Happy Halloween!

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Bad Ass Pinking Shears

These are the far out pinking shears I found last Saturday at an estate sale.
My estate sale 'runner' usually hangs out in the Woodburn area so it was a surprise to see her in the Portland Gateway area.
Which, oddly enough, is near my favorite fabric store, Fabric Depot.

Her sale advertised the usual estate stuff plus YARN. Yes there was boat loads of yarn and just a wee bit of sewing notions.
These are still sharp and I love the blades. They give off that "we mean business" vibe.
$5.00.

 Also found, biggest covered buttons ever.
$2 ziploc -selling the rest of the notions.
I have a purpose for these if I can find the darn tutorial again.

And I just asked my creative friend if she had any jump rings on her.
hah - I find everything at garage sales.

Look at these cool tweezers. One can never have enough tweezers in life. . . or is that sewing machines. . . or is that scissors. . . patterns. . .fabric. . .

The Pink Windmill

                May I present to you The Pink Windmill

Almost the entire baby-sized quilt is made from stash. Hooray for me.
I've had these Minky pieces in stash for several years (garage sale find .50 cents) and thought they would go well with the vintage Spring Industries gingham rabbit - reminiscient of Current, Inc stationery imagery.

I found more than four yards of the gingham rabbit this summer at a local garage sale for $2 - yes, two bucks. I promptly sold 3 yds  and kept the long yard for me.

Still, it was pink. I saw a post on Benta's site where she was doing a christmas quilt with prairie point edging and I was inspired to add some prairie point windmills to break up all the too cute gingham rabbits.

 

I feel so quilty - cutting up perfectly good fabric and sewing it back together again.

The gingham checks are 2"square and 3" prairie points looked too small so I went with 4" squares  to fold and I love how it turned out. 


I love how the day turned out too. It's been sunny all morning which was much easier getting a photo to look good and not twisty in the wind.

I still have to quilt it and am thinking of tying it with yarn. That minky is the very devil to sew with as it stretches in weird unexpected ways that you cannot control. I hand-basted the quilt top to the minky backing and then purposely put the minky in the middle of the quilt sandwich with the batting while I sewed the edges.
I thought I was never going to get a squared-off quilt backing out of it.

Any thoughts on quilting this pink beauty?

A.  Hand -tie with yarn
B.  Hand quilt around the squares
C. ???

Rocket Baby Quilt Finished

One quilt finished. Need to tackle my pink one still.

 A very windy and blustery Pooh day. 
Yesterday was stormier, today we get intermittent sunbreaks.

 The backing is a mini-check flannel. You can see the scraps in the binding.
Which makes my heart sing. That piece will not be added to stash.

I was able to hit FabricDepot yesterday for the backing fabrics after work and a doctor's appointment. There was an estate sale nearby that made driving out there worthwhile. I found some pinking shears that are the coolest ever.

I machine quilted using a wavy line found in my machines' hundred stitch library - very simple. 
Rows four inches apart. I'm not a fan of every inch needs to be quilted. I like the quilt to be more plush and soft.

Inside is Hobb's Heirloom Cotton Batting - another garage sale acquisition and mostly gone making these two baby quilts. Yay!

Velvet Elvis

My newest plant lust: Velvet Elvis.
Latin name: Plectranthus

This one dropped into my cart last spring because of the plant label. It showed lots of little tubular flowers on stalks - somewhat like salvia.

I always buy a few filler plants for my patio pots in the Spring. This one grew and grew and grew some more. No flowers. But it was super happy to make my patio it's home so I watched it and watered it as it grew some more.

After a long hot, dry summer, in which it did nothing but grow, it burst forth with these delicious orchid-type flowers in October.

Oh my.

The leaves have a  nice purplish/blue undertone and I am now on a quest to see if I can get it to winter over.

Dahlia from my Mom & Dad's place. 

I am super lazy with dahlias. I do not dig them up to winter over. 
Four out of five years, they will survive our Oregon winters and come back better than ever. That 5th winter, they tend to freeze too long and turn to mush. Which most of mine did last winter - except for this one which is protected by an evergreen yew situated nearby.

These landscape roses are out front and they bloom wildly from late April to late November. I have a love/hate relationship with these. I love all the constant blooming but they have lethal thorns. Not just the usual rose thorns but double'O'7 thorns.

'Tis the season. Apple pie time.

My avocados.

Like most people, I've always heard you can grow your own grapefruit from seed, avocado from seed, etc. The reality is frustrating. There is the missing secret of getting them to work. I think I watched every youtube video to find out what I was doing wrong. The toothpicks, the careful scraping off the bottom of the pit, -- I must have spent 14,000 hours googling to find out how to do it.

Here's how; You pick a nice slightly ripe avocado and sit it on the counter for a few days to get it to that optimal 'ripeness'. You peel it, put it on your salad greens, wash the pit and carry the pit outside where you cram it down into the soil of one of your patio pots.
Forget about them.
Tada! they all grow.

I have four in this pot. This is their second year. Debating whether to re-pot before bringing it inside for the winter or leaving it rootbound......

Rocket Baby Quilt

I sewed this up yesterday afternoon. It's a baby quilt  for a friend of mine.
I was thinking she was having a boy.
She's having a girl.

oh boy!

So this will probably go into my etsy shop.
This first photo is outside - see how the orange is orange?
Next photo inside my sewing room - see how the orange went red?

When taking photos, quilters not only have to worry about lighting more, they have to figure out how to show that the seams are straight. Mine all  look catty-whompus  in these photos. I assure you all my little quarter-inch seams match.


I wanted a blue, orange & gray theme to my fabrics. Since I don't quilt (almost never), most of my prints  --are prints, not solids. It was difficult to find enough 'solids' to offset the definite airplane and elephant theme going on.

Just goes to show you that you can never hope to have enough fabric.






Testing out a binding material. This light and dark airplane material is all over the quilt top in the above photos. I don't know whether to use this fabric.
I'm not real fond of light-colored anything for boys but it seems to work.

This is more of the quilting I like as it was not monotonous figuring out fabric placement in my no pattern sew-as-you-go way.






It's a busy quilt, but then, boys are quite busy.
Right - off to start that girl's quilt....

Check out Gina's Etsy store - she makes the most amazing wedding treasures.

Needle Books

When my children were little, we had a little game we played when out shopping with all the pretties vying for their attention. I would give a quarter to the first one who spotted an airplane.

I got the quarter last Thursday.
After work, aka the shift that started at 4am, Creative Girl and I hopped in her truck to go find a garage sale.

 The black paper (at the top) is in there to keep the needles shiny (no rust). The black paper is cut with the center notch too.

These were all inside a vintage plastic sewing box. With threads, scissors, thimbles, lovely sewing notions.
The seller wanted $20 which could be considered high for a garage sale,  but it had a Pièce de résistance.

A needle book 'made in Czechoslovakia.   In 1914.
I didn't quite swoon, but I may have *sighed*.

And, of course, when I got home to look at things properly, there was the airplane needle book from the Army and Navy.

 I love these older books. Look at the design behind the needles.
A lovely random floral design.
Nowadays, we are so spare with our art.

Back side

Finally, taking photos with the waning September sun, here's some hydrangea blooms on my kitchen table. . . and their 'friends'. . .