beginnings

Has anyone seen my sewing mojo anywhere???  I just got home from my 3rd trip in 5 weeks (all fun but AAAAH - that is a lot of traveling!) and it is nowhere to be seen. Ironically, I have lots of projects I want to start - I just can't seem to find the motivation to actually sew. The photo above is a preliminary fabric pull for what may someday be a triangle quilt.

I also would really like to finally try to make a geranium dress for my 2 year old. I know, I've been saying that for at least a year but I bought the pattern over the weekend so this time I'm serious! I've heard great things about the pattern and I love so many of the versions I see pop up online so I'm not sure what I'm waiting for.

And I want to make a quilt using these new fabrics that were sent to me from Birch. These are from an upcoming collection called Feather River. I was actually about to start sewing with these today but my sewing machine was misbehaving - ugh!

Thanks again for all the great comments on my recent posts about glue basting and pinning. It was great to hear everyone's methods!

If you see my sewing mojo anywhere - let me know! Any advice on how to find it?

charley harper messenger bags

I made a bunch of these little messenger bags for my littlest daughter back in October. She was constantly carrying around her older sisters' bags and so I figured she could use one her own size. I soon realized that these bags also worked great to store some of her toys since it is very easy for her to get everything in and out of them and all the pieces of each toy are stored together. I made the bags shown in this post using some adorable Charley Harper fabric I had leftover from this quilt.

I think I told a few of you that I would write a pattern for these and I actually did write it quite a while ago but I wanted to include a few variations and sizes before finalizing it so hopefully soon!

pins and glue

Last week I wrote about how I realized that (for me) pinning actually makes piecing easier and that it didn't actually take more time in the long run. I also asked the question to anyone reading about whether they pin and if they have any tips. There were lots of great comments and it seems that many of you regularly use pins. You can find the comments here.

The next "new to me" thing I decided to try was glue basting (with washable school glue) for a machine stitched binding. I was tentative thinking it might be messy and more trouble than its worth but I know so many quilters love this method so I figured I'd try it at least once. And, you know what - it worked really well! Any extra time taken by applying and setting the glue was more than made up for when I went to actually stitch down the binding. At first I forgot to make sure I was covering the stitching line on the back (I used the stitch in the ditch method on the front of the quilt to sew the binding) so I did miss a bit including a corner but then I realized what I was doing wrong and it was pretty much smooth sailing from there! Not perfect but so much closer than I've ever been.

So, I'll put the question out to you - do you glue baste your bindings? Tips, tricks, warnings? One of my concerns was whether it would hurt my sewing machine - I used a minimal amount of glue and I made sure that the glue was dry before sewing and I don't think it adversely affected my machine, at least I really hoped it didn't! At this point, I don't plan on using glue for basting when piecing the quilt but is there anyone reading this that does? Again, any tips?