I wasn’t supposed to buy any new fabric this year.  Well, I did really well for a while and then I guess I quit doing really well because I just bought this pretty little stack of fabric.  It’s called Vintage Summer by Little Yellow Bicycle for Blend Fabrics.  It’s kind of my style and yet it’s not, but I like it.  I’ve learned that I like a lot of large scale prints but then I struggle to cut into them and actually use them because I feel like I need to do the perfect thing with that large print.  I don’t know if I’m just getting smarter or if more fabric designs are getting smaller, but I’m trying to avoid the larger prints (because I still have plenty of them) and watch for the smaller ones that look great when they’re cut into small pieces.

I also shouldn’t start another quilt top until I’ve dealt with all my projects that need finishing, but for some reason I started reading about string quilts the other day and I got the idea in my head that I NEED to try it.  If I’m ever going to make that selvage quilt I’ve been saving strips for then I’ll have to learn paper piecing anyway.  Then I poked around and found this one  over at Film In the Fridge and I was sold.  Just enough order in that quilt for me to jump in.

So in the only quiet 30 minutes of my Mother’s Day, I went to my sewing machine and made my first ever paper pieced string quilt block.  My kids were shocked that I was sewing fabric to a piece of paper, but I was excited.  Learning something new beats a nap any day!

So the Vintage Summer prints were immediately cut into (big deal for me!) instead of waiting around for the “perfect project” and here’s my first block:

The fabric is the perfect scale for a quilt like this and I’m happy with my decision.  Paper piecing has always sounded tedious but I quite enjoyed this experiment.    I love the white with the prints, and I’m following Ashley’s pdf  chart  for it.

I really love those little strips of white in there.  They look so cool and they’re something I’ve always been intimidated by.

Honestly, I might not touch my sewing machine again until June, but it sure was fun to experiment for a little while!

HH

I love the way it turned out.  I have a vintage sheet I’ve saved for years, purchased long ago still in the original package, which I used for the backing.  It wasn’t quite wide enough so a pink strip of an old Anna Griffin fabric  which used to be bed skirts in this room was added to finish it off.

I took this quilt in and had the owner of a nearby shop quilt it for me.  I couldn’t be happier.  I love the pattern she quilted it with!

For the binding I used the only yardage I had (and my favorite print) of the Ava Rose line, the deep aqua with dark pink roses on it.  I think it looks great with both the quilt top and the back.

So here it is, the whole thing:

From the other side:

Yay!  I love it.  This one is going to my bedroom for those nights when it’s a bit cooler.   Just looking at it makes me happy.

I don’t love the fact that almost the entire main floor can be seen from the front door.

Have you ever noticed how frequently foyers are featured in design magazines, usually with some amazing statement piece that sets the tone for the house?  Often these entries are designed to shield the rest of the house from view.  When we were building our home I knew I would wish I had that kind of entry, but I couldn’t find a way to do it with our floor plan.  The dimensions of our lot gave us little choice about the footprint of the house and we did the best we could.  We ended up with a great house, but no real entry.  There’s somewhere to stand inside the front door, but you can see pretty much everything from that spot.

Which is fine, if it’s all clean.  But more often than not I feel like I’m opening my front door and the shoes, toys, socks and so forth is what sets the tone instead of a console table and an awesome mirror.

Here are some pictures of what you see if you turn your head from side to side upon entering my house:

If you knock on my door and the curtains are open, you can see through the dining room and into our kitchen eating area  (translate:  table must be clean).  When you enter the house, the dining room opens on your left with a clear shot of my kitchen counters  (translate:  counters must be clean also).

If you look straight ahead when you walk through the door, you see this:

To the right is the hallway leading to my studio/guest room with a closet and bathroom on the way.  The closet is currently our game closet which my youngest girls love to open and pull things out of ALL. DAY. LONG.  Getting that hallway clean and keeping the closet door shut is no small feat.

To the left is our family room, and for some reason everyone loves to drop things on the ground in front of this table, or on top of the table.  The table itself is a thrift store find which needs a coat of paint.  I don’t love the bookshelves but they’re sturdy and functional and I want access to some of our books in there.

Lastly, on the right is the living room.   {Happy sigh.}  I love my living room.  I can get it looking right in less than 2 minutes.   It’s the one view I have going for me (most of the time) when that knock is heard.

So there you have it.  In about three quarters of a second you can sweep your gaze across the areas of my home that get messy faster and more often than any others.  When everything is clean, I love that.  When it’s not, I really wish I had some focal point I could draw attention to instead of the clutter on the floor.

I’ve been thinking about that.  A focal point.  Is there something I could do to catch and hold the eye nearer the door?  Between the hallway and the living room sit the stairs.  All too often the stairs hold 2-3 small piles of various things that belong upstairs.  All too often I’m the culprit, placing it there while I tidy up so I can save time and take one big trip upstairs.  A few years ago my sister made me this awesome “H.”  I’ve had it in several places since then:  on my mantel, leaning against the fireplace, on a wall in the family room.  I made some changes to the family room so the H was without a home for a while.

Until now.

I hung it on the stairway wall, and I think I like it there.   I like the drama of the strong lines, and I like having something to notice.  From the front door it looks like this:

While I’d like to say that it makes the entry a little more interesting and attractive,  it surely makes me more motivated to keep the stairway clean.  It’s hard for me to justify a temporary pile on the stairs when in my brain the presence of the H means that it’s an area worth maintaining well.

I’m trying something on the edge of the dining room as well, with a similar goal in mind.

This little red bench is having an audition on the edge of the room near the front door.  I like it’s size but I’m not sure about introducing red in the dining room and I really love the red on this bench.  I saw a cabinet a while ago at an outlet store that I’ve been dreaming of ever since which would be a perfect statement and storage piece but that’s just an idle dream.   So the question is:  bench or no bench?  And do you think the H is an improvement?

Every day one of my housekeeping goals is to have the main floor tidy and clean.  With little ones home all day this usually proves to be a challenge, but it’s a good challenge.  We have days when other things take priority, and when that happens I’ve learned to shrug and open the door with a smile.

Tell me, do you have a formal entryway?  If not, what do you do to keep “the view” under control should someone knock?

Hopeful Homemaker

My little squares of cheery fabric have become a finished quilt top.  I used the instructions found at Pins and Bobbins for the Made in Cherry Quilt Along.    I made the smaller 60 inch size, which actually made this a super fast project.  Once I got all the squares lined up on the bed, I broke it into small sections and was able to work at it in 10-15 minute segments until I had it all pieced together.

For this project I cut into a small stack of prints from the Tweet collection by Timeless Treasures.  (You can find some of them here.)  The turquoise solid I had in my drawer just happened to match and I thought it was good for me to use a solid other than white for a change.    I’m proud of myself for cutting into relatively new fabric instead of fretting about having the perfect project for it.

This is the fourth project I’ve finished in 2012 that is still waiting to be quilted and finished.  I did baste the Little Man quilt top and made a couple of passes for quilting, but am unhappy with it and need to pull it out and start again.  Ugh!  I wonder if I’ll get it done in time for the baby to still use it!  (I know, I know… it would certainly get done if I worked on nothing else in those stolen 10 minutes each day.)

Sooo, I’m off to clean bathrooms so I can perhaps find a few minutes to spend with my seam ripper later tonight.

Have a great day!
Jennifer

Last week I shared photos of my girls prepping for a last-minute birthday party for a friend.  The joy we all found in scurrying around to prepare was increased when our friends arrived.  It was a perfect evening.

And yet, very little about it was technically perfect.  I didn’t have any paper cups or plastic forks.  I went through several recipes before I found one I had all the ingredients for.  The house was barely tidy.  What was perfect about the evening was our willingness to do our best before the party and when the party started, we all wholeheartedly gave ourselves to enjoying it.

I remembered this post and realized that I’ve learned a lot in the past 18 months.  Many lessons have been imposed upon me by the realities of caring for eight children, but I’m so thankful I’ve learned to relax and enjoy my guests, refrain from apologizing, smile and visit and focus on making people feel good about themselves.

Gratefully, my lavender shortbread cookies and this citrus lemon cake with lavender frosting carried the day in addition to the chocolate cupcakes and cake our guests brought with them.  Everything looked and tasted delicious.

The very best part of it was our family’s common goal of making my friend’s birthday special.  It wouldn’t have been a common goal if I’d been more worried about how things looked than I was about involving my family in preparation.  Because I let them do the decorating, they were able to serve and to anticipate joy as much as I was.  Sharing the creative process without specific expectations or judgment allowed my children to claim my goal as theirs.  This goal was a blessing to her children as well, who felt good about being part of something special for their mom’s birthday.  We had two families who were content to relax, laugh, talk, give praise, and enjoy being together.  Ten minutes before our friends arrived I had a list of 15 things in my mind that I wished I could still pull off, but when we said good-bye I couldn’t remember any of them.   I felt so full and happy I wouldn’t have changed a thing.  We had done enough to let them know they’re important to us, and then we spent time enjoying their friendship.

I don’t mean to go on and on about it.  It really was a very simple gathering.  I guess I think that too often we get big grand pictures in our heads about what a party looks like.  The parties we see in magazines and on pinterest aren’t the kind of party that usually happen at my house.  Those pictures are inspiring in their beauty and it’s fun to glean ideas from them, but they can distract us from the real purpose of a party.  I always try to do at least one special thing to make it look nice (like the mini cake on a piece of china sitting atop a cake stand in the first picture), but I never manage to get everything perfect.  I don’t think we have to.  I think we need to be open, real, relaxed and more concerned about enjoying our guests than we are about what they think of our event.

If you’ve got someone you’ve been meaning to invite over but haven’t yet because you can’t seem to get everything to work out for a Perfect Party, try a Good Enough Party.  Be yourself, make your signature dessert, work as hard as you can for a little while and then take a deep breath and  smile.  Your Good Enough Party just might become a Perfect Party.  Ours did.

Our evening ended with the girls getting wagon rides from my husband while the older children spread streamers all over each other and my yard.  While they played my friend and I talked about real life as we took down streamers together.

And then the birthday girl got a little surprise from her son.

Like I said, a Good Enough, Perfect Party.

Hopeful Homemaker

Isn’t this a great stack of fabric?

My daughter and a close friend of hers are working on value projects for their Personal Progress achievement (a goal-setting and personal development program for girls age 12-18 for the LDS Church).  For one project they each want to make a quilt and we’ve decided to make them in the colors of the Young Women’s values.  We spent some time Saturday going through my stash and making piles of fabrics for 7 of the 8 colors.  The colors are (starting at 12:00):  orange, yellow, green, blue, purple, gold, red.  The 8th color is white, but they’re both using lots of white in the quilts.

Do I have time for this project?  Not at all.  But it’s one of those things I’m not going to miss.  It’s a chance to spend time with my daughter and her friend, a chance to mentor another girl, a chance to teach them a skill that is useful.  A chance to help them make something beautiful.  Their excitement is infectious and I’m looking forward to the process.

Now I have a bunch of math to do before we start cutting!  Wish me luck…

Hopeful Homemaker

On my recent trip to Loganf I worked on a project I started in February.  I took an online class for sewing curves.  I started this table runner for that class.  Instead of using solid fabrics, I opted to use two charm packs I had sitting around.  One was from the Verna collection by Kate Spain and the other (I think) was called Swell.  I’d had the latter for a few years and didn’t know what to do with it.  You’ll see a few pieces from American Jane’s Punctuation collection also.

I worried that I’d hate this project because it would be too busy.  While it is certainly a riot of color, I like it more than I thought I would.   This was a good introduction to improvised curves and I enjoyed experimenting with it.    It took me a few hours to piece this together and two weeks to get around to adding a simple white border!  I think the wide border (3 inch) gives the eye a chance to rest.

My one concern is that it doesn’t want to lay flat due to the curves.  You can see that easily in the photo below.  I’m hoping I can find a way to minimize this when I’m quilting it, which will mean very careful basting.   Hmmm….

Even so, it’s nice to have the top finished.  I learned a lot while piecing this, which was the whole point.

HH

Too much rain and gray skies can do this to me.  Somehow the blah outside makes me feel blah inside too, and something new is in order to bring a bit of cheer.  I should have been basting and quilting the Little Man quilt top, but instead I cut lots of 3.5 inch squares and had fun laying them out.  I’d been looking at this yummy stack of fabric long enough.

More soon!

Hopeful Homemaker

I had so much fun on my mini-trip to Logan!  I hadn’t seen my sister’s new house since she and her husband moved in and began a massive overhaul to update it.   I love her adorable living room.

And the kitchen ceiling (overlooking the living room) they painted an awesome blue.  It’s fabulous.

We spent most of the day in her sewing room.  I loved the way they used the framing in the basement to make a natural decorating statement using paint.  She also re-purposed a wine cabinet to use for her quilting fabric.

We had so much fun talking about fabric and what we’d like to do with it, talking about life, munching on popcorn, eating a delicious lunch, and generally just enjoying being together.  Kristen cut into her stack of Heather Bailey’s Nicey Jane fabrics and started making her own Swoon quilt!  Hooray!  It’s going to look so awesome.

She finished the first block and it looks great.  We were both excited.  The pictures of that block are on her camera or I’d share it with you.  I think the Swoon pattern is one of my all-time favorites.

For my sewing I took an unfinished project from the Curves sewing class I was supposed to work on in February.  I made a long table runner using improv curves.  It was good for me to force myself to do this and I like it better than I thought I would.  It’s all pieced and I just need to decide if I want a white border or not.  I’ll share it soon.

Now I’m back home with my awesome family and a kitchen full of dishes to do.  I’m so happy that it worked out for me to run away for a day and have so much fun with my sister.  We definitely need to do this again soon!

Jennifer

It’s time for another baby quilt.  I really hope that someday I get these done before the babies are born!  After the sparkle punch baby quilt I made in February, I really needed to find something that would come together quickly.  I thumbed through Camille Roskelley’s book, Simplify, and settled on the Little Man pattern.

The pattern calls for just 4 fat quarters and a neutral, making it a simple and inexpensive quilt.  I already had a small stack of fabric chosen and I used 7 different fabrics instead of four, using one fabric twice to make the pattern work. I also added a white border around the entire quilt instead of borders at just the top and bottom, making it a square quilt.  The project came together in just a few hours and the bright happy colors are making me smile!

Most of the fabrics I used are from Sarah Jane’s Children at Play collection.  I especially love the little boys building rockets.  I also used my all-time favorite plaid from Emily Herrick’s Going Coastal collection (wish I had an entire bolt of that plaid) and a navy polka dot print from my stash.  I’m very happy with the depth and contrast the plaid and the polka dot add to the composition of the quilt.  I feel like they prevent it from being too soft, making the quilt better for this new little boy who is the youngest of seven children.  Now I need to settle on a backing and get quilting!

I must say that this pattern was delightfully simple and fast, which means I will be revisiting it for future baby projects, both girl and boy.  I highly recommend it.

HH