Blue Green Napkins

 

I really am attracted to these beautiful toweling fabrics from Ruby Star Society that have been out in the stores lately the texture is just so lovely. I bought a yard of a different color way than the rainbow one I worked with last year or the blue/brown stripes in 2022. Those napkins from four years ago are really holding up well to a lot of use and washing.

I stitched along the raw edge with the triple zig-zag stitch.

I also cut the one yard fabric length in half with pinking sheers to limit the fraying as I sewed.

I also stitched around the pre-stitched edges as some of the existing stitching wasn't regular, quite long in some spots.

And then I went around again a second time just for fun.

Now to pull threads and make a little fringe

And there they are, two completed napkins. Turns out I should have bought 2 yards to make the usual four. Maybe next time I make it to Hart's Fabrics again.

Seat Repair

I have this great pillow from Cushion Lab that I use with my sewing room chair. Even though the chair is on the new side, the cushion wasn't cushy enough for me. The pillow cover has a great grippy surface on the underside so it stays put.

Unfortunately the studio assistants also enjoy it and poked some holes in the jersey cover which then tore quite badly along the seam. The pillow is still in great shape (especially for a memory foam pillow), and thankfully it's got a removable cover, so it's worth the time and effort to repair it. I got it wrestled off and set up for some repair stitching.

I chose to use a piece of this nice soft grey pomegranate print. It turned out to be pretty easy to sew it on, and I didn't stitch through all the layers, which was my real worry. It seems to be working out well so far, we shall see how long it lasts in its repaired state. Especially with the cotton quilting fabric vs. the stretchier jersey.

 

Towel to Napkin

The beautiful rainbow toweling that I bought in Portland got washed (after I stay-stitched the raw edges. I cut the pieces apart with my gigantic pinking shears.

 And then I stay-stitched those newly-cut edges to hopefully contain the escaping fluff. That made ironing the edges into stitch-able shape much easier.

The pre-hemmed two sides of this toweling fabric makes this an easy process to turn these into nice big napkins.

I really like these new napkins, and I'm going to put them into immediate service.

Travel Shop

 

The fabric shopping on the way to, and in Portland with friend Jaye, was pretty great. The above picture is  what I found at Sewlarium. First is the new Ruby Star toweling, I'll be making napkins out of this beautiful stuff. I think it'll go well with my pride month table runner. FQs of the PDX airport fabric, a black on grey houndstooth, and odd yellow grid, a pink/caramel ribbon print. A mushroom print that I plan to make a pillowcase with, a really interesting print with odd yellow shapes (I thought it looked like a tile floor), a beautiful (instead of ugly) Frida Kahlo print, and an on-sale pearl bracelets in a dark grey almost black. 

At Pioneer Quilts, I found more of the Ruby Star toweling, because I hadn't bought enough at Sewlarium. An odd grellow star print, a pretty purple halloween print and then the ingredients to make the witch hat "pin keeper" (not a pincushion I guess?). They have a great selection of wools in this shop.

At Mill End, I think I was fabric shopped out/overwhelmed with the vast array of choices, so I only got a couple buckles and a Tombow textile glue that I'd never seen.

In Eugene, we stopped in at Paramount Sew-Vac, a really great store, especially for sewing machine selections as they had all the brands and tons of room displaying them, I found a great remnant of this white and grey print, and then was excited to see Marcia Derse print on a lovely cotton jersey, I got enough to make myself a top.

In Ashland, we checked out Sew Creative and I found that I was really drawn to the Australian Aboriginal prints, they have a huge selection, but I managed to narrow it down and chose three and then found another print that I thought would work well with them.

The last shop we stopped at was Purple Frog Quilt Shop, where I found these 4 FQs, a Peanuts print, blue Grunge, and two lights on a string one dark green and one charcoal. They had a great selection of the American Made solids, so I bought the last of the light grey, a little over a yard. And a new nail file, because my travel one is worn out now and needs replacing.

And finally, at Powell's Books, I found this book, Ahead of the Curve(which includes 5 patterns!) by one of my fave curvy pattern designers, Jenny Rushmore of Cashmerette.

That was plenty of shopping to last me for quite a while, and now I get to add the new fabric purchases into my fabric tracker. At the last update, I was previously at a net increase of 11.8 yards. After adding all this new stuff in,  and subtracting out what I've been sewing since the last update, I'm up to a net of: 18.3 yards. I better get to finishing some big things before year's end to get that number down!

Color of the Year and More

 

Here's a catch-up post on new stuff I've bought this year so far. I was shopping at Hartland Quilt shop on Etsy buying supplies for the Jane Sassaman class I'm taking this month, Golden Threads quilting paper and I also bought a half yard of 

this really interesting butterfly fabric by Faye Guaniper from Dear Stella. For the class I also had to get a pretty big quantity of Pellon interfacing, so I bought it from Amazon along with another fusible Hobbs 80/20 batting. Not worth a picture on those two items. I'll let you know about using this quilting paper stuff after the class, it looks pretty interesting.

My pre-order of the Kona color of the year, Nocturne arrived from Keepsake Quilting. I got three yards of it and I love love love this purple. It's a really beautiful, rich color.

Mx. Domestic has an online shop and they announced a great sale so I snapped up this assortment of fat quarters from the fairly new fabric line, Scrawl by Giucy Juice. 

I love all the print and fonts as well as the colors which will play well with the Alison Glass fabrics I have left over from the Trinket quilt.

To support this great and very inclusive store in Washington, Wyldwood Creative, I did a little browsing on their website. This looks like such a fun local quilt (and more) shop. I'd seen this Art Gallery Fabrics binding fabric in a couple of other fabric shops but hadn't bought any, but this color way was interesting to me. I think it might be usable as is, I really like the dashed cutting line and scissors. They also had this really pretty checkered ribbon, it has a lovely hand, very soft. And their sticker selection was pretty awesome, yes that's a banana slug sticker. The two shiny holographic stickers do not photograph well, but they look cool in person.

I saw this embroidery project when friend Jaye and I visited Cheryl in Oregon, she'd finished all these ladies and it was so wonderful. I want to try it, so I bought the little kit and book that Brooklyn Haberdashery sells. Just a note, I want to make the ladies that I embroider of more diverse body types. This cellulose PFD fabric looked very interesting and it is very very smooth, I can't wait to try and dye it to see how it works out.

And lastly, I bought myself the Victoria Findley Wolfe book, The Quilting Experience. It's really beautiful, I haven't read it all yet, but the pictures are great.

Yikes, that was a whole lot of shopping, hopefully that's out of my system for now. Inspired by friend Jaye, my newly created Fabric Usage Tracker worksheet is getting a real workout. With my two quilt finishes, I'm currently in "the red" by 5.25 yards. As in, I've bought more fabric than I've used. Not a surprise given all this shopping! Okay, back to working on using some more of said fabric up.

It's Curtains

This picture of my hand-dyed scraps is lit by the strong afternoon/early evening sun at 5:30 pm. This is nice to have the light when it's not super hot, but it's a lot of direct sun. It honestly feels like too much direct sun in a room filled with fabric and thread. 

Last summer we had to go as far as to mount on the outside of the house a shade curtain. It worked very well, but it was quite ugly from both outside and inside. So there's a curtain project afoot to see if I can avoid having that shade put up again this year. 

The window in my workroom is an unusual size, it's quite wide at 8' and it's 4' high. So that means that buying grab and go curtains from Target isn't in the ballpark really. Unless one has a sewing machine....mwahaha. 

All I can hear in my mind's eye memory is the Bugs Bunny version of "It's Curtains for You":

So I bought some "light-filtering" curtains from Target that need to be modified down to size as they are much too long at 84"

These curtains are very simply made, and I discovered that both the top and the bottom have a similar big hem that's open on the ends so that they're can both be functioning rod pockets. 

Here's the before picture. The current curtains on the sides are very old and made out of a fairly heavy damask that is also lined. They were made for a normal 6' width window. So they block too much light and also don't cover the whole window. The dumb thingy on the curtain rod in the middle was what I made out of the leftovers from shortening DS's blackout curtains that we got for the same afternoon sun situation. It was made to try and block the bright light that was coming through the top of the exterior shade we put up last year. Unfortunately it didn't work and also looks truly demented.

Tah-dah, much much better. No more demented pouf crouching up on the curtain rod and a very nice filtering of the light as per the package. The two curtains were both shortened to 4' high and then I used the left over fabric to make a third curtain (seen on the left) for when it's really bright.

This is great, I feel so much better, like I now have some control over the amount of light coming into the room. 

Even with the strongest sun of the day coming in, it's still much better. I love the moving shadows.

I'm counting this project as Done✅

 

Sun Block

 

(Photo taken at 6pm)

This weekend it was time for some "whole house sun block" efforts. As I've mentioned before thanks to the winter storms we lost a stand of redwoods that had previously been blocking the afternoon direct sun to the western facing side of our house. That's two rooms downstairs, and two rooms upstairs. One is DS's and one is my workroom. The direct sun has been driving me nuts and I was beginning to worry about sun fading the contents of my studio. We were contemplating buying solar powered outdoor vertical shades that would be installed above each window on the exterior, but even if we ordered them, it was going to be 2 months until they arrived (ie the rest of summer). We also weren't sure that it would help enough to be worth the price.

To test out the proposition that some sort of outdoor vertically hung shade would work, I remembered that we had one CoolaRoo rectangle shade that we hadn't used yet, so DH figured out how to hang it up on a (hopefully) temporary basis. It involved using our new very very tall ladder. I was happy to hold and stabilize the ladder for him and not have to climb up it myself.

It looks absolutely atrocious. 

Here's how it looks from the inside at around 1pm with the shade installed outside. These curtains were leftovers from the previous (before our house expansion) much smaller window. I made them out of a fairly heavy damask and they're lined so they were blocking enough light when I needed it before the trees fell. I'd never gotten around to installing window shades or anything in this room mostly because we weren't using it as a bedroom.

But now with the shade installed, I don't really have to use the curtains at all. This picture was taken at 1pm, so that's before the direct sun starts hitting the window, so it's plenty bright already. The air is still coming in just fine as the windows open on the sides. Unfortunately the top of the window not being covered by the shade is a bit of a problem, so maybe I'll make a temporary valance of some kind to block it. 

A downside is that I can't see out the window very well to see the sky or the trees that remain, and I can't raise and lower it like I could a shade. This is the view this morning sitting at my sewing machine.

That took care of my studio window as well as the downstairs window as well. But then for DS's window, we bought at Costco for the stellar price of $24, a pair of floor length sun block curtains. While I cut and hemmed them to non-floor length (avoiding the sewn-in magnets) DH got a curtain rod installed. They look great, and he's happy with how adjustable the light in his room is now between his blinds and the new curtains. What should I do with the leftover cut off parts of these curtains? Oooh, maybe the temporary valance I mentioned above.

Shade Please

 

One of our outdoor sunshades got a bit shredded in the windstorm this winter. This one is our very oldest and it stays up year round. I've already repaired it once before and now it's time once again. It's now sunny again and time for the seasonal shades to go back up so I'm really missing this one. It blocks most of the early morning sun, so I can't ever sleep in past 7am. The kind of silly concerns of the retired, I know I know.

During the mad dash to take this down during the storm, I really thought it had gotten shredded, but in fact, it did not. It just split at the main seam line and along the side seams. The fabric although faded is still quite strong, the weak point is the thread.

There's also some very confused lichen growing on it. I'm sure it would rather be on one of our old trees instead of a man-made sunshade. I'll have to scrape this off before we put it back up once the repairs are done. Also, if you compare this picture to the one above, you can see how much this has faded over the years. It's held up better than any other outdoor fabric we've used though.

Cruella rides again! My Pfaff has a name, because I sold my Porsche 914 to buy her, and he had a name, Bud. I had some 101 Dalmations stickers that my kids found and were sticking on everything in the house, including the machine. It's an illustration of Cruella, thus the name.

I got all set up out on the deck on a very overcast day, but not drippy foggy. Perfect for outdoor sewing. The reason I'm sewing outside with an extension cord is because this thing is rather big, and definitely somewhat dirty. 

I'm also using a UV resistant outdoor thread in the top and bobbin

It all went pretty quickly once I re-learned how to rethread and wind a bobbin. Every machine is a little different of course.

I'm really glad that the sewing seems to be holding up fairly well near the hardware because my machine was not up to sewing through that thick of a lump. Hand stitching this section would be very tough.

I even used some Wonderclips at one point. 

Could I have thrown this away and bought another one, yes, of course. But! I knew I could fix it so that it would likely last another two years and put off the purchase of yet another thing made out of plastic. I had the time, tools, and set up to get it done, so it was worth it to me to give it a try. It'll get re-hung this weekend, and then I can finally sleep in.