A Prairie Home Quilts

Phase Two is complete. The fabric was moved from my closet onto the shelves I bought and put in the closet in this room.  You can see a few of the plastic bins holding WIPs up on the top shelf.

I moved the dry sink onto the wall away from my design wall.  On paper it looked like it would be a tight squeeze between it and the file cabinet near the desk — like I’d have to turn sideways to fit — but I can fit through there just fine.  I’ve decided to make a pressing board that will cover the top of the dry sink using Sharon Schamber’s video instructions. That will be a Phase Three project.

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I bought two 4′ x 8′ sheets of styrofoam to use as a design wall surface.  The wall slopes down to 7′ 6″ though so I need to cut them down and mark and cut out the spot for the electrical outlet.  I’ve purchased gray fleece to cover them.  Another Phase Three project.

I needed more table space if I plan to do more machine quilting.  Mom had this table she got at a yard sale for $5 in the garage.  Her plan was to refinish it but she said I could have it.  It measures 48″ long x 30″ wide.

I moved the Singer treadle tables — one on the left to use as a small cutting surface while I’m piecing.  The other on the right which, as you can see, is sort of a catch-all space.  [You thought I was so neat, right?] You can see more plastic bins holding WIPs on the right behind the rulers in the picture.  I use these so that I can just take whatever I want to work on with me while I’m house sitting.  Makes it easy to just grab a few projects and go.  The white cart under the table is not working for me as I had hoped.  I need to find a home for it in another room.

Ludo [AKA Freckle Lips or Mr. Pink Ears] is allowed to sleep on the treadle tables…

When I move the sewing machine off to the left, I have a nice space for cutting fabric on the table.  Unfortunately Ludo loves to sleep right where I’m working and I have to keep moving him back to the treadle table.

Total spent to date: Basket $1, Inkwell $1, Saucer $1, Shelf Unit $20, Love Plaque $4, Colored Bottles $20, 2 Sheets Styrofoam $20, Fleece $25, Duct Tape $4, Double Sided Tape $5 = $101

Need to Buy: 2 new cutting mats, goose neck lamp, wall rack for rulers, purple paint, quilt rack for wall over dry sink.

Phase Three projects: Pressing surface, design wall, move out white cart, find permanent place to keep Singer 401 and overhead projector, hang ruler rack and quilt rack, more wall decorations.

With all my “road running” I have not spent near enough time working on these this month.  I’m just taking stock and trying to motivate myself for a few finishes as we near the end of the month.

1. Leftovers Again – Untouched.
2. Plaid Bargello – Still just strips. . .
3. Striped Shirt Boxes – I loved the ones I saw everyone making and now that I’ve started one, it’s just not making my skirt fly up.  I guess it’s all the cutting.
4. Crooked Path Table Topper – Finished top.
5. Scrappy Patchwork of the Crosses – First block is done.
6. Nevada – Untouched.
7. Baby Girl Bug – 4 rows of hexagons sewn.
8. Variable Star – Untouched.
9. Plaid 9 Patch – Untouched.
10. Rocky Glen – Untouched.
11. Streak of Lightning – This is the one that I messed up cutting the setting triangles and now the one project has become two — one in plaids and one in florals.  I did get more fabric ordered and the setting triangles cut for the plaid version.
12. Bold Streak – I have one more section of HST to put together and this one will become a quilt top.
13. Field of Flowers – Untouched.
14. Rose Basket – Untouched, but I did rehang it on the design wall hoping to get inspired.  It’s so close to done.
15. Layer Cake – 1 more block done.
16. Liberated Amish Get Together
17. Frederica Josephson Quilt

Cross one off the list and add two more.  That is what we’re supposed to do, right?

1. Layer Cake

You are probably thinking that I’ve gotten lost in my newly arranged creative space and that’s why I haven’t posted.  Well, I do have my space rearranged and I LOVE IT, but I’m doing some temp work with the 2010 Census so I haven’t had time to enjoy my new space.  A drawback?  Not really. It does mean some extra money that I can use for shelving and storage and perhaps even a little extra for FABRIC.  So all in all, I’m okay with it.

Phase One of the redo of my creative space involves rearranging the existing furniture.  I removed a lot of the little  items that were cluttering up the space to another room for now.  As I find a new home for them, I’ll move them back in.  In Creating Your Perfect Quilting Space, Lois suggests making a scale drawing of your room and using index cards to make scale representations of your furniture pieces.  She then suggests playing with different configurations and taking pictures.  I think I have a dozen pictures…  (Yes, this is the kind of thing I love to completely waste time doing…  Sort of like coloring the same quilt design 50 different ways in EQ6 — which I’ve also been known to get caught up in.) I decided on this configuration for the first of the three phases.

The overhead lighting is a ceiling fan in the center of the room.  I have already replaced the bulbs with daylight spectrum bulbs.  I wanted my work areas centered under this overhead lighting a much as possible.

Start of the rearranging…  I emptied the corner near the closet by moving the corner cabinet to [basically] unusable space at the entrance to the room.  The upper cabinet shelves will hold decorative items and antique sewing notions.  There is some storage at the bottom of the cabinet on two shelves but they don’t hold much because of the “V” shape of the cabinet.

Ludo decided the now empty corner looked like a great place for a bath and a nap.  I disagreed. He left to find a hiding place soon after the vacuum arrived.  The small desk got moved into this corner where the first green cabinet was.  The second green cabinet stayed in place.

This is how the room looked when I got done.  The small desk on the left isn’t used for anything.  Basically it’s just being “stored” in my creative space.  I’ve since moved it out and put the rolling cart from the closet there.  I put my wooden ruler rack on top of the cart because it’s right next to the small cutting area set up on my “L” shaped sewing workspace.

I have a small clip-on lamp on the top right corner of the table where my sewing machine sits.  When it’s on, the shadow that you see on my sewing machine bed disappears.  I’ve added a divided basket on the table near the small cutting area to hold scissors, rotary cutters & miscellaneous notions.  It sort of hides the cables from the back of my computer…  I want to paint the basket so I’ll show you a picture when it’s done.

My new desk area.  Yippee! Lots of space on the left to spread out because I’m a LEFTIE. I’ve been in here several nights during the past week working on census stuff at my desk.  It’s been heavenly. See the new-to-me monitor?  It belonged to my youngest son — he gave it to me.  Everyone should have kids as great as mine. Seriously.

The dry sink is still obscuring my design wall which I don’t like/want.  If I put it on the other wall though, there’s not a lot of room to fit between it and the file cabinet when I’m trying to get to my desk.  I’m not sure what the solution is going to be.  This may be the one problem area of the redo…

And finally, the quilt rack.  This wasn’t in the room originally but I wanted to put it in here.  It holds quilts in progress and ones that need to be quilted.  It’s not the right shade of green so I’m going to paint it purple. Yep, purple is going to be my main accent color in here.  (I love color!) At the thrift store, I found the divided basket, a small saucer to hold my bobbins and a green inkwell-looking glass thingy for $1 each.

Total spent to date: $3

After discovering all the things I didn’t like about my creative space, it was time to figure out if I could do anything about those things. While I was house sitting, I had a chance to read through this book.  It was helpful. The before and after pictures were inspiring. (Yes I know, not much of a review.  My recommendation?  Check the book out of the library to see if it is worth the purchase price to you.)  Working in other quilter’s work spaces while I’m house sitting has given me some idea of things that will work for me  and what things I want to avoid.

There are space and money limitations for my redo. My room is about 11 ft x 10 ft. and there is a non-existent budget. I want to use what is already in the room if I can, but I had forgotten how much I loved my old “L” shaped desk and realize that it would be good to have that sort of set up with my sewing area.  I will need to bring in something to create the “L” shape though.  One of the reasons I want to use what is in the room is that I have personal possessions that have been packed away since 1999 and more items that haven’t seen the light of day since 2004.  (And I wonder why my life feels strangely like it’s in limbo?) I don’t want more of my life stuffed into boxes in a closet or worse yet, put out in the garage.

These are some of the other things I want to do:

1. Move the mini ironing board.
2. Set up some direct lighting on my sewing and cutting areas.
3. Create more work space on my desk.
4. Create more work space on my sewing table.
5. Be able to see the design wall from the desk and sewing table.
6. Get to the design wall easily while sewing.
7. Move my fabric into the room.
8. Organize my tools to be within easy reach of where they are most used.
9. Fix up my design wall.
10. Add some more color to the room (it’s awfully GREEN right now).
11. Organize the closet and come up with some good storage solutions.

Let’s see what I can get done on my list in the next month. Hahaha. Another list of things to do!

Thank you all for your wonderful and encouraging comments on my last post.  I have made some decisions about what to do and how I’ll accomplish my goals.  I’m going to try to get everything done in three phases.  Since I don’t have any  money right now, Phase One will start with rearranging what is already in the room.

Much like Meg Ryan’s character in You’ve Got Mail, I’m not expecting  any answers–I’m just sending these comments and questions off into the cosmic void.  [I'm not even bothering to put them into coherent paragraphs...]  It’s become apparent to me that I enjoy starting new projects more than finishing old ones.   Okay, that fact has been apparent to me for a couple of decades actually…  but I do finish things. Eventually. What I should say is that this has become more of a concern during recent weeks. I have noticed lately that I further procrastinate on finishing old projects by continuing to dream up and start more and more new projects.  [Who needs patterns and magazines when your brain is overflowing with ideas??  I fell asleep the other day thinking of a pattern for a Christmas tree skirt and woke up with a pattern idea for kitchen accessories too.]  What’s even more problematic is that recently I’ve started cutting out several new projects without even beginning to sew the last projects I cut out–ones that were just started within the last few weeks.  Is it an obssession? A new disease?  Why do I enjoy dreaming up new ideas, figuring the yardage, and printing and/or cutting the fabric bits for these projects?  Why am I then letting these new projects  languish at that point??  And then starting another project??? Is there a point where your WIP and UFO list, like a fabric stash and number of question marks at the end of a sentence, becomes utterly ridiculous?   Who determines that point anyway? Or is all of this because I have these three other little non-quilting projects to do that I’m totally avoiding? Is starting more and more projects a way to feel too busy to do the non-quilting projects?  I know it’s one way to avoid doing housework. Am I afraid that once I lower the presser foot to the fabric that I won’t be able to quit until I have half a dozen projects  to the completed top stage?  [Hey, I've done my share of quilt binging.]  But then I’d really be behind on those non-quilting projects.  Which would probably cause me to want to start even more projects! That’s it!  I’m a quilt binger or a quiltaholic or something.  Hmmm.  Actually, I think I just answered my own questions… [Thank you, Cosmic Void.] Yes, I’d much rather do the fun stuff and only the fun stuff. I need to get motivated to finish up those three computer-related, non-quilting projects.  And yet I have no valid excuse for not doing them.   It’s funny to me that they are computer projects that are quilting related but not quilting projects.  And, get this…  I’ve started those three projects… just haven’t finished them. I think I need a taskmaster–someone to tell me what I should be doing when and making sure I get it done.  My mother would be a good candidate.  Nevermind.  I’d surely rebel and run for the hills screaming. Perhaps just some dark chocolate would help.

Well I had all these plans. . . I ended up helping out someone who needed me to care for their dogs & horses.  They had an emergency out of town.  It is giving me a chance to do some hand piecing but I’m not getting some other important projects done.  I am posting though on a laptop that my oldest son and daughter-in-law gave me which will be nice to have when I’m house sitting in the future.  It needed a new hard drive which my youngest son put in for me but I don’t have a power cord for it yet so I have limited time to use it before the battery runs down.  I haven’t figured out how to download my email either.  All this to say that I won’t have a chance to post the tutorial yet.  You would think I’ve would have learned by now not to say I’m going to get something done by a certain time as something always comes up.  Why is that?

I’m Not Martha is a quilt that I challenged myself to put together for as little money as possible.  I managed to pull together enough fabrics for the 42 full hexagon diamonds and 8 half diamonds from my meager stash & swap & purchase the rest on sale for about $37.  I’ll make the backing from some of the larger pieces I have in my stash.

Originally I wanted to coordinate the sets so that I could have 7 of each of 6 different colors, but when you’re “making do with what you’ve got,” things don’t always work out like you hoped.  There wasn’t any way to put the fabrics together without mixing & matching colors.  So some diamonds are made with 2 colors — blue & yellow, purple & pink, etc.  And some of the fabrics aren’t as perfectly coordinated as I’d like either, but that’s also part of the “making do” thing.  You actually find yourself being more creative.  I needed 50 sets of fabrics so I mixed & matched as best I could.  (I keep telling myself that it will be part of its charm.)

I fell behind in February in my goal of making one diamond a week but got caught up in March to where I should be.  I managed to stay current in April.  I now have 15 of the 42 full size diamonds done.  That’s 375- 1.25″ hexagons!