Thursday's trials and tribulations

I slept in!!!  I shouldn't have!  It messed up my day.  I knew I had to get up early cause we had to grocery shop and be home by 11:00 as my daughter-in-law (DIL) was coming over to get some slacks shortened so she could wear them Saturday night.  I do lots first thing in the morning including 1/2 hour on the treadmill.  Didn't make it.  Had a coffee, had a bath, washed my hair and out the door to get food, food, delicious food.........all fat and sugar free.............not boring!  You can do a lot with it.  Add homemade raspberry syrup to vanilla fat free/sugar free pudding. Oh that is yummy!  Oh, sorry this is a quilting thread.  Back to business.

I signed up on my quilting forum to do a row by row quilt.  We found this one and you could do it too.  Its FREE!!!  something we all like. You can put the link to it in your favourites so its easier to find.  I haven't done that yet, but I do intend to after I have finished up here.  (Click on the word link and there it is.)

You get the cutting instructions for the background fabric right off the bat...........it takes 5 yards so I went to Hancocks (located in Paducah, Kentucky) and ordered it.  It came the other day, but I had some things I wanted to finish up before I started.  It is so much cheaper to buy in the US than here.  Makes me rather angry that I can purchase on line and have it shipped for less than I can buy it in any store in Ontario.  Yes, I know I should support them but my dollars only go so far.

I decided this afternoon to get going on it.  I already had the snowmen traced onto fusible web and cut out.  There are a couple of tiny errors with the tracing section of the pattern.  One "arm" from one snowmen isn't there and today while I was fusing them together I discovered that the centre piece for the bows isn't there.  No big deal.  I thought I would mention it though.  The other thing.....you have to trace everything twice!! 

I put the snowmen together using my teflon sheet on my light table.  I only fused the bodies as I wanted to blanket stitch around each one.  On my sewing machine, which is a Husqvarna Sapphire, I can use B-19 for this job.  I don't have to fiddle around with the length and width of a buttonhole stitch.  It looks like one, but everything has been done for me and I don't have to write down how I did it for the second panel.  I won't get to that one today.

I decided to use the bottonhole stitch for the bodies and a tiny zig-zag for the arms and the nose and the bow.  I am using co-ordinating thread. 

When the sewing was all done on the bodies of the snowmen, I went back downstairs and fused the nose and the arms onto the bodies.  Then I fused the bows together on the teflon sheet and then placed them on the snowmen.

Before I started to make this quilt, I decided I wanted some texture.  I am using a thicker fabric for the bodies and therefore can't see through it to place the bows.  The other great thing about using a thicker fabric is I don't have to fuse interfacing behind the white fabric.  You may think about doing that.  You do that so the background fabric won't show through.


Here are my first three snowpeople.  No eyes, no mouths.  I haven't decided what to do about them.  I'm thinking I may use snaps for the eyes and then maybe some kind of jewellery bits for the mouth.  I'll let you know what I find. 

You can still get in on the row quilt.  January's row is still there.  Go through to  the link for it and then click on Christmas.  Once you have done that you can click on Pattern Cover and Yardage click here!   Once you have printed that off you can print off row one......see where it says Row 1 click here

Tomorrow I hope to get to the second section of row 1 and make that big decision about the eyes and the mouth.  I'll put the panels up on my flannel wall and take a look and see if I like what I'm thinking.