Sewing room usable

Progress has been made! While not everything has been sorted and put away, OK, very little sorted, and a bunch put away, I can actually start sewing in here. The cutting table has been cleared, the Alto has a space, along with the other mats on top of the new cutting island. I'd like the mats to fit better, but they will work. You can see the old cutting island (buffet) in the back of the picture. You can see it is taller than the new island, but DH says he can lift the new one to be the same height. At some point the buffet will turn into a pressing station, I think. The plywood on top of it will be trimmed and turned into a large pressing board.
The quilt hanging from the cabinets is trying to inspire a quilting design. Finished the top ages ago, but never quilted it.

Right now I put my pressing board on top of several project totes, which is close by the sewing station. A couple of things are actually there now, the pressing board and a June Tailor Square n' Block, which doesn't really work for pressing all that well (too cushy), but I do use it for a small design wall. The hole between the totes gives access to the plug outlet in the floor. My Civil War Diary and Baltimore Christmas stuff are in the small satchels between the totes.

Sewing station with easy access to the computer. I watch DVDs on it now, someday will get a TV in here too. Still need to bring in the printer. In back of the monitor, more totes with projects to be started.

The back side of the cutting table, finally found a spot where the file boxes can go. Thread on the floor was displaced with the boxes, it needs to find a new home.

The room is shaping up, now to sew a bit!

Sewing Room coming along

The room being filled with fabric totes, and my treadle base I use as an end table. I do have the machine, but need to work on it to get it to sew. I actually have another working treadle, but it is staying in the living room for the time being.

The entry way to the room, the rug will be moved closer to the cabinets when they are done, and will have my rocking chair on it. Right now it is being used as padding while my DH assembles furniture.

My DH has been very busy assembling furniture from IKEA. One of the first things he built was the VARDE kitchen cabinet with all of the drawers. It has another piece backing it with shelves and will be my cutting island. The drawers have a lot of thread in them so far, and my Bernina accessories, manuals, Marti Michell templates, other specialized templates, and two empty drawers.

You can see the fabric storage cabinets, one more to go, then I need to figure out how to store all of the stuff I want to keep in this room. Some will have to go . At the end of the storage cabinets is a HEMNES bookcase. Another one, with glass doors, is at the opposite end of the room.
Too many magazines, will be purging them too, keeping anything that looks interesting in sheet protectors in a binder. Haven't done that for about 7 years, time to do it again!

A quilt finish

We are having a fundraiser at work to benefit Second Harvest Food Bank and Toys for Tots. Since I work in the space biz, I thought the space panel would be a good jumping off point.

It is only a panel, and I wanted lap size, so played around in EQ and came up with an Attic Windows layout. The Stonehenge fabric worked perfectly with the colors in the panel (used for the window frame).

I like a skinny border before the final border, but didn't want to find more fabric for this, so went with the double skinny border, and I like it! When it got put on the center, I sewed the border strips together first, pressing some in and some out, so when I mitered the corners they snugged together nicely. I give it away on Thursday, hopefully to a good home.

Sewing Room update

Yesterday and today we got doors! They are not finished yet, still in the raw state, but there are locks on the outside doors and I can now walk from the house into the sewing room without going outside.
New front door, we have been wanting one for a while, new light will replace the dangling one... We are replacing the ugly rock with brick and stucco, so far only the rock has been removed. Soon you won't see the old insulation coming out of the framing.

This is the side door into the sewing room, where my friends can come without going through the house.

This is the door from the porch to the utility room, not exciting.

Finally, a door from the house into the sewing room, so I can sew in my jammies.

The room was also painted a lovely shade of blue, precious dewdrop. But, they neglected to prime the old wall, and it needed it. So, we will see what they do now.

Farmer's Wife Sampler - 96 done now!

Three of these I finished last weekend, and three I finished today.
67 Pine Tree was done with paper piecing.

74 Ribbons - used marti Michell templates, trimming a rectangle to get the paralleogram. I pressed the lighter parellogram out, and the darker one in, so that piecing them together went together pretty easily.

76 Sawtooth - Paper pieced

77 Seasons - debated about templates, but went with paper piecing.

98 Waterwheel - Marti Michell templates

99 W.C.T.U (Women's Christian Temperance Union) - Cut with Marti Michell Templates.

Sewing Room Status

Still no doors, but they did get delivered on Friday and I have hopes that they will be installed next week. And also the walls and ceiling should get painted. I picked out Precious Dewdrop (Kelly Moore) for the walls, and Swiss coffee for the trim and ceiling. Storage shrunk a little with the extension into the room that is around the electrical box. There will be a bookcase in front of it, and then the high cabinets (probably from IKEA) that will hold all of the boxes of fabric that are currently in back of my couch. Lots of boxes.
Right now I am thinking about switching the orientation of my sewing cabinet, so that it faces the room, and the TV. Will need to play around with the layout to see if that will work.

90 blocks done for the Farmer's Wife Sampler quilt

Plugging away here and there, here are some of the latest attempts.
64 Peace and Plenty - made up of lots of 1 1/2" HST (and so is the next block). For a change of pace, I didn't use Marti Michell templates. Instead I cut squares 2 1/2" of each fabric, put right sides together, stitched 1/4" from the center diagonal line (both sides), cut down the center (between the stitching lines), pressed open and trimmed the sort of square to a perfect 2" square (to finish at 1 1/2"). They were then laid out and pieced together using a scant 1/4" seam. Mostly I pressed to the dark side when pressing the HSTs open, except for the corner squares in Peace and Plenty. The pressing worked much better if those squares were pressed to the light side (so the seams nested together when piecing the two squares together).

62 Old Windmill

60 Noon and Light - Marti Michell templates - Background pieces are (finished sizes) 1 1/2" squares (A-5), 1 1/2" QST (A-7) and 1 1/2" HSTs (A-6) in the center. Red triangles are also 1 1/2" QST (A-7). For the diagonal strips I used a 3" HST and then cropped the corner with A-7.

58 Mother's Dream - I used a border print for the background green bit and wanted the lines in it to go around the block, so I pieced the corner HSTs using two QSTs. Marti Michell templates where I could and templates from EQ when I couldn't (the rectangles). The center square is a 3" diagonal square (A-3), large setting triangle is a 3" QST (A-4) and the corners would be a 1 1/2" HST (A-6), but I pieced together two 1 1/2" QSTs (A-7) instead.

47 Homemaker - I used templates I printed from EQ, put double sided tape on the back of the template, placed it on the fabric and used a small rotary ruler placed with the 1/4" line on the seam line to cut. I did mark the seam lines so I could do the Y-seams. (I showed this block before, but it was a terrible picture!)

46 Hill and Valley - more Marti Michell templates, the large triangles are 3" HST (A2), the green HSTs are 2" HST (B-13), the smallest green triangles & brown triangles are 2" Quarter square triangles (B-14), and the square on the diagonal measures 2" on the diagonal (D-28).

45 Grape Basket is a Five patch block, so I paper pieced it.