A Summer of Sewing Projects

I accepted a new job today!  This will be old news by the time I get this written, edited and all of the photos uploaded, but right now it seems like a big, freaking deal!

Woah, woah, woah, you say?  No, I’m not leaving Darcy Quilts behind.  I love what I do here, giving you free quilting tutorials, attempting to infuse my personality into each post, and writing and selling patterns.  I’m not going anywhere.

It would be ah-may-zing if blogging was my full-time job.  I’m still working towards that being a possibility someday.  But for now, I quilt and write before and after work, and on the weekends.  I still have to work for the man Monday to Friday. 

After 12 years in one position, it was time to leave and find something new.  I timed it right, used up vacation time, and got myself nearly a month of “vacation” in between leaving the last position and starting the new one, and I managed to make it happen during the summer!

While I’ve wasted a lot of time here and there in the last 4 weeks, I’ve also done a lot of sewing and quilting and that’s what I am here to share with you today!

Knowing I needed some time to decompress before finding a new job, most of what I worked on this summer has not been writing patterns or tutorials, but following other people’s patterns and tutorials and just sewing for fun.  I knew I needed the mental break to sew for fun, while not stressing my creativity any further than asking “does this fabric/color go with that fabric/color?”  My mind is still spinning about quilt patterns I want to write, but for today, what I have to share with you did not spring from my own ideas.

I had the opportunity to pattern test the Camellia quilt for The Little Pine Needle.  This is a beautifully written pattern and a stunning quilt!  I can’t give you the measurements or numbers of the pieces that I cut, as that would give away her pattern, but look at all these fun building blocks!

I really enjoyed making these flying geese.  I love flying geese quilts, and I normally use the 4 at a time method, to save time and to reduce waste.  You can find a Flying Geese tutorial HERE. This time, the pattern was written to make the geese one at a time, and I really enjoyed doing it this way, so that I can could get a really scrappy background.

This quilt came together much faster than I expected, and I really enjoyed putting together each of the different types of building blocks.  It was fun to chain piece a handful of one type of block, and then switch to another color combination or other building block.

I’m really happy with how my scrappy background turned out, although I would leave out the polka dot if I could do it over. I like the polka dot, but it just doesn’t blend as well as the others. Here is a close up view of the quilt too.

I’m also really happy with my new set up for photographing large quilts in my little house. I used two hangers with clips, pushed the table out of the way and hung the quilt from the loft.

I also wanted to tidy up different parts of my house, and get better organized.  I went looking for fabric basket tutorials on Pinterest and stumbled across this tutorial by Lily Ella.  What I love most about her tutorial is that after she walks you through the process of actually making the boxes, she then gives the measurements for how to make a box of any dimensions 1” to 100”. 

Since I wanted to fill in these spaces under an old Ikea coffee table doing duty as an entertainment stand, I knew I had funny measurements 7” tall by 11” wide by 18” deep and I love how they turned out!  The whole living room looks tidier now, because I was able to use not only the front 8” of those shelves, but the full 18” of depth.

I did take the time to write some tutorials for you as well, and those are coming soon.  Making a New York Beauty quilt has long been on my quilting to do list, and I tackled that project first this summer.  Right now, only the blocks are made, as this is a baby quilt for a baby that’s due in November.  Once I had the blocks made, I set them aside so that I could focus on the projects that would help me to have blog posts in August and September.  This quilt needs to be gifted to the baby’s mom and dad before I can share it with you, so you can expect to see this block in a quilt (with a full tutorial on how to work with curves!!!) after the baby shower this fall.

And, in less exciting but super practical news, I spent part of the summer repairing a couple of pairs of pants for my dad and have written that up as a tutorial as well.  That tutorial (with photos and step by step directions) will be out in early September.

I also snuck in two mini vacations to visit family, deep cleaned my house, read several books out in the backyard and visited my 10^th baseball stadium.  Not bad for four weeks of “vacation.” 

I’ve re-learned the value of recreation time, as well as decompressing time.  I know that the need to always be creating new content, for you my readers, can be problematic for my Type-A self.  I need to sew because it’s fun and I need to not forget that.

What projects have you been up to this summer?