Yesterday I Made Leaves

Yesterday I was going to bind my Plum Millie quilt.  I made leaves instead.

On several recent dog walks, I saw houses with purple or orange lights on their trees.  Pretty!  I decided I should retire the elephants from my elephant tree, wrap the branches with lights, then make leaves to hang.

Here's the starting point.  The elephant tree was in a turquoise ceramic pot, but now I was in the mood for this neutral-colored pot.  After potting the root ball of this tree, I added some stones on the bottom, but not too many.  The pot was heavy enough as it was.  I filled the rest of the empty area with crumpled newspaper.

 

The pot has a really rough bottom, so I have it sitting on this plate.

The stores were out of orange lights, so I bought a box of purple.  But they were so dark you couldn't see them in the daylight, so I fetched the strand of yellow and white lights I had in the basement.  I wrapped and wrapped and wrapped the 20 feet of wire around all the branches.  It wasn't any fun, and it will be even less fun when I have to unwrap it.

It makes sort of a gobby mess, so I need to train my brain to only look at the lights, not the wire.

At the base of the tree, to cover the newspaper, I piled on thread and felt balls.

I made nine different leaves, seven of which I'll show you.  All of them are wool or felt on the front, fused to fabric, held together with a variety of free motion quilting.  I did a little beading on all of them.  Not a lot, because I wanted to finish the project in one day.

This leaf is brown wool.

The orange leaf is also wool, but the yellow one is felt with a tie-dye pattern.

This leaf is felt, with snippets of fabric and beads layered on top.

This is my favorite leaf, made from tie-dyed felt.

Another felt leaf, with snippets of Plum Millie scattered across the top.

This is my goofiest leaf, because it doesn't look like a leaf silhouette.  I like the color, though, so I kept it.

Now I need to get Plum Millie bound, so I can move on to another quilt.  I have one UFO from 2-3 years ago and it really bugs me.  I don't need another one.  My goal is to do that binding this weekend, then start out next week with a cute little project.

Last of the Zinnias

In early summer, I bought eight packages of flower seeds for $2 from a dollar store.  I bought them so I could use the packages as decoration, but I eventually opened them and planted the seeds.  You get what you pay for, and between the eight packages, I had about a teaspoon of seeds.

The only ones that germinated were Zinnias and Morning Glory.  These are the last of the Zinnias for the year, combined with Aster and Chelone.

Monday is Fun Day - Poodle Canister

Poodle canister, purchased earlier this month from my favorite flea market.

Spool Pin Cushion

I didn't think I needed another pin cushion, but who am I kidding?  They take so little time to make and are an easy way to try out a new block.

Spools of thread are a common motif in quilt patterns, but I hadn't made one until last month.

I used the free pattern from Fresh Lemons Quilts.  

If you like spool blocks, check out Faith's Fresh Spool Series that started this past Monday.  Every week for the next five weeks, she'll share another spool pattern.  

Monday is Fun Day - Washi Tape Pots

I recently bought some mums for my sewing room.  I was feeling cheap, so I bought outdoor mums, in yukky pots.  (I bought them at a big box home improvement store - $1.88 for the small mums, and $3.33 for the medium.)

I was also feeling lazy, and I didn't want to repot them for the few weeks they'd stay in bloom.

So I slapped some washi tape on the pots and stuck them in clear saucers.  Works for me.

Plum Millie - the Quilting

Yesterday I finished quilting my Plum Millie quilt.

I quilted one block at a time.  Each block is approximately 12.5" so it was lots of fun to zip around on it and just have a small little sandwich to maneuver.

I started with green thread and echoed all the strips.  After doing all twenty blocks, I switched to pink thread and did all twenty blocks again.  After doing the same with orange and yellow, for some of the areas I had to start over again with green.

That thread in the lower right corner is just a dangler that will go away when I square up the blocks.

I laid out the blocks the way I wanted them before I started quilting, so I labeled each one with the row and column number so I could reassemble them correctly.  I also wrote "top" on there, and pinned the label to the top.  You might think that such a random assortment of strips wouldn't matter as to how you assembled them, but it mattered to me.

These are the backing squares.  

When the quilt is pieced, the back will be a mirror image of this, because I'll be sewing together twenty sandwiches.  If this was going to be a one large pieced rectangle for the backing, then it would look just like this.

It made my brain itch, but this is what causes the mirror image: My row 1 column 1 front block got quilted to the row 1 column 1 large floral backing block in the upper left corner.  When all the blocks are sewn together, and you turn the quilt over, that block stays in row 1, but moves to column 4.

At first I didn't want a mirror image, so I started rearranging the back squares so they would come out right.  But I liked it just as well either way, so I put them back and decided to go find something else to worry about.

Monday is Fun Day - Three-Tier Plate Stand

My favorite flea market was open this past weekend.  I get lots of fun things there, like a vintage donkey, tiny ballerinas, unusual scrapbook paper, and a pixie ring.

I was looking for something exactly like this, so I was really happy with my find.  She was using it for display, but it was also for sale.  

She epoxied vintage plates to some interesting "poles".  Not something outside the realm of my capability, but a person doesn't have to make everything, do they?

Here's another reason why it's just as well I didn't try to make this.  It wasn't until I was photographing it, that I realized this top "pole" has a face on it.  I've never seen a bottle or vase (whatever it is) like that, and I like the character it adds.

The bottom "pole" is a beautifully crackled planter.  Again, I've not seen a vintage planter this pretty, and the new planters can be fairly expensive, sometimes more than the price of this entire piece.

The middle plate has handles (another first for me in vintage shopping), which line up with the handles on the planter.

This is going in my sewing room, but I'm not sure what to store on it yet.  At 12" tall and 10" wide at the bottom, there's plenty of options.

Plum Millie - a Good Mistake

I can't listen to music and sew at the same time, evidently.

I made this pattern before, and know perfectly well how it goes.  You cut your fabric, insert a strip, then sew everything back together.  Simple?  Yes.

This is how it's supposed to look, nicely intersecting lines.

But when you're listening to music, you can get distracted at the ironing board and mix up the order of the segments and not even realize it.  See, I was doing them in sets of three, to be efficient, and that made it easy to scramble them, like you see here.

Sewn together, they don't line up.  At this point, I noticed my mistake.  Of course my first reaction was "wrong".  But it was quickly followed by "so what?".  I kind of liked it.  It had a branched effect that went with the title of the quilt (Plum Millie).  If I lost you there, think plum tree.

I kept the three branched blocks, made some "right" blocks, then made two more branched ones.  Now I'm almost done with the twenty blocks, and I have eight branches.  They kind of grew on me.

Monday is Fun Day - Pixie Ring

Too big for my finger, but just right for a temporary landing spot on an unfurling leaf.

Plum Millie - the Revised Plan

For the strips in Plum Millie, I was going to use pieced scraps.  I pulled the ones I wanted, started ironing them, then lost interest pretty quickly.  The amount of time it would take to piece them, only to cut them into one-inch strips, seemed silly.  I wouldn't have minded the time if I was going to enjoy the process, but I no longer saw the fun in it.

The revised plan is to cut strips from this print, part of Kim Schaefer's Dazzle fabric line for Andover.  As you can see, it goes perfectly with the inspiration for my latest sewing room re-do, a vintage metal tray.

Folded to fit under my one-inch slotted cutting guide, it was quick work to make the cuts.

There's enough variety in each strip that I think it will look just fine and not be boring.

I saved that collection of scraps and put them in a safe spot so I can use them in another quilt.  I recently attended a lecture by Amanda Jean Nyberg and picked up a copy of her Sunday Morning Quilts book.  Right now, I'm thinking Scrapper's Delight, made from quarter Log Cabins.  Of course, by the time I get to that bucket of scraps, I might have another revised plan.