Quilting – nicole.groudasfamily.com

Stitching and Quilting

Now that my office/craft room is finished and more importantly, now that the playroom is finished so the toys are out of my craft room area – I have space to unpack my stitching and a huge beautiful craft table to quilt on!

New couch and new sewing table ryan built!

I wasted no time in picking up some projects and the timing was great that my stitching group came out from MA for a 2 day stitching weekend and that got me motivated to start a few new pieces and start stitching again.

This is just an update on the stitching but the first project I did was to finish piecing my nephew’s baby quilt (just as his first birthday rolls around – hah) – and it’s now mostly quilted too. I did the basic straight quilting in the seams and just have the free hand/free motion quilting to do to make it more decorative.

While my stitching friends were here I focused on this Spider Banner that I had going already (possibly started it last year?). It was so nice to stitch for large blocks of time and I made lots of progress on it. It didn’t feel like it was the right season for it however so after the weekend ended I decided to start a new piece that would have me more motivated and I’ll pick old spider up again maybe in the fall.

Ok so the new piece may also be a bit on the Halloween side my friends all love these pixie witches (there are a bunch of them) and decided we would each stitch our favorite at the same time. I have 2 patterns but decided on this green one first (the other one is more of a jack-o-lantern/orange theme – too fall like).

I’ve been working on this witchy piece just a bit over one week and she’s going so fast!

There are a lot of beads in this piece which will be those blank swirls in the skirt – I can’t wait, it’s such a fun piece to stitch!

I also started another piece yesterday that I designed myself using elements of a pattern I liked. It’s a piece for my brother and sister-in-law that celebrates their house and marriage. I’m hoping I can get this done around their anniversary? Because I designed this one it’s hard to see what the finished piece will look like but I included a part of the design in this picture.

Just a bit of stitching on this one so far

I’m excited to get some craft time when I’m not working or playing with the kids. My new space is perfect for it!

Crafts

It’s been a few years since I’ve made any real time to do much stitching. I’ve quilted on and off over the last few years but I’ve decided to get back into cross stitch as well this year. I’m going to document my crafts here as well as house projects.

In January my Aunt gave me a quilt she and I had pieced back in 2011 and I had left mine at her house unfinished. I took the last week in January and put the final border on it, then hand quilted and put on the binding. Finishing up the Japanese Diamonds quilt (Japanese and homespun fabrics).

I’ve been going through boxes of cross stitch and quilts and patterns, trying to organize and find projects I have. I found this piece called the Shepherd’s Bush purse that I stitched back in 2009. It’s beaded and I always loved the soft color pallete. So today I turned it into the purse with some fabric from my stash and a little sewing then hand stitching. Cute and can go in my bin of finished stitchery now!

Shepherd's Bush Purse — Shepherd’s Bush Purse

Hopefully soon I’ll be able to show the other piece I’m stitching – started about 2005 and hopefully to be finished soon!

Halloween and other updates

This is a very late post but generally I like to have my sewing projects on here along with house projects. So I’ll do a quick recap. No house work has been going on, Ryan has been working every free second he has including all weekend every weekend 🙁 This means I’m on Alex duty and with the teething lately (molars!), her naps haven’t always been great so I’ve been focusing on things that are easy to quit when she wakes.

What have we done ? Well first up was Halloween, I made her costume this year, she was a purple owl. She LOVED it. She loved the costume, loved trick-or-treating and just overall had a blast. She walked down and back up the street carrying her bucket and chatting with the neighbors. The idea of picking out candy and then getting to eat some at the end of the night – wow. It was fun.

Alex with her glow wand and bucket of candy when we were all done. It’s impossible to get a still picture of a toddler!

After Halloween Alex and I went down to Aimee and Jason’s for the weekend (Aimee’s birthday) and the kids all got dressed in their costumes. We had a great weekend playing, Alex loved playing with all of Jason’s toys (I got a ton of great xmas gift ideas out of it for Alex 🙂 ).

The last 2 weekends we’ve been home. We started going to myGym on Saturday mornings and Alex loves it. We love it because she’s happy and gets tired out enough for a great Saturday nap 🙂 I need to come up with a Sunday morning activity to do the same! In the afternoons we hit up the park and do some daddy snuggles while he works (usually a xmas movie is on). We started introducing xmas concept to Alex and so far ‘Santa’ and ‘Ho ho ho’ are fun ones.

Alex’s favorite toys right now are trains so we spend a lot of time playing with Thomas and friends 🙂

And this weekend I finally finished the top to Alex’s wall hanging for her bedroom. I set up my sewing room in my diningroom and Alex sat at the table and colored while I cut and ironed. After Alex went to bed I put the top together and I am looking forward to hand quilting it!

Hopefully we’ll have a house update next week, this weekend we plan to tile!

Weekend Update

Well this weekend was eventful but not quite productive 🙂 Ryan was away with his friends for a long weekend so after getting the house cleaned up and organized, and doing lots of baking I had a little girl party on Saturday (stitch friends). One of the treats I made was these homemade strawberry sorbet in chocolate cups treat:

2012-02-18_11-49-50_489 — Mmmmm - strawberry sorbet!

Fitzy had his cousin Buddy over to play for the weekend and they really are best buds.

2012-02-19_16-09-33_806 — Tuckered out on sunday 🙂

Saturday was a long day and after the girls all left I just crashed for the night (after clean up of course). Sunday I had big plans to be productive – but when i woke up I was still tired so the dogs and I chilled for most of the day (I finished up a good books with them cuddled on the couch). In the afternoon I did manage to do one little household item that’s been on my list for a long time…

We have this old switch (turn style) for the basement entryway light and it doesn’t always work (the wiring is old and loose). Since we put in new basement lights when we first bought the house I’ve been meaning to run a new light and switch off of that circuit so I could reliably see going down the first half of the basement stairs with laundry in my arms. Plus this means I could disconnect a bunch of the knob and tube that’s spliced numerous times for this light/switch and an old outlet.

Took a little while but we have a light. This isn’t permanent, when we remodel the kitchen we’ll be redoing this entryway a bit but who knows when that will be so for now we have a light!

2012-02-20_12-22-34_839 — New switch (see the turn style one to the right - that's now disconnected)

2012-02-20_12-22-43_235 — New light fixture (the old one was definitely not up to par)

I also hung up a sheet to keep the dust more contained in our work area (since I’ll be sanding the drawers and shelves of the built-ins as soon as I’m motivated to).

2012-02-20_12-23-16_949 — Work area dust sheet 🙂

I spent Sunday evening over at my uncle’s house for my cousin Maia’s birthday. Buddy is going to stay the week with them so he made the trip with me. The dogs must have worn each other out because Fitz was pretty tired most of Monday when I worked from home. He has completely recovered however and thank goodness it was daycare day – he was driving me nuts this morning!

And last night I decided to do something fun and make a baby quilt for Itty Bitty! I actually only intended to get the strips cut but it went so quickly I couldn’t stop myself. This is the same pattern I used for the crib quilt for little Jason but this time I used all flannels. I just have to figure out what to use for backing and binding now. The one unfortunate thing was that I could only use 10 flannels so I had to limit my choices and now i have leftover favorites so I may need another quilt. But after I finish this up I need to make an owl wallhanging. Maybe I’ll make burp cloths or bibs something with my scrap pieces.

2012-02-20_18-53-33_147 — Fabrics that I selected for the quilt

2012-02-20_22-12-26_963 — Quilt top all put together (crib size)

The corners of the blocks definitely do not line up well but the nature of flannels is that they are stretchy so that was challenging and since the quilt is so busy I wasn’t worried about it. Plus I plan to lay it on the floor for tummy time – not exactly important that it’s perfect 🙂 This quilt took only 3 hours to cut and piece (for future reference)!

That was my ‘weekend’ with a work day 🙂

Herb quilt

Yesterday I worked from home because I had a cold, in the evening ryan had ZBA so I pulled out my herb quilt which just needed borders and got that finished up.

Borders are my least favorite part of quilting so it’s nice to have it done enough to plan out the quilting part now. Since this piece has stitching I’m not going to do much more than in the ditch quilting, although the border has lots of room for some free-style. This gives me the perfect excuse to buy the walking foot for my machine though 🙂

Feeling much better today so I’m taking advantage of the extra hours at home (no commute today either) to catch up one work.

A day off with my nephew

Yesterday I took a half day off of work and went down to visit my sister and nephew. He’s just over 2 months old and he’s such a cutie. He’s tiny but he’s very alert and was looking around at everything all day yesterday. It was a great time to visit because he decided to stay awake all day again for me.

DSCN1272 — Let me help you, take that pacifier out so you can say hi.

It was a hot day so he spent the evening in just his diaper to cool off a bit and then it was on to muscle shirt number two for the evening and some tummy time (at which time he promptly fell asleep).

I even got to spend some time with him this morning (he was hungry though) before heading in to work.
Bye bye little jason, I will definitely see you soon!

While I was over I added the tabs to the wall hanging for Jason’s room so they can hang it up. I also remembered to take some pictures of it finished since the only time I did it was with my dad’s camera.

DSCN1300 — Wall hanging for little Jason

DSCN1299 — Closeups - I designed the monkey based on one of the fabrics in the quilt.

DSCN1298 — The rest of the animals were part of the pattern.

Just one last thing to sew, a skirt for the crib. Should be a quick one and I was tempted to do it last weekend but it was too hot to go up and spend time in the sewing room!

Crib Quilt

Well plans don’t always work out and this week no quilting happened Tuesday or Wednesday night due to a continued headache. Yesterday however I had no headache! And after work and a few episodes of Castle while eating dinner, I got to work on the crib quilt again and finished up the top!

It’s not done done as it needs to be quilted but I’d say conservatively this quilt took about 4 hrs to piece maximum, maybe 3. It went really fast and I like the pattern a lot.

DSCN1201 — Crib quilt for my nephew Jason

I’m very excited to go see little jason this weekend. And once the quilts are done I’ll have another excuse to go down and visit again in a few weeks 🙂

Baby Quilt

Last night I got started on the crib quilt for my nephew, it matches his wall hanging and I need to get it finished before making the crib bumpers since the bumpers will be made out of the scraps (haven’t designed them yet).

So all the strips are cut and so far I’ve gotten 6 blocks put together of the 20 total. The blocks are 10 1/2 x 10 1/2 inches each so it’s a decent size quilt.

The quilt is very simple, no borders, just a binding after being put together. Although it might call for rick-rack with the binding, I’ll have to see if I have enough rick-rack.

Sewing

I got some sewing done tonight – the valances for my sister’s nursery!

I made two of them, they go with the curtains I’m still working on (one window done, one to go on those).

Then because I won’t be home tomorrow night to sew, I got some of the animals for the quilt ready to applique and started on those – the giraffe first. This quilt will have 4 animals total.

In only 10 minutes or so I have more than half of the giraffe body attached already so I realized I need to go back up and prepare a few more pieces to bring, other than just the giraffe or else I’ll be doing something else tomorrow night since this will finish up quickly.

In car news – the relay switch that controls the secondary fan has gone wonky and is kicking the fan on all the time when the car is off. This is draining the battery and now I need a new relay and a new battery. At least I know which relay, it’s not too difficult to get to (4 bolts), so I’ll probably get a new battery tomorrow and remove the relay when I park the car until the new relay comes in (had to be ordered). Pain in the butt having to jump my car to start it every time!

Quilt Time

My Aunt and I have a few quilt kits we bought together over the years and finally we’ve made one of them – it’s Japanese fabrics and I showed the blocks we did a few weeks ago. Wednesday night we finished the blocks and put them all together with sashing. All that’s left is a border and then quilting! It’s a small little quilt and I love the colors. I think this will have to hang in the tvroom when it’s finished (both it and the tv room finished) 🙂

square_in_square_quilt01 — Blocks all done!

The paper piecing really helped with the points not getting chopped off – but it took me 20 minutes to pull all the paper off the back when done 🙂

Today is kind of a busy day, between work, haircut at lunch time and a show tonight in Boston I’m all over the place. My friend’s mother couldn’t go to see Mary Poppins with her tonight so she offered me her now extra ticket – I couldn’t be more excited about this last minute surprise but I’m sorry her mom couldn’t make it and hopefully she’s feeling better.

Then the rest of the weekend I’ll be working on the gym! Saturday we’ll put up trim and baseboards and Sunday I’ll be painting while Ryan works! In 2 weeks my Dad might come out to help us finish up the floor, that should be the last thing no the list besides a coat of paint on the walls by then – can’t wait!