Peter Rabbit - Friday finish

Quilted, bound, washed and ready to be used.  It feels great to finally finish this after a year or two in the needs to be quilted pile.  The pattern is my take on The Crafty Quilters Peter Rabbit wall hanging. You can find the tutorial for her wall hanging here.

The quilt has no border, instead I carried the sashing design out for the border.  Because the sashing has cornerstones I had to use a super small binding that finishes at a quarter inch.  The normal binding that uses 2.5 strips of fabric would have made the cornerstones look like rectangles.    Cutting the 1.5" strips of fabric on the bias made it a little easier when it came to hand stitching it to the back of the quilt.

 You can see below the cornerstones and the tiny binding.

There's really nothing more I can say about this quilt so I'll just show you a few more close ups and call it day.

~ Lea Anne ~

Sew Fresh Quilts~Have a Jolly little Christmas

Hi quilting friends!  I just wanted to pop in today to share a cute free quilt along.  Lorna over at SewFreshQuilts once again has designed a super cute quilt along.

"Have a Jolly Little Christmas" is free and a new block is posted every 2 weeks.

The quilt along started in January but there's still plenty of time to catch up.  Lorna also shares ideas for several layout options.

Including a few ideas for smaller projects using these blocks.

Hop on over to get the free tutorials and coloring pages download by 

clicking here.

Restoring a treasure

 Last weekend I went on a little quilting retreat to my Aunt Brenda's house.  She's the proud new owner of a Baileys Home Quilter on a frame.  It was delivered and set up during the visit.  The plan was to show her the basics about quilting on a frame, fix a couple of her sewing machines while she played with her new toy, and start piecing a new quilt pattern designed little ole me.  Well she's got the basic idea of quilting on a frame but there's still lots to learn.  I was able to fix one sewing machine but the other was out of time.  Timing a machine is above my machine maintenance abilities.  And my new quilt pattern...well it never even made it to the cutting table.  We were having too much fun playing with her new quilter and shopping.  Then she hit me with a big surprise.  She gave me my Grandmas's(her moms) sewing machine.  What a treasure since I also own my other Grannies sewing machine and will soon have my mom's also.  This machine just needed a little TLC.  It had been stored away for years(decades) before my Aunt took possession so I can't blame her for it's condition.  For the most part all it needed was a little elbow grease.

Only a few of the accessories were missing. The feed dogs in it were coated with rubber.  The rubber has turned to mush.  It would stitch as long as I pulled the fabric through.  It's good to know that it'll make a stitch, no timing issues!  After doing a google search I found two sets of feed dogs that originally came with this machine.  The rubber coated ones and the normal toothed kind.  Might as well get them both so this machine will be complete.  I also found a free  Touch and Sew Maintenance manual.  Guess what?  The manual covers how to set the timing!  YEAH!  It's not needed now but all machines are pretty much the same when it comes to setting the timing.  This will come in handy.  

Luckily all of the cams, needle plates, and couple feet were still in the original accessory box.  And believe it or not the owners manual was in fairly good shape also.  The front cover is missing but I can live with that.

I can't wait for the new feed dogs to arrive so I can take this girl for a test drive.  The funny thing about this whole story is I had one of these Touch and Sew sewing machines for years.  The only difference was mine was in a table and had no cams so it did fewer stitches.  It came from the high school I attended.  When I purchased my new machine with all the bells and whistles in 2011 my Touch and Sew was donated to Goodwill.  Well I regret that decision and have been looking to buy another on Craigslist for about 2 months.  But something told me to wait.  I'm so glad I listened to my inner voice.   Thank you so much Aunt Brenda for passing your treasure on to me, she'll be loved and well taken care of for years to come.

Simple quilt finish and quicky tutorial

 A couple of weeks ago I finished a lap quilt and forgot to share it here on the blog.  This is the last of the simple quilts I made during the last few weeks of taking care of mom.  The simple designed allowed for mindless sewing for the soul and a quick finish.  

The idea for the quilt came from seeing this picture on google while searching for quick quilt patterns.  Sadly I cannot give credit where credit is due because the google picture links to pinterest and when I get to pinterest this picture isn't anywhere to be found.  So somebody is being cheated by google and pinterest.

With that little rant behind us lets get back to the pattern.  Here's my EQ7 drawing of a small lap quilt.   Since the quilt is basically scraps, except for the red border, I designed by how many 2.5 squares were already cut and ready to sew.  The sashing and background fabric were leftovers from a jelly roll and some 2.5 scraps.  

The quilt finishes at (64 x 72)

If you'd like to make this quicky quilt here's a quicky visual tutorial/pattern.  You'll need some quilting knowledge I'm not going to explain every step n the quilt top making process.  Don't forget my blog is printer friendly just scroll down to the bottom of this post, click on the print friendly icon to print this page in pdf format.  It will also allow you take out parts of this post you don't want to print.

Use the the picture above and the first full quilt drawing to help you with your layout.

~ Lea Anne ~