Lost and Found

More quilt-searching. I'm beginning to think I hallucinated Grandma Morgan's hex quilt. I found one I got nearly done and abandoned, though. Jeez, I had forgotten all about it.

I worked on this in . . the 90s? I think. But it was a cursed project. Everytime I'd start making progress on it, the sewing machine would break. Or the zig-zag stitch would start making horrific snarls of thread under the fabric (a tension issue, I know). Or I'd piece something backwards/upsidedown, and have to rip out the seam and start anew. It got to a point where I had a buffalo-induced breakdown and put the whole damned thing away.

Ant, buffalo,crab,dog,elephant, fish, goat, hippo . . you can see my pattern, here.

Well, dammit. I am going to finish this quilt. Vicuña (or vulture?), x-ray tetra, yak, gett'er-done.

Fabric

In my quest to unearth the antique quilt fragment I've been looking for, I emptied a wicker hamper that I stored fabric in, but haven't touched for a while. I didn't find the quilt (darn it!) but I found a remnant of an adorable corduroy that I bought when my daughter was little. I made her the cutest jumper.

Memories! {sniffle}

Old times

When I was a small child, one of my parents' neighbors, Aunt Lou, used to babysit me in her home sometimes. She had a granddaughter my age. Also, her mother and mother-in-law lived in their house, tucked into one bed in a corner bedroom like the grandparents in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. I called her mother "Grandma Morgan." She would have been born in the late 1800s, and was a quilter.

When Aunt Lou was downsizing and moving house many years later, she gave me an unfinished fragment of a quilt that Grandma Morgan had never finished. It has tiny, I mean tiny hexagons. I folded it in bewilderment and stored it. Couldn't bring myself to throw it away, didn't know what to use it for, and it would have been a Herculean task to finish it.

While I was cleaning out my father's house, I had an idea to take old sewing notions, of which I have many, and make an art piece using those with a background of Grandma Morgan's quilt.

I have a suitable wooden panel. I have the notions. Can I find that quilt fragment????? I cannot. I thought I knew right where it was, but quite a bit of searching later I cannot find it. Sooooo, that project will have to wait. When I find it - I WILL find it - will I be able to find the other pieces I need? Who knows.

But do I have a TINY, fully functional child's sewing machine? NO, I have TWO of the damned things. Tried to sell them. Got lots of scammers and no actual collectors.

Sewing

I was making slow but steady progress on the winter portion of the seasonal small quilt. However, yesterday, my iron fell from the ironing board (where I had left it to cool down after using it) and broke. Now I have to go get a new iron. I don't w-a-a-a-a-n-t toooooo!

Still don't have my oven fixed, either . . so I'm going to have to go down to Home Farm to bake a pie there.

Small project

A small project that has taken a surprising amount of time. I pieced a 'winter' version of the little fall quilted runner.

They are stitched together at three sides, I am probably going to hand sew the final hem. The fall side got a pumpkin appliquéd on it.

I wanted them to be seasonal but not holiday specific; so the Fall side isn't halloweenish or Thanksgivingish, and the winter side is not Christmassy. Just . . fall and winter. There's a piece of fleece fabric leftover from another project in between to give it a little heft, without being puffy.

I cut way more strips than I needed for the little runner I wanted to sew for my hutch - so I made a second one for the coffee table. And an appliqué pumpkin? Why not. Eventually I want to make a second part the same size but wintery colors - and use it as the back to this. Reversible. It's . . a work in progress.

One small pumpkin, one pumpkin-adjacent gourd, a yellow squash, a couple apples, and a cornhusk maiden, sitting on the new strip-pieced runner. {Kronk voice} Oh yeah, it's all coming together!

Little project

AAAaaaaaaah-I just lost a game of thread-chicken, a scant 18 inches from the end of the last seam in a small, strip-pieced table runner. I am vexed, and I'll probably wait until tomorrow to finish it. I also couldn't find, in my extensive fabric stash, the ONE autumn-themed fabric that I was counting on to be the main part of the project. I could have tabled the project for today and continued searching for the fabric, but decided that getting started while I had the spoons to do so was the most important thing. Pix tomorrow, I guess. {Huffy noises]

I am hearing what is either the longest roll of thunder in history or - maybe a whole bunch of jets? Or distant artillery, lots of? Hmmm.

Little Monsters

Little Monsters everywhere!

I bought this fabric from @pterribledinosaurdrawings designs (but I cannot for the life of me remember the name of the website) quite a while back. I made the green design into a dress for my little niece last spring, and saved the rainbow monsters for this year.

Small dresses are so quick to sew up compared to adult-sized ones!

Cleaning Out

When my husband was decluttering the basement during the winter he pulled a box out the "closet" under the stairs that had been there for ohgodwhoknowshowlong a while. It had some sewing things in it, including quite a few old patterns and a box of fabric I was given in the 80s by an elderly cousin of my mother's. I appreciated the gift, but didn't know quite what to do with it.

For those with screen readers or who cannot read cursive:

"Dear Angela, At last I'm sending the materials I mentioned. Thought you might want to know the origins. Two pieces of French silk (1.5 yd by 1 yd) Bought in Paris, 1961. Polyester sari (3.5 yds by 1 yd) bought in Nadi, Fiji Islands, 1978. Block print cotton (2 yd by 1 yd) bought in Papeete, Tahiti 1987. Native girls wrap it around their bodies sans pins, etc. as a dress. With your hair and skin, these colors will be becoming. We enjoyed our visit in May. My regards to you, Julia C, and Jan. Love, Mary Catherine."

Other than the cotton print, which I did use to make a very nice skirt, I just didn't know what to do with these. They have been in a box all these years. The pretty aqua print is the sari, the cobalt blue and the questionable blue-yellow-brown print are the silk. It love the idea of them - just don't know how to use them for anything. Which, unfortunately, describes a whole LOT of the things I have inherited from family members. French silk from Paris! So cool! But WHAT do I DO with smallish pieces of very odd and dated patterns?

Quilt, continued

I'll make it a separate post, because crabs are special, but the other non-vertebrate block for the fish quilt is a gauzy jellyfish.

The blue gauze I bought because my then-toddler daughter fell deeply, madly in love with it at the fabric store. I actually made a little blue dress for her with this stuff as an overskirt. Because of the little sparkles on it, it is a nightmare to work with. My sewing machine took one look and then shied nervously like a stressed horse. Even for handstitching it's a trial & tribulation. However, it just screams "jellyfish" to me. So I set aside ALL common sense and put this block together. The fish blocks took about 7 minutes each to sew. This has taken almost two hours SO FAR and is not completed. However.

Sparkles. What else can I say.

I think I have all 70 fish blocks (if I have kept accurate count, nervous chuckle) and two nonfish, which is all I need. I also cut the triangle pieces I will need, because these blocks will be pieced "on point", ie the squares will be diagonal. All is ready, maybe, to lay them all out on a flat surface and start sewing them together.