Sew Awesome Pineapple

 This week really has been all about just playing with fabric and designs and ideas and techniques that I've been wanting to try for a while but somehow just never seem to have the time for.  And it has felt so good to do just that.  I really needed to get the creative juices flowing again and this exercise has been just the thing to do that. 

Here is the fourth mini quilt that I've churned out in the past week.  This time its a scrappy pineapple block with a fussy cut "Sew Awesome" in the center. :)

 Amanda Jean over at Crazy Mom Quilts has a great tutorial on how to make a pineapple block without paper piecing it which you can find here.  Amanda is the queen of scraps and this definitely proved to be a fun exercise in playing with scraps.

 Ok, back to sewing now. I've got a few more little mini quilts in progress as I just have some fun exploring and making for the sake of making. :)

A Mini Lone Star Quilt

I know that the Lone Star quilt design has been around for ages and it's a super traditional quilt, but gaahhh, I can't get rid of the itch of "I must make one!!!"

So, I made one.

And it was really good.

And not hardly scary at all. All thanks to this fabulous tutorial I found by Better Of Thread. Janice was even amazing enough do all the math and provide a chart with numerous different sizes of the Lone Star block.  I ended up going with the smallest sized star finishing at 16" because going tiny with bias edges is always the smart thing to do.... Thankfully though, it did turn out pretty great.

But! But, now that I've made one, I'm even more obsessed! It has only served to fuel the itch, but this time, I'm thinking something more along the lines of a queen sized Lone Star quilt.  Not that I don't all ready have a bagillion quilt ideas being too be made. ;)

More For The Sake of Play

After cranking out tons of yarn bowls for wholesale and prepping for a craft show, I was feeling in a sewing funk. So I decided to take this week and just play with scraps and ideas I've been putting off and just have fun sewing for the sake of sewing versus sewing with a deadline. And it. felt. good.  On Thursday, I made the rainbow mini quilt as seen in the previous post. And on Friday, I pulled out a pile of hexagons that have been sitting basted just waiting to come to life since last summer.

I didn't really have a plan of what I wanted to do with them so I just played around laying then or on a large scrap of white fabric until I had an arrangement I liked. I then glued them on and quilted them down based on a tutorial by Modern Domestic for making "Modern Hexies".

It turned out quite fun and I even had some scraps of binding left over from other projects that complimented the mini quilt quite nicely. 

So this has become my favorite way of labeling my quilts lately - a nice little corner label with minimal hand sewing and just enough information to know it's mine. 

It felt good to just play and have fun and to sew for the sake of sewing and making something new and beautiful. 

I added this mini quilt along with some I've made previously and 2 I received in swaps last year to a little corner of my bedroom.  I'm in love with how they look all hung up together. My husband doesn't even seem to mind too much - he says it's cute because it's "me". :)

Rainbowey Scraps

This past fall, I made up a pile of tic tac toe blocks to donate to the #quiltblockstohealviolence project headed up by Jackie Gillis over on Instagram.  I was left with a whole pile of little half square triangles left over from making the blocks and I couldn't bear to just throw them out.

Instead, they have been sitting all together in a baggy in my scrap bin.  Well, yesterday, we had a rainy day after a week of gorgeous spring weather providing a needed break from all the yard work I've been doing.  And since I didn't have any pressing projects that I wanted to or needed to be working on, I decided to pull out those scraps and just play.  Half square triangles are so fun to play with and when they are in rainbow order - oh the possibilities!!

I went with a rainbowey diagonal stripe layout and just had fun sewing up those tiny triangles - not stressing too much about getting them perfect.

I framed it with some Essex yarn dyed linen and went to town quilting it.  Two layers of batting combined with matchstick quilting made for all kinds of yummy texture on this little quilt.

Feeling lazy and not wanting to make some new binding, I dug through my binding scraps and found enough of this teal blue Pie Making Day fabric from 3 different projects to use as binding for this mini quilt! Score!

And now I've got a sweet little mini quilt for my wall and a day well spent playing with scraps and color. :)

Catching Up

Huh, look at that.  It's all ready been over a month since I last posted about my crafty doings here on my blog.  Where does the time go?  Oh, well this time, I actually have an answer to that!  I spent a week out of town on a road trip with just me and my 2 little boys to visit family back in New York state.  And the rest of this past month has been spent sewing like a crazy woman to get 3 wholesale orders out and prep for a craft show!  Yes, so many really fun opportunities have come my way since March. 

 

First, a few maker, entrepreneur and mom, Kat (whom you can find here on Instagram or here where she and her business partner sells gorgeous hand dyed yarns and rovings), spotted some rope bowls I had been making and posting about on Instagram.  Instantly, she had a brilliant idea to have me make some rope bowls that would be the right size and shape to be used for yarn bowls.  Umm, yeah! After a few trial runs, we landed on something that was just perfect. :) (First picture is the right size/shape. Second picture is the snap/loop finish we came up with to provide a loop for the yarn to travel through while also making it possible to take a project out of the yarn bowl before it's finished)

 She wholesale ordered 10 of them from me for a fiber expo they were having a booth at in Chicago a few weekends ago. 

Well, those 10 rope bowl/yarn bowls sold right out, and she needed another 10! for another fiber expo they were doing in Ann Arbor the following weekend!  

And those nearly sold out too!  Crazy right?!?!  It's pretty exciting to be a part of the collaborative project with a fellow maker and to really be a part of "makers supporting makers"! I love it! 
So, as if that wasn't enough to keep me busy, out of the blue, I was contacted by a lovely lady who owns "The Happy Woman" shop in Sutton's Bay, MI.  She had seen my rope bowls that I had listed up in my Etsy shop and loved them and wanted to wholesale buy them from me to sell in her lovely shop!  Not gonna lie - I totally squealed and did a happy dance when I got her email!  :)  Here are my rope bowls in her shop.  They fit in quite nicely with the other beautiful things she has curated for her shop. 

I also had another opportunity work out to sell my handmade sewn items in a brick and motor shop in Traverse City, MI called "My Secret Stash".  It's a nice little shop filled with beautiful, fun and unique items from fellow Michigan makers and artist.  Things are sold on commission so I'm going to try it for a few months and see how it works out.  Right now, I've got a nice selection of Elephants, Bunnies, Pencil Pouches, Fabric Baskets, and Pacifier clips in this shop. 

And then, to top off all the crazy busy fun going down around here, I had a craft show this past Saturday!  Naturally, it also happened to be the first truly nice Saturday of the Spring!  So it was a little bit slow and not as large of a turn out as craft shows that I've done in the fall, but still, I did fairly well at it. Well enough to consider it a successful day! :)

Oh, and one last thing! Remember how I've started to make shop samples for the local quilt shop?  Well, I was in there earlier this week and she had the 2 I've gotten done thus far all hung up!  How exciting is that?! :)  They are the large quilt hanging up above the ladies and the mauve/gray quilt next to the owl and hedgehog. 

Plus, I do have a few other finishes that I want to show you, but that will have to be in a few other blog posts which I'll get up soon (hopefully!). :) Thanks for stopping by!