Week of October 1st

So I have still been sewing quite a bit this week, not as much as the 2 weeks previous.  Partly because the tension on my serger got messed up :( and I need my mom to talk me through out to fix it.  Also I am working on projects that take longer to finish, so I can be working quite a bit, but don't have anything finished.

We have General Conference this weekend, so I wanted some good hand projects to work on while I am listening/watching conference.  So I have been prepping some small tied blankets to do the ties on during conference.

This is last general conference in April, when the kids helped me tie a blanket that my Grandma had made, but never got it tied.

I had a batting party to get all the blankets ready.  I went into my stash of batting and was able to piece all these pieces together to get batting ready for 3 different quilts.  I don't particularly like piecing batting, but I like using up supplies and not throwing stuff away.

This is a closeup of one of the quilts that we will be tying this weekend.  It is a nine patch quilt that my Grandma cut up all the pieces.  They are mostly polester fabrics, and they ar 2" square blocks.  I think she cut these up from old clothes and stuff.  My mom and aunts were just going to throw all these blocks away.  I couldn't handle it, because I imagined my Grandma so painstakingly cutting out all these squares, and I decided to keep them.  I made the below quilt in January 2008 (just 4 months after cleaning out her house) with some of the blocks.  Well I FINALLY have all the blocks sewn up.  I feel happy that these blocks didn'g get wasted.  These quilts remind me sweetly of my Grandma in so many ways.  She never wasted anything.

Quilt I finished in Jan 2008.  You can read about it here. 

This is some purple polyester that I bought to make a swimming sling for Prairie when she was !, but the fabric was all wrong, and it didn't work at all.  I have been taking it apart and I pieced up all the fabric to be the back for the nine patch polyester quilt.  I am sure my Grandma would be proud that I repurposed some fabric for the back of the quilt.

So my Grandma seems to be a theme with these projects.  This is some flannel that she had stored away at her house.  She always made nice little tied blankets for people when they had a baby.  I thought I would make a nice little tied blanket with this flannel that I got form her house.  I decided that I didn't want to use anything except the flannel from her house, so I had to be creative in piecing the backside.  This is a closeup of the back so you can see all the ways it had to be pieced.  So this will get the ties and I will finish the edges this weekend!

 This is the last project I have been working on this week.  I have been working on quilting up this bad boy.  I pin-basted this thing in 2008 and was working away on quilting it but the bobbin tension got messed up, so I stopped.  My mom was nice enough to unpick on the quilting that had loose bobbin threads, but I never got back to quilting it.  It was supposed to be a wedding present for one of my best friends, on sunday it will be her 7 year anniversary, oops!  So I am almost done with quilting the stars, and then I just need to quilt the borders.  I was thinking that hand sewing the binding down would be a good conference project, but I don't know if I will have to time to get it to the point before saturday or sunday.  I guess we will just see.