Sew I See!

Today I finished putting together the quilt top with the pink and blue-green/aqua strings and stitch-and-flip units.  It's now folded and put away in the closet with the other quilt tops awaiting quilting...  At some point early in this project, I started thinking of it as "Make It Pink!  Make It Blue!", which is a bit of a mouthful for a quilt name...  But it's still what comes to mind— that scene in Disney's animated Sleeping Beauty , where two of the fairy godmothers duke it out (with magic wands) over whether Aurora's birthday surprise dress should be pink or blue.  (It was one of my favorite parts of the movie, when I was a child!)   Here are a few photos of the quilt top as it now stands: I think the next thing to do is give the Juki a cleaning under the needle plate.  The next project will probably  be the string HST quilt started several months ago.  All the string squares are ready, so the next step is cutting the background squares, marking them, and

Continuing on from last time... With the rainbow strings UFO project set aside, I moved on to the next UFO.  This is another string-based project I started but never finished.  (Seeing a trend?  I get excited about string-piecing and crumb-piecing— strings especially when I want to use the treadle— but sometimes I don't start with a very specific end in sight, and even if there's a plan, momentum stalls out once the fun part is over.) I had two stacks of string blocks, one blue-green/aqua and one pink.  A while back, I'd pulled some pink and blue/aqua fabric for the next proposed phase of the project, but I wasn't sure I wanted to do the work that involved.  It didn't sound like fun, but I wasn't sure what else to do, instead.   So I wasted part of a day one weekend just thinking about it and looking a quilt blocks to see if anything jumped out as a superior alternative.  After all that, I reluctantly admitted that the original idea was still the best thing I co

I've been trying to finish up a couple of old UFO quilting projects, lately.  There are so many other new projects I'd like to start, but the backlog of UFOs was weighing on my conscience.  I'll feel better with some of the old WIPs wrapped up and scratched of that mental list.   - - - - - - - My first UFO pick-back-up of the year was the stack of rainbow-colored string blocks.  You may remember them... I originally thought I'd make them into a quilt of my own design, based on paper lanterns, but as time went on, I lost steam and didn't want to spend that much effort on them.   At that point, I wasn't sure what to do with them, instead.  I played around with ways of laying them out in rainbow order, and came up with a layout that would be "okay", but I still wasn't excited about it— and then serendipity struck, and I found something better! I had some digital rewards points to use up on Amazon before they expired, so I bought the Kindle version of

There's a new sewing machine in the house!  And this time it's an actual new machine, not a "new" vintage machine.   I bought my "old" computerized sewing machine-- a Brother Designio DZ2400-- during a Black Friday sale in 2014.   It's been a good machine, and it's still going pretty strong.  So much so that I'm keeping it as a back-up machine-- especially because it has some features that, while I don't use them often, are occasionally very useful.  (Zig-zag and decorative stitches, mainly.) However, it does sometimes make some squeaky noises, and... well, it just felt like a good time for an upgrade to a better machine for piecing.  That upgrade, bought in another sale around Black Friday, is a Juki TL-2000Qi.  Be Advised: This is a long, rambling post about the features of the new sewing machine, comparisons between the new and the old, and so on.  It's probably not interesting to anyone who isn't considering buying the same sewin