Not Much Stitching... BUT...

... BUT lots of SEWING!

Happy Tuesday everyone and welcome to November!

My hands have been very busy over the last couple of weekends doing everything but stitching. Which I need to get at!!! I miss you my dear cross stitch. 

With, dare I say it, Christmas on the horizon, I've been busy planning projects to give as gifts. Being a little cash strapped for gifts this Christmas, I've been searching for a way to give the people I care most about something special, that will mean a lot, and not break the bank all at the same time. 

And lets face it... I'm not about to be giving away my cross stitch projects (the big ones that is) to anyone anytime soon. I'm not the fastest stitcher, so when I finish a project I have so much emotional and sentimental attachment to it that I just can't bring myself to give it up. AKA: I love them too much.

Perhaps this is a little selfish of me, but I can't see giving away something I've spent literally WEEKS if not MONTHS on. Also there's that other danger that some of you stitchers may relate to, that you work months on a beautiful piece and then big moment comes where you give it to the person it was intended for annnnnnd... nothin'. They don't appreciate... maybe they don't even EVER hang it up! Or worse still they could be like "what on earth is this...." in the bad way. 

All I have to say is: NOPE not going there. I've heard way to many horror stories to even consider giving away any of my cross stitches to anyone but my mom (a cross stitcher herself). 

What I HAVE decided to do is make some quilted items for some special people. I already had a few jelly rolls lying around and just bought some majorly discounted x-mas fabric, so I figure I'll make something out of them. 

A pic of my first quilt... all for me :)

Love the colours :)

New project! Made from a Jelly Roll.

All my scraps! Not bad eh?

Why not……

Pining of the quilt top with help of my best friend. You'd be
surprised how fast 100 pins disappear…

I've literally spent the last two weekends piecing, cutting, sewing, ripping..., and sewing some more. I never thought my back could ache so much!!! I woke up this morning and I swear every bone in my upper chest and whole back cracked. As I'm going through the work day, and even as I write now, just the littlest movement lets off an extremely satisfying crack. Hopefully my bones and muscles will get used to this soon because I think it's fair to say I've been bitten by the quilting bug!!! I just want to do it alllllllll :)

At the moment I'm balancing two projects. One that is almost done and one that I picked up after discovering that I didn't have enough fabric to finish the first one... naturally, since I couldn't finish quilt 1 and was looking forward to a night at the sewing machine I got to work on a second project... what is wrong with me!!!!!??????

As of last night here's where I was at with both projects...

FINALLY DONE!!! ( Took me 7 weeks!) Not bad for my first quilt is it? :)

Project number 2

I started sewing all the block together last night! By a happy mistake I ended up have enough material in my stash to do sashing for the two small quilts I have planned outta this project. At lunch hour today I made a little trip to the fabric store to pickup the rest of the material I need... I stayed up until 1am last night trying to figure out the math.... ugh. 

Trying to figure out how much material one needs for a project is much like a puzzle .. a puzzle that makes your head hurt after a very short period of time...

Anyway, that's all for now folks! Hopefully I get to put a few stitches in on my cross stitch projects soooooooon!

xo

Melissa