Keep your Quilting Templates and Small Rulers Safe

Hello

Here in the UK we have a wonderful shop called Wilko.  It sells all sorts of stuff including stationery.  I bought some handy small wallets to store my work receipts in and a dinky file to keep the wallets in. Then had a brainwave and got a couple more for quilting templates and small rulers.  I find these tricky to store, had ended up with them all over the place in tins and boxes.

The Lori Holt "Bloom Quilt" & "Cozy Christmas" templates are very easy to misplace so needed a secure form of keeping them.  These little wallets are ideal, they have a popper fastener on them.  There was only one of the templates that wouldn't quite fit in the wallet but did fit in the file Ok.  There are little index labels on each section of the file. The file is small enough to pop in your bag when you are out and about or just take the wallet.

My smaller rulers fit in the other one a treat.  Each in their own individual section in the file.

So no excuses for lost templates.

If you are wondering, the button wallets are £1.00 for 5 pack, the cheque files were £1.25 each. Bargain.

Word of caution, when the file is full the elastic over the button is tighter, don't do what I did.  Undo it and let go of the elastic when the file is on your knee, ping, it doesn't half sting when it hits your leg!!!

Cheers
Sharon

Baby Boom Cot Quilts

Hello

I am starting to lose count of how many cot quilts I have made.  My niece Amy is expecting her second baby, its late like her first.  She didn't ask what it was so have made another neutral quilt.

Cute farmyard animals.

Had some fabric left over so made her a cushion for her new nursery chair, thought it might help support her arm when she is feeding. I hand quilted around the animals so it has a textured feel to it.

All ready to parcel up.

k

Update Amy has had a not so little boy weighing in at 10.5lbs.  Both doing well,

My school friend Helen is going to be a granny in March, Katy wanted to know what she was having so its a girl.  This one is a girly pink one, its my favourite.

The backing fabric is from Moda "Bespoke Blooms" by Brenda Riddle, its lovely fabric soo pretty and feels divine.  Kicking myself cos I only bought the metre I needed for the back of this quilt.  Will have to keep my eye out at the Quilt show in Harrogate later in the year.  I quite fancy doing a plain "whole cloth" quilt with this fabric and machine quilting it, will have a go if I manage to get some more fabric.

I didn't have any fabric left over from this quilt so no extras.  I like it better when I over estimate (wild guess more like!), they get another gift!  Don asked me the other day how do I decide how big the quilt should be for a cot, my answer was, when I run out of fabric!

Cheers

Sharon

Zipped Bags & Broken Walking Foot

Hello

A belated Happy New Year.

We were having mild weather in the UK so I have been able to work. Normally at this time of the year snow or wet weather stops my gardening business and I quietly hibernate in the house with my quilting.  Not this winter.

I did make some Xmas presents in December, had a production line going making zipped bags with lovely quality fabric, don't you just love the feel of good fabric?

I have been doing a bit of quilting at the weekends, two more babies due, my niece is due any minute and a friends daughter is having a little girl in March.  So baby quilts just about finished BUT 

Ages ago, I sent to America for a walking foot to fit my Singer 221 Featherweight as Singer didn't do an original walking foot for these machines.  Luckily, it also fit my Singer 201 so have been using it on both machines over the last few years.

It is no where near the quality of my Singer attachments but it does the job and has helped me make a lot of quilts. It started to make a clunking noise when I was using it on the 201, this noise came and went.  Then it did the same when I used it on the 221.  The clunking got really bad but I couldn't work out what was causing it, it was very unhappy, then one on the plastic lugs that grip around machine to hold it on, snapped and flew across the room so it was obviously moving sideways for some reason.  Hmm, it still worked as long as I kept tightening the holding screw so managed to finish the quilt.  For the second quilt, decided to use the 201, at the start it was working fine then the clunking noise started and got worse so decided to take it apart (I am well used to dismantling the sewing machines).  Ooo, errr took the screws out and lifted off the white cover.  Whoops, all the internal bits fell out in a heap!  So I had to work out how everything fit back together, the parts were tiny weeny, covered in mucky black stuff, you needed 3 hands to hold levers while you put the cover back on to hold some of it together which is why dear readers, there are no photos.  Every time I let go with one hand, everything fell to bits again.  I did get it together and is appears to be working without making the clunking sound so have cautiously started to quilt with it again.  So to be on the safe side, have ordered another one from the USA, its on its way.

The vintage Singer machines themselves are easy to dismantle but a modern attachment is a nightmare!  In our throwaway society new stuff just isn't designed to be repaired.  Those Singer designers were clever chaps.

Update - The walking foot was working but it kept loosening the screw and more importantly, it kept putting little black marks on the quilt - grrrh its going in the bin!!! 

So, tried the Walking Foot I bought a couple of years ago of an UK Ebay seller for the Singer 201K which I thought wouldn't work when I got it because it didn't match up with the feed dogs.  I can't have tried it and just put it in the drawer.  Dug it out today in desperation, it works wonderfully!  Doh!  I had read somewhere that that they had to match the feed dogs to draw the fabric through, this is not true.  Why I didn't try it out when I got is a mystery to me, stupidity probably.

Cheers

Sharon