

Sigh. I'd ask you to feel sorry for me but let's be honest. I brought this on myself. Haha, and I really don't feel that bad about it (as is demonstrated by writing this post instead of dealing with the mess creeping into every corner of my house).

Now, off to refuel my tummy, refuel my car, take it for service and then come home, run around like crazy and make the place look presentable for our guest. Once that's done, the goal is to the have the top and back pieces, and the quilt basted and ready for quilting tomorrow morning.

Updates soon.

sexy hexies

I realize I never posted a follow up to my busy work post about my new love of hexagons!

As it turns out (and not at all to my surprise) hexagons are super fun!  They are small enough that they travel well in a purse or little bag, and with a little prep, you can sew them just about anywhere!

I took my little pack of hexagons to the Toyota dealership so I would have something productive to do while I waited for my car to be serviced.  (They offered a shuttle but I declined since there was nothing close enough for me to do while I waited.  When we bought the car, for some reason we purchased from the dealership on the other side of town instead of the one down the road and now we have to drive all the way by the airport to get service!  oops!)

Anyways, I had spent the night before cutting all my templates and little bits of fabric and pinning them to the templates so that I could just bring a pile that were ready to sew.



After talking to a service rep, I got myself all settled into a comfy chair in the lounge and started sewing.  I must have looked like I was setting up camp.  I had a water bottle, snacks, all my sewing supplies and a book.  Apparently I was prepared for the long haul.

Even though the dealership is across town (a very LARGE "town" indeed) I really don't mind going there because of this:



That's right.  Possibly the most beautiful carpet I have ever seen in my life.  It is the most beautiful colours and detailed scenes and it's endless inspiration.  Who knew you could find something so beautiful in a car dealership?

Back to the hexies.  After that first day I have about 18 done.  According to my calculations, 18 hexies over approximately 2.5 hours including a bathroom break and a coffee break works out to about one every 7.2 minutes.  Not too shabby for my first go round.



I'm not sure what I will be making out of them, but I love them.

busy work

I've mentioned before that I am a nanny. One of the perks of being a nanny is a lot of down time during the day. I have a few things that I do to help out around the house while the kids are sleeping like tidying up the kitchen and putting some laundry through. There is still a lot of downtime during naps or when the kids go to bed at night and I am staying later. Most often during my downtime I will read or maybe watch a tv show or movie, but I've temporarily fallen out of love with reading, and tv is boring so I had to find something else to do.



Enter hexagons. As most of you know, these little babies have been popping up everywhere for quite some time now, but I have yet to make any. So the other day when I had to make a car service appointment (that's going to last 3 freaking hours!!!) I thought, "I need to find something interesting and productive to do while I wait."

So today, I found a pile of scraps, made myself some templates and I am set. I'll bring them with me to work tonight so that once the little cutie goes to bed I have something to keep my hands busy, and I will definitely bring them with me tomorrow while I sit in Toyota's customer service lounge drinking stale coffee for 3 hours.

finding inspiration can be frustrating

I would describe myself as a very creative person. But for some reason, for the last few year I haven't done much that I would consider creative. I don't know why, but since I graduated high school (2004) my "creative activities" have all but dwindled away. I used to paint, draw, make slideshows and movies, play the flute, dance (mostly by myself) and now...nothing.

I have been overcome with the urge to be creative again in the last few months. I supposed it started a while ago, or maybe it's always been there, but a few months ago, I started to become interested in sewing. I have a few friends who are avid sewers and incredible quilt makers and their work started to awaken my creative side again. For my birthday, my husband bought me a gorgeous Janome Quilting and Embroidery sewing machine and again, my creative side was woken up a little more. Then, a few weeks before our first anniversary, as I was pondering (again) what to give my hubby, I couldn't ignore it any longer. "BE CREATIVE!" It seemed my soul was actually yelling at me!

Finally, I remembered a painting I had started 4 years ago. My husband is actually the one who asked me to paint it, even though at the time we barely knew each other. (Long story). I decided I would give him the completed painting as an anniversary present.

Since then I have been trying to find the inspiration I so desperately need to be creative. I read blogs and search random things on the internet hoping to find something that will spur me into action. I finally came across it the other day. 100 ideas - a work in progress was created by a woman named Keri Smith, who I now owe dearly for wonderful inspiration.

100 ideas is designed to be used with a journal and to me it is becoming an exercise in creativity. Each day I will pick one of the 100 squares and do what it says. I decided that if I was really going to force myself to learn to be creative everyday I should make a journal instead of buying one. So last night, for 3 hours I sat in front of Scrubs and sewed 120 pages into a book, decorated it and dedicated it to my 100 ideas experiment.

This is a pretty big commitment in my mind, because I'm not the most disciplined person, but I really think that this is just what I need to get out of my creativity slump and back to creating on a daily basis. The thought has even crossed my mind that it would be interesting to do the same 100 things every year in a new journal and watch the progress over time...

Today is day one. "#90. Write about or draw some of the doors in your life."

I've got three so far. The front door, the Yaris door, and the fridge doors. I'll post it when it's done.

For now: THIS IS...What's on my desk.