Something Old, Something New

Did you expect this post to be about weddings? It's not. My something old is a Singer 66.

Sometimes dating a machine isn't as easy as it seems. Here is the serial number.

That first letter is hard to read because of that black splotch. It looks like a C to me. I even took a rubbing and it still looked like a C. I looked up C series machines, and they were all made in Prussia, but the records were lost in the 1940's. As far as I knew Red Eye decals were mostly an American thing, and when I looked up Prussian Singers, they had a different medallion than this one.

With the decals indicating American, and the medallion being wrong for Prussia, I decided the first letter must be a G, and from there it was easy to date. This machine was made in 1918, so it is 100 years old!

I knew it was an early Singer 66, because of the decorative end plate and the fact the presser foot is back clamping.

New sewing machines are pretty ugly compared to these beauties. 

Now that school is out for the summer, I wanted to do a project with the grandtwins. I decided I'd like to use a handcrank to teach them, since I don't have to worry about them going much too fast on an electric. At 7, I thought it would be too hard for them to reach everything on a treadle. 

I dug out my five inch squares from my scrap user system. I wasn't sure how interested they'd be, and I didn't want to work with anything smaller. I decided a 4x5 layout would work well for a doll/stuffed animal quilt. 

First rows done. I didn't want to press my luck, or have them get tired of sewing, so I would only have them sew a couple seams before we'd take a break. I had them for a couple days, so there wasn't a big rush. 

They eventually got more comfortable with the machine. I was glad a had an adjustable height table to put the machine on, lowering the table made it much easier for them to work the machine. 

I ended up doing the quilting and binding myself, but they helped pin-baste. They went home from their three days at Nana's house with finished quilts! New quilters at my house, on a 100 year old machine! 

It's a Girl!

My news this week is big grandbaby news! DD#1 just had her fourth child yesterday, and it's a girl! Eliora Muireal was 8 pounds 3 oz, and 20.5" long. 

DH and I had the other three kids during the birth, so as soon as Mama was settled in her room, we took the kids over to see the new addition. I'm holding the baby and showing her to one of her older brothers. Now DD#1 and DSIL have two boys and two girls. 

This pic was taken today, such a sweetheart, and wrapped in the quilt I made!

Besides playing the busy Nana, I finished cutting out the wedding quilt I was working on, and I started sewing up the sub-units. Life is a bit crazy right now, but I expect to have at least short sewing sessions fairly frequently. My arm is feeling a bit better, so I'm thrilled on that front!

Block Tower

I've been making Town Square quilt blocks, and I've now got all the blocks finished.

How's that for a stack of blocks? I didn't count them, and I can't remember offhand how many I was making, but at one point I figured there were enough for a queen/king quilt. If I remember correctly, I think there were even a couple extra blocks. 

Mother's Day was fun around here. I got some vintage-looking sewing advertising signs for my sewing room.

I haven't decided where to hang them yet, and I'm a little hesitant to hang them right now, because I've got a few more on my wishlist, and my birthday is coming up. If I do hang them now I might just use pushpins for now, just in case I happen to get a couple more soon.

I also got these for Mother's Day...

...and I got a book, a Hotels.com gift card, and I heard from all of my kids which was the best!

I don't need the Town Square quilt finished anytime soon, so now that the blocks are done, I've put them aside and am back to cutting a quilt I do need done ASAP. My arm had been hurting too much to do any cutting, but it's feeling a bit better, so I can cut a little at a time. 

I have two grandsons that either just got a bigger bed, or will be getting a bigger bed very soon, and I need to come up with quilts for them, as well as finish the weighted blankets and wedding quilt backlog. With my arm still causing issues. I chose a UFO for one grandson, that has all the blocks done already, and the other will be getting a UFO that has been cut out, but not sewn on at all. I'm hoping to use it as leaders/enders while I work on the wedding quilts. I really need to get a design wall sorted so I can start assembling some quilts more easily. Since most of my quilts are scrappy, seeing them laid out before I sew them together makes for a much more balanced quilt.  I don't have a good floor area to lay out a big quilt, which is why I saved one wall in my new sewing room to feature a large design wall. Now to just find the time to get it made...

Sewing Room Progress

I am still working on getting my new sewing space together. It's definitely a work in progress. As my projects change, my storage needs change as well, so I'm looking for flexible storage solutions. I really wanted to get at least one vintage machine set up in the sewing room too, so that's what I've been working on.

I've got the picture my sister did up on the wall now. The quilting leaf is up on my Arrow Quilty cabinet with the longarm. I've got Patsy Thompson's quilt suspension system set up on my cabinet as well. With the repetitive stress injury in my arm, a bit of help handling the weight of a big quilt is a good plan. If you are interested in how the system works, you can click here.

DH assembled the cabinet that came with my Tin Lizzie, but I am repurposing it to hold a vintage machine. If I put the back leaf up, I could set up a second vintage machine on it, because this cabinet is solid as a rock. Tin Lizzie makes a great cabinet, I just preferred the dimensions of the Arrow Quilty cabinet for sit down quilting. Since I'm using both cabinets, I'm not considering it "wasted" money. I need to do a little bit of tweaking to make my Singer 201 fit in it better, but I have a plan! 

Under the window you can see one of the cube storage units I bought yesterday. I really like plastic bins over fabric ones, and Target is the only place I could find with 13" plastic bins. I mixed up the colors, just because I could. They also had blue, but I hate blue, and they had black, but that was harsher looking than what I wanted. 

Right now I only have one chair in my sewing room, but I have the machines set up in a way that makes it easy to move the chair to each cabinet. I may get another chair or two later, but this works. 

I've actually cleared a bit off my green cabinet since the last photo I posted. Obviously, I've been sewing on the Bernina lately. I'm still working on more Town Square blocks from my last post. The cabinet with the mismatched drawers caught a few people's interest, and I got them at Hobby Lobby. I've got thread stored in it. You can see the second cube storage unit I also bought yesterday next to that. I liked that I could set them either horizontally, as with the one under the window, or vertically, like this one. I moved all the free motion quilting books and my quilting magazines to this unit, then I've got three bins for storage. 

I like bins for storage, for several reasons. I can easily change what is stored in the bins as my projects change, plastic bins are my preference over fabric, because I find them easier to get stuff out of, fabric tends to stick to fabric, so getting out a stack of quilt blocks is easier with plastic. Mostly, I like the cleaner look that bins provide. In the middle of a big project, my sewing room does get messy, but I can't function long in chaos. I need a room to look organized, even if I did grab everything off one surface and toss it in a bin. I hate wasting time looking for stuff. I want to know right where it is, and just grab it if I need it. Hunting hours for a seam ripper is not my style. Right now most of my new bins are empty, but as I work in the sewing room, I'll come up with a system that works. 

It looks more crowded in the photos than it is. I can easily navigate my way around the room.  The wall I didn't show will have my design wall, but that's a project for another day. I'm really anxious to have a large design wall. 

I'd like to make both my fabric prep area in the next room, and my sewing room pretty. I've had different sewing rooms over the last few years, and they've always just been practical, but now I want them to be pretty. Eventually, I'd like to make a few quilted wall-hangings, and I have a few things I'd like to buy eventually for the walls. If I'm really lucky, my kids will look at my Amazon wishlist for my birthday in a couple months!

I really enjoy organizing my sewing space, so this is just fun for me. Are you the organized type, or does your sewing space look like a bomb went off?

Deck the Walls?

I'm slowly changing some things in our house, and one of the things I've been working on changing is the stuff on my walls, artwork and such. Somehow, after having certain things on my walls for 30+ years, I'm getting tired of it. We've moved several times during our marriage, but we've lived in this house almost 15 years now, and several things on our walls were moved from the last house, or multiple houses ago. 

I'm a lot pickier now than I used to be, and I'd rather have fewer things hanging on my walls, but have the things I do have on my walls be pieces I really like. We have a friend, Jean Sumption, who does amazing watercolors, and I've always wanted one of her pieces. Her prints can be found here . I really love her Old Chevy Truck painting, but when it came down to buying one, it had to be The Quilt. Actually, I didn't even have to buy the print, DD#1 and DSIL bought it for me for Christmas. I just got it back from being framed.

I ended up hanging it in our bedroom, because it's a good combination of DH and I. The wood of the house has that barnwood look DH loves, and you know I like that Cathedral Window quilt in the window. When I first saw the original painting at Jean's house, I asked her if she knew what pattern the quilt she had painted was. I told her it was a Cathedral Window, and she thought it was pretty funny she had put it in a window. I'm very thankful to have a print of one of her paintings, she's a wonderful lady and a talented artist. 

My oldest sister has been down to visit a few times recently, and she has been watching my progress on my sewing area shaping up. I told her every sewing room I've ever had has only been functional, but never pretty. I told her now that I have two rooms and it's not so crowded, I'd like to pretty it up some. 

My sister is quite talented, although we tend to do different crafts. We both sew, and she's made several quilts, but I lean heavily towards quilting, whereas she often works with paper, paint, or other mediums. She decided she wanted to make a picture for me to hang in my sewing room, and she got it done in record time!

It is a mixed medium art piece, with fabric, paint, and marker on canvas. I'm going to hang it right above my sit down longarm. She calls it My Happy Place. 

My repetitive stress injury was quite unhappy with 10 days of caring for a baby/toddler, so I'm having to take things slowly as far as getting back to sewing goes. I did manage to sew up a few blocks from some sub-units that were already made.

I found some Dusty Palette Kona Skinny Strip (1.5" strips) rolls at Tuesday Morning a while back, and I bought three of them. When I saw this Town Square quilt tutorial from Missouri Star Quilt Company, I decided I'd like to make that quilt with my skinny strips. Resizing a pattern comes easily to me, and I realized I could make two blocks with each stripset with the smaller strips. Most of the time, I can get one extra 3.5" square from the end of the stripset, but not always. I've got plans for those extra squares! I switch which fabric I have toward the middle for the second block of each stripset. As you can see above, sometimes just switching the stripset around makes a big difference. 

I threw these blocks on the floor to take a photo of them, but looking at them now, I realize the gray of my solid squares is really close to the color of the carpeting in my sewing room. I'll mix up the blocks when I start to assemble the quilt. There are a lot more blocks to make, I decided I liked the way they were coming out so much, I bought two more rolls of skinny strips and I'm not quite finished the extra stripsets. I have already cut the extra gray squares I needed. Do I need to be working on this quilt right now? No, but I need a little time to get back into a quilting groove, and I'd rather use an easy, fun project for that.