Saturday catch-up

I fully intended to put up a post for Finish Friday, but we ended up gone for the day and I was too tired by the time we got home at almost midnight.

Anyway, as far as finishes go ~ I have a few, but the first two do not entail any sewing at all.

I've been wanting to accomplish two things to help me as a quilter ~ and I got them both done this week.  The first was creating a large pressing board (since my ironing board with all those holes in it just plain sucks!).  So my hubby and I went to Home Depot to buy a piece of plywood for that purpose.  I thought it would be good to get his input on what would work for this project.  I wanted something that would be easy to store in case I needed to get the ironing board out of my sewing space which is actually in my kitchen/dining room (we never hardly ever eat at the table ~ it's usually covered in fabric and cutting tools!).  

So once I found a piece of wood (24" x 48"), I covered it in two layers of an old flannel sheet and a piece of home dec fabric (Joann's was having a 50% off sale on their red-tag fabrics, so I paid $4.50 for a yard which fit perfectly!).  I wrapped the board with the flannel - taped that down, then wrapped that with the home dec and taped that down as well.  (I'm not going to show you the back, but imagine lots of bright turquoise duct tape holding everything nice and tight!)  And here's the finished pressing board which for now just sits on top of my old ironing board ~ it's light enough that I can move it anywhere I need to.

I love the fabric ~ makes me happy :)  Since I took these photos, I've moved it so that it's parallel to the big window and it gives me lots of natural light during the day.

My second project was putting up something for a design wall.  Sounds easy enough, but I put it up in a guest bedroom (aka storage room) on the only big wall, which then entailed splitting a king bed into two twin beds, moving them to a different wall and cleaning out some of the things that were stored in there.  But the initial design wall is now up (I hung up two crib-size flannel backed vinyl sheets by sewing loops at the top corners and hanging them on little nails).  Works for me (although I may need a bigger one down the road!).  (BTW, that bag hanging on the closet door is my Aragon Bag ~ love it!)

Now for the sewing part!  I followed traceyjay's Continuous Bias Binding Tutorial, and turned 1/2 yard of fabric (from Deb Strain's Christmas Countdown) into more than 9 yards (!) of bias binding for Christmas tree skirt #1.  Love this method!

 

Last, but not least ~ I finished this week's City Sampler Blocks  # 58, 59 & 60.

So that's it for my belated Friday Finish!  Time to relax with some Tiger baseball, college football, NASCAR & Red Wings hockey  ~ oh, and Mecum auto auction ~ (my husband flips the channels while I catch up on sewing/quilting blogs).  Go Wings!

WIP Wednesday ~ Adventures in binding

Today was binding day on my Pinwheels & Postage Stamps quilt ~ I thought for sure I could do it all in one day ... dream on ...

They say we learn from our mistakes ~ I sure hope so!  I started out OK ~ I trimmed the quilt down cutting off the excess batting and backing.  So I thought I'd stitch along the edges to make them a little flatter so they'd stay still while I'm sewing on the binding.  Silly me, I must have sewn 1/4" away from the edge ~ not realizing that I needed to sew the BINDING 1/4" away from the edge.  Big mistake!  

Here's the binding all clipped on and ready to sew (I was really optimistic at that point!)

Once I got the binding sewn on, guess what showed up underneath?  Yup ~ the first line of stitching.

So I started doing a lot of this

and ended up with a whole bunch of visible little stitch holes.  Not happy.  I guess I'm just hoping that those little holes will eventually go away once the quilt is washed?

So tomorrow, my goal is to put on a good movie (or two) and hand-stitch the binding on.  I don't trust myself to machine stitch it!  Hopefully, I've learned something from today's adventures.  :)