for sweet little girls

My latest stitching project… 2 little dresses for my 2 little nieces.

White dresses with pretty pink pinafores.

 

 

         So sweet!

 

 

 

Sisters

Today I finished another Jo’s Little Women Club quilt called “Sisters”. 

 

It’s 12 inches square.  The women in the center were a challenge as each sister is about an inch in size and very detailed.  I just about went blind trying to stitch that tiny!

This quilt has extra special meaning for me because I grew up as one of four sisters. 

This is me (far left) and my younger sisters 35 or so years ago.  I hope my sisters are okay with me posting this.  We don’t get pictures together anymore as we live so far away from each other and especially since my youngest sister has passed away (far right).  So pictures like this with us together mean a lot to me.  But my two sisters and I do keep in close touch with each other through email. 

I love my sisters!

Autumn Crossing …in Springtime?

 

 

Yeah! We’re finally having beautiful Spring weather here, even though yesterday I finished a quilt called Autumn Crossing.  Perhaps a little untimely, but oh well.  It measures about 18 x 22 inches and is hand quilted.  The smallest squares are three quarters of an inch.  For now, I’m going to use it as a topper for a cabinet where it fits perfectly.  I have been participating in a local Jo’s Little Women’s Club making small quilts like this.  The patterns are so sweet! 

Some Assembly Required

My very thoughtful Mr. Sunshine recently took me shopping and let me pick out some beautiful fabrics and patterns.  Later, when my son-in-law saw it, he joked, “Here’s your gift, go put it together.”  But Mr. Sunshine knows that he was giving me the gift of doing one of my favorite things.  And I had such a super time “assembling” this little 13 x 17 inch quilt.

My mother understands that too.  One day, many years ago, when I was first married and living far away from family, there came a big box in the mail.  Inside I found fabric, yarn, needles, crochet hooks, hoops, a conglomeration of all sorts of stuff like that.  Wonderful stuff.  I was intrigued and went right to work with it.  I grew up sewing, mostly clothes, but this started my passion for sewing to be creative.  That gift made a big difference to my life and is treasured to this very day.

The pattern is by Jo Morton and the blocks are just 3 inches square.

It looks just great on my little quilt wall.

Thank you Mr. Sunshine!

A little bitty challenge

Stuffed in a drawer, I found a small plastic bag of leftover scraps from a quilt I had made.  The pieces of fabric were all very tiny, the biggest ones just 5” by 1 1/4”.  At that size, they are usually discarded as useless.   I thought, “What was I thinking?”  It was time to toss them…or…hmmm… could I really use them?  The wheels in my head started rolling so I challenged myself and this is what I came up with.

Now, just as soon as I bind it, we have a new topper for the coffee table made entirely from those teeny tiny bits of fabric plus some muslin.  And they aren’t junk anymore. 

Do you see the candy dish full of old Scrabble tiles sitting there on the coffee table?  Our family has so much fun with those.  I’m always finding messages of some sort from the kids after they’ve been here.  They get very creative and make me laugh. 

A good little house

It’s been fun watching our children settle down to family life in their own houses….which happen to be lots bigger than our house.  Of course we are quite comfy in our home of 25 years and hope to live out our days here.

I saw this quote the other day and it got me to thinking.  So I found a pattern for a tiny 3 1/2 inch house in the book, Little Bits of Whimsy, by Kathleen Brooks.  I stitched everything together and now have this hanging on a wall in our humble little house.