Design Wall!

I have been waiting rather impatiently to get a design wall. I make a lot of BIG quilts, so I wanted as large of a design wall as I could have. We debated various mounting techniques, and in the end, I decided to not mount the boards at all. 

We bought three sheets of insulation board and some spray adhesive. I had DH cut the 4x8' boards down to 7 feet tall, because 1) our ceilings in the basement aren't quite 8 feet tall, and 2) I can't reach any higher than 7 feet anyway.

I had king sized Warm and Natural batting on hand, and cutting on the fold gave me 60" wide pieces to wrap around the boards. We used spray adhesive on the boards, held the batting taut and lowered it onto the adhesive. Once we had all the batting adhered, we brought the boards into the house to staple the excess batting on the back of the boards. We could have stapled outside, but it was 108 degrees, so doing as much as possible in the house seemed to be a good idea. 

The insulation boards are very lightweight, so very easy to move around, which is very important in my sewing room.

The wall I have to put my design board on isn't actually much of a wall. The board on the left blocks the closet, the board on the right blocks the door to the bathroom.

When I add the third board it blocks most of the doorway to the hallway. Since the boards are easily moved, it's not that big of a problem. I never use that door to the bathroom, there is another door to that bathroom from the hallway. I do have lots of quilting stuff in the closet, but  I can get whatever I need from the closet before I lay out a quilt. Only the largest quilts I make will require all three boards next to each other, and since I won't be laying out a quilt until I'm ready to assemble it, I think I can squeeze by the third board to get in and out of the room during the couple days a quilt is likely to be on the boards. 

When I'm not using the design boards, I can stack them in front of each other on the section of wall with no doorways, so not in the way at all. 

Now that I've got a design wall, Time to start laying out some quilts.

My grandson, Mr. L, just got a full sized bed, so he needs a bigger quilt. I am so far behind on wedding quilts, I didn't want to start one from scratch, so I dug out the Allietare mystery quilt I did in men's shirts. I did Allietare in two colorways, but neither is assembled, both just have all the blocks done. This version should work fine as a full sized quilt once I add a border. I'll be assembling the rows as leaders/enders while I make units for one of the wedding quilts. 

Since I only needed two of my design boards for this quilt layout, I moved the third board to a spot not in my way, and started laying out another quilt.

This quilt just makes me happy. Such bright, happy colors. These were bonus HST's from making 4x8" Flying Geese units. 

My sewing room isn't all neat and tidy right now, I've got projects going everywhere.

I'm in the top 20 for my online UFO challenge, so I dug out a quilt I had pin-basted, and I'm setting a timer for myself to quilt one hour a day. Right now my suspension system is not holding up the quilt, I release the quilt when I'm done for the day, so I don't stretch out the bungee cords prematurely. It's very easy to move the clamps around as I need to. 

I'm making Flying Geese units on my Singer 201 for one of the wedding quilts. Of course I'm double sewing those sew and flip corners so I get lots of bonus HST's to play with later. 

My Bernina has a couple different things piled up on it. I need to hem two lightweight baby blankets, then I'll be back to making HST's and four patches for the same wedding quilt I'm making Flying Geese units for. I really like having one machine have a seam guide screwed in, and one set up without a seam guide. Normally I'd have my vintage machine have a seam guide, and be doing everything else on the Bernina, which I will probably will switch to as soon as I'm done making Flying Geese. I was itching to use the Singer 201 (my favorite vintage machine), but I wanted to do the Flying Geese first, so I didn't put the seam guide on it yet. I've got to take the seam guide off the Bernina to hem the blankets, so I will probably just leave it off, and when I finish the Flying geese units, I'll just put the seam guide back on my vintage machine and finish the four patches on it. Keeping my Bernina free for when I need specialty stitches usually works best for me. I sew all my bindings on with the Bernina, and hopefully, that hour a day of quilting will lead to a finish soon!

With a bit of a mess about, it definitely looks like the new sewing space is up and going!