In Progress

 Welcome to Treadlestitches!

Nothing is finished this week, but there's plenty that isn't.  I'm quilting the first Razzle Dazzle quilt on my electric Pfaff, and it's coming along okay.  I'd like to get all my Rainbow Scrap Challenge quilts done by the end of the year.  I admit, it may not be realistic, but it's a goal to shoot for.

Here's another RSC project in progress, the 16 patch blocks made of multicolor prints plus a solid.  I'm sewing them into rows, and then into a twin sized top.  My treadle sits under the window in my sewing room.  I can see the driveway when I sew in the morning, so I know when my daughter arrives to drop off my littlest grandson for babysitting.

Besides the quilts in progress, I am also trying to better organize the sewing room.  Here's one of the reasons why:

This is just PART of what I bought at a quilt show rummage sale in early October.

Picture a regular sized classroom at the quilt show.  Three of the walls were lined with tables and there were double tables down the center of the room.  All of these tables were piled HIGH with fabric and there were overflowing boxes underneath.  Some of the larger pieces or kits were priced separately, at around $3 to $4 per yard.  All the rest, about 90% of the fabric in the room, was priced at $10 per grocery bag full.

I filled one whole bag with flannel, mostly large pieces for backing baby quilts but some cute smaller stuff for piecing tops.  I stuffed the other bag with cotton prints, plus a heavier print for a zipper bag and four or five full feed sacks.

Adding this to my haul from the rummage sale at the quilt museum in June, some of which is seen below:

...plus stuff I picked up at flea markets and antique stores through the year made reorganizing the fabric storage absolutely necessary.

I even got this wild print at the Quilt History retreat!
 

Like many quilters, I store my fabric both by color and size.  I have bins of quarter yards, half yards, and one yard pieces, and I was able to just squish the right size new stuff into those, but the bins in the closet hold the bigger yardage, and they were ridiculously full.  Expanding into bankers boxes helped. .

This bin of light fabrics is definitely overstuffed!  I need to use some of it up soon or change to a bigger box.

Light fabrics are ALWAYS on my list to search for at sales.  I always look for backing fabric, colors I'm out of or low on, and (of course!) novelty fabric for the kid quilts.

So the fabric is better organized now and it's easier to find what I need.  I also added a Some Assembly Required box for finished block sets, and another box for projects I want to finish by the Quilt-As-You-Go method.

Now to organize what I work on!  I bought a white board, and Hubby very kindly put it up for me above my cutting table.  So far, I'm really liking it.  I can keep track of deadlines etc., and the magnets will hold paper patterns while I'm cutting the pieces.

It's not perfect (yet?) but it's a good start.  A work in progress.

Last weekend we went to see a local theater performance of The Music Man, featuring our oldest grandson. It was so much fun!  He has three more performances this weekend.  Break a leg, G!

We got some real snow this week, but only about 2 inches total.  It's been cold, so it hasn't melted yet.  The big maple tree looks weird with both leaves and snow.

A new family member joined us on Thursday!  We adopted Snicklefritz from the Humane Society.  It's amazing how someone so tiny can turn everything totally upside down.  The grandkids love him, and so do we.  Our dog is putting up with him really well, thank goodness, but I'm already tired of a kitten waking me up to play at 5:30 in the morning! 

Next week, it's Thanksgiving!  We're hosting, as usual, and I'm doing as much cooking ahead as possible.  Next stop after that is Christmas!  Just thinking about it is making me tired.  It's a good day for a nap with a furry friend.

Have a lovely week, whatever it brings.

Thanks for reading,

Sylvia@Treadlestitches

Linking up with:

Alycia at Finished or Not Finished Friday

Angela at So Scrappy

The Joys and Dangers of Unfinished Objects

I've always been pretty casual about my Unfinished Objects (also known as UFOs).  I'm not one of these people who only work on one project at a time and finish everything they start.  [If you are one of those people, I admire you, but I don't see how you do it.]  My attitude has been this:  Quilting is my hobby, not my job.  I only have deadlines if I set them myself (for example, if a quilt needs to be finished by Christmas or a birthday.  And to be honest I'm ridiculously casual about that, too.)  I am free to work on whatever I want.
There's a lot of joy in that approach.  I can run with an idea when it hits me.  The time I spend working on my quilts is fun.  I do finish quilts (quite a few, in fact) but if something gets set aside, it's no big deal.  I admit it, I'm avoiding the guilt.
There are actual dangers lurking in the unfinished objects bin, as I found out recently.  My youngest daughter moved out, and I took over her room as my sewing room.  (There are windows in this room!  And a closet! Sunlight, fresh air, and a bathroom across the hall!)  In deciding what to move into the room, I did a major clean out of the basement sewing area.  Which led to looking through the UFOs and deciding what to do with them.
The first sort was easy--quilt tops in one pile, partial tops in another.  Then I sorted the tops by priority, from Needs to be Finished Now to Do When You Have Time to Give This One to Charity.  (There was one more category.  I call it Seriously?  OMG)
The partial tops/projects were tougher to sort.  More recent ones were pretty easy, but stuff happens to UFOs just sitting around.  The books with the pattern I was using get used for another quilt, put away or returned to the library.  Fabric (especially large pieces) gets "borrowed" for another project.  Worst case scenario?  I have no idea what I was doing with this quilt.  What pattern were these pieces cut for, anyway?
Here's a case in point:

I cut these 45 degree triangles with the Accuquilt cutter, and started sewing them together as a leaders and enders project.  It was not easy to line them up correctly, but I finally learned.  And then, when I let it sit for several months, I forgot.  I also couldn't remember how I was setting the rows together.  I started working on it again, and it finally dawned on me that it came from a library book.  Once I had that in hand, I could finish, but it doesn't help this little quilt that I had to learn how to sew it TWICE.  (I'll show the full quilt when it's finished.)
This one was a puzzle, too.  It was one we worked on at a charity quilt day.  All I had was the bag with the pieces in it.  Once I started laying them out I remembered we were planning stars, with the snowmen centers.  So I finished the top like this.  I have four wide red strips left over, and no clue what I should have done with them.

Not only do I create stacks of my own UFOs, I actually BUY other people's unfinished projects.  I've been doing this for years, and I've gotten some pretty nice quilts out of them.  It might be a good idea for me to stop sometime, though.
In the picture below, you can see a wonderful pile of stuff I bought at the It's A Stitch Quilt Show last May.  Can you see the small bundle of multicolored fabric wrapped in blue duct tape?  It's in the back, on the left.  It's the one not in a plastic bag.

This was actually a UFO someone donated, which I bought for $2.50.  Below is what it looked like opened out--a long row, a partial row, and a stack of about 50 triangles.

My first thought was to make this into a baby quilt for charity.  The colors are bright and cheerful.  But I didn't like the lack of organization in the original rows.

So I got going with the seam ripper.  I just left the project on the kitchen table, and worked on it a little at a time.

I kept most of the sewn hexagons made up of six triangles, and made more.  I had to cut more triangles, of course.  Some of the fabrics came from the same sale as the UFO.  I sewed white triangles between the hexagons, for contrast.  Every other row ended with a diamond made of two triangles.  White triangles finished off the rows to make a straight edge.

By now it was much bigger than a baby quilt!  That's another danger of UFOs, at least for me--I sometimes get carried away.

I added purple borders, and now the top is done.
This whole quilt is made with one pattern piece, a 60 degree triangle.  For my quilt, I cut 4.5 in. strips, and used a triangle ruler to cut the triangles.  I cut the white side triangles full size, and trimmed them down after they were added to the ends of the rows. 
For me, this is the joy of UFOs--figuring out how to make them into something you like.

[Note to self--remember to add notes to the projects when setting them aside.]

Note to you--Happy Quilting!

Rummage-O-Rama!

I love Wisconsin, but I'm not from here.  I grew up in Indiana, and my family and I lived in Ohio, before moving here 24 years ago, in the summer of 1991.  All that summer, we kept seeing signs around the neighborhood for rummage sales.
We thought it was funny.  Rummage to us foreigners was a verb, as in, "She rummaged through her closet, looking for something she could still fit into."  On the signs, and in the newspaper, it was used as an adjective, and even as a noun, as in, "They really have some great rummage."  My favorite new word (after bubbler) was Rummage-o-rama, which was a big event held every so often at the fairgrounds.
Of course we had similar sales in Ohio and Indiana.  We called them yard sales, which makes perfect sense because they were held out in the yard.  A friend and I used to go "yard sailing" with our young kids.  (Where else can you buy a kid a toy for 25 cents?)  There were also garage sales, which were the same thing as yard sales, except that the sellers had an actual garage and so were snootier.
Whatever you call it, I love it.  It really appeals to my bargain hunting/recycling side.  But it can take all day to hit all the rummage sales in the area, and sometimes you don't find anything beyond baby clothes, bar stools, and VHS tapes.
Unless you go to a special fiber arts rummage!  Which is where I got the loot pictured above.  And below.

The picture at the top of today's blog is of most of the things I bought at the annual rummage sale at the Wisconsin Museum of Quilts & Fiber Arts last Friday.  The items for the sale were donated, and then sold to raise money for the museum.  The immediately above picture is just the fabric.  Yards and yards of cotton fabric, from small scraps to several yards long.  Some items were priced separately.  Most of this fabric I stuffed into a bag for a low, low price.

There was also yarn!  This is 100% wool, destined to make hats, mittens, socks and sweaters this fall.
My eyes glazed over after a while, but I did manage to find 3 books.  They had hundreds.
The basket blocks are OLD.  There are 30 of them.  Three of them are basted, ready to applique.  The other 27 are finished.  An amazing deal for $10. (Of course this adds to my project list.  But it was such a deal!  And the blocks are an unusual pattern.  That's my story and I'm sticking to it.)
I overheard this exchange at the table of fabric, while we shoppers were stuffing our bags.
Shopper One:  "You know, we women are gatherers.."
Shopper Two:  "Really?  I just thought we were hoarders."
All Shoppers:  (laughing)
In my opinion, we're not hoarders if we USE what we buy.  Or at least pet it once in a while.
I've already used a small piece of my amazing loot, as the binding for this little lap quilt:

The center of the quilt is made of squares I bought at a quilt show rummage table a couple of years ago.

Can you see the seams in the big purple floral print?  I had to use one other square to make this one big enough.  This is how our foremothers coped.  Works for me.

Here's the purple binding.  It was a Fons and Porter print from several years ago.  Now it's washed, cut, and put to good use.  Plus the scraps are trimmed and in the bins.
This little quilt will probably go to a nursing home patient, where I hope its colors cheer her day.
Most of the fabric pieces and scraps I bought at the rummage sale will go into my charity quilts.  Some pieces are even big enough for backing.  I also made sure to get some bright colors for the quilts I make for kids.
There is nothing like new (old?)  fabric to stir up new ideas. 
Many thanks to the museum volunteers who run the sale, and the generous people who donated the items.
Happy shopping, and happy quilting!