Monday, June 6, 2016

A Sewing Retreat at Home

Last Wednesday as I sipped my morning coffee I noticed there was a Cutthroat Kitchen marathon on Food Network leading up to the premier of the new season.  Cutthroat Kitchen is my latest TV obsession and I couldn't resist the draw of 9 straight hours of episodes.  Now I was supposed to spend that day on school stuff, so I decided that if I was going to spend an entire day not doing school it needed to be an exceptionally productive day!

Machine turned sideways to make room for cutting

I set myself up a sewing station downstairs right in front of the TV and prepped sewing and cutting projects to keep me busy.  There's something neat about this picture that I didn't realize until afterward:  that table.  That table is old. It used to sit in the corner of the kitchen in the house where my mom grew up.  It wasn't their eating table, it was for butchering chickens and that sort of thing, and has the cut marks to prove it.  Mom's parents both died when she was a child and this table was forgotten for years. Turns out some cousins had rescued it. They refinished it and a few years ago they gave it to us and it now sits in the corner of our living room.


My mom's mom is my only family connection to quilting, although obviously I never met her.  We have several of her quilts.  It's neat to think that decades later I can sit at the table of another quilter and work :)

Here's my tally from my personal sewing-retreat day:
sewed together the rows on a May block drive top
quilted and bound the blue and orange baby quilt
cut and sewed (112) 8.5" HSTs for an upcoming wedding quilt 
sewed up another May block drive top
 began sewing together the April block drive bonus blocks


Over the weekend I pressed and trimmed the HSTs and sewed them into flying geese units.  Here is my initial design wall layout.


These are Cotton and Steel fabrics (my first time working with those, in general I'm not a big fan of their designs).  This will become a wedding quilt for friends of a friend. I don't know the newly weds or what their tastes are but I was told they like "everything hipster" and the store Anthropologie.  I sent my friend a few snapshots of fabric swatches and the Cotton and Steel fabrics passed the "hipster" test.

Sewing downstairs (and away from the distraction of the computer) was a lot of fun. Definitely going to have to do more of that in the future!

Linking to Design Wall Monday.

7 comments:

  1. Your personal little sewing retreat seems like the perfect get away to me. I love that show too by the way :) And what a great story behind your little table.

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  2. Nice Retreat! But I have to say that the table really caught my eye! Why? Because I have history with one like it! My ex husband and myself found one in 1981 on our honeymoon. It was refinished a couple of times. It currently resides inn my daughters kitchen. She is wanting something larger, and once she finds it, will return the old table to me. It will have a new home in my downstairs sewing area. I am looking forward to getting it back! Neat to hear your story about it. Pam

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  3. Happy to hear that you were SEW extremely productive!!

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  4. Wow!! One, I have never thought of sewing whilst watching TB - ever! Two, what a lot you got achieved. Three - I love the table and the story. I have a table returning from New Zealand shortly that has similar story and I am hoping that there's room in my studio for it somewhere!

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  5. Kat, I've always thought of you as hipster. You're so cool. I'm not being sarcastic either.
    My mother had a table with a story that was all beat up and I wanted it so bad. Years ago, I offered to buy her any dining room set she wanted if she would give it to me. She chose to put it in my sisters leaky storage room so it could ruin. That's my sad story for today. :)

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  6. I just looove the look of flying geese at the moment. That will be a beautiful quilt!

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  7. I'm thrilled that you finally got your grandmother's table. What a blessing! It was nice to have your own personal retreat and you accomplished many, many feats. I love the crosses on the wall. I have some crosses for that purpose and they just have not made it to the wall yet. Seeing yours makes me want to get them on the wall even more. My son professes to be an atheist; yet he will let me take his children to Sunday school and Vacation Bible School. He moved home last fall because he needed a place to live. Then circumstances changed greatly and he is trying to get custody of his 2 1/2 year old daughter. She has been with us since that process began in March. Now we have his 10 year old son for the summer. I believe God is using this experience to draw him back to Him. I'm going to follow you on Bloglovin'.

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