Hot Hot Hot

We are in a stretch of ridiculously hot weather, 100 + degrees but I am keeping inside in the air conditioning and of course, sewing! Today it's the New Moon and time to share our Totally Useless Stitch A Long ORTs! I don't have many since I spent most of the last month working on restoring the 301 but I sewed a little and have a few threads to share:

There aren't enough ORTs to cover the ink stains in my wooden leaf. Maybe I already told you this bowl sat by the telephone when I was a girl, filled with pens and pencils?

The leaf bowl is sitting atop some little postage stamp blocks I have been practicing with. Why do I need practice? Well...I spent my Piggy Bank Savings on this:

A Singer 404, already fully restored. He arrived on Friday and I wasted no time putting him in my cabinet.

Then I grabbed my box of two patches and started sewing! He runs like a top and sews a really lovely seam. The two patches are what I've been using as leader/enders for two years now.

Have I mentioned how much I love this cabinet? I even love the thousands of teeny scratches caused from a seamstress putting her scissors down over the years. I plan on adding to those!

Dash said he looks just exactly like my other two. What can I say? I adore Palomino colored Singers!

I am used to sewing on a modern machine. Fern always stops with her needle down and her foot controller is completely different. There is no computer controlling the 404! I need practice to learn how to stop this one with his needle in the fabric. Soon, I had a stack of my two patches sewn into 16 patches. All the while I am learning to control that needle!

I sewed the sixteen patches together. Would you call this a 64 patch? Whatever! It came out to 12.5 inches square. Perfect! There is no better way to practice than with a giant stack of two inch squares. The scary thing is I have not made a dent in that box of two patches...

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Now it is YOUR turn...we want to see your ORTs! Leave a comment on this post with a link to your July TUSAL post so we can come visit! If I hold a Totally Useless giveaway your comment will earn you an extra entry.

Wondering what a TUSAL is and why all these people are posting pictures of rubbish? Click here to learn more and join the fun!

Thank you for visiting my blog today!

xox 

On Time

Woo! It's the New Moon and I am not late for the Totally Useless Stitch A Long! Go! Get out your camera and snap a photo of your gorgeous ORTs!

Can you believe I actually have some cross-stitching ORTs? I got a little bug and stitched a motif from one of my Blackbird Designs books. These are my first embroidery ORTs of the year!

My leaf bowl is stuffed with scraps and thread ends. Although I usually have a Leader/Ender pair under my needle, I mostly can't when sewing the Dresdens. It drives me batty to toss all that thread! The scraps are from cutting more 2 inch squares for Leader/Enders.

My Leader/Ender box was nearly empty before I cut up those scraps. I grab a pair of these (light+dark) and start it through the machine, followed by what ever blocks I am piecing and follow those with another pair. This keeps me from having wasted threads and if the machine is going to gobble up the starting piece it can gobble my scraps and not my important pieces. Lots of people use a little piece of folded fabric as a leader and just keep sewing on it over and over. That is still wasting thread! Why not use that Thread?

Here is the box of two patches I've completed. I need to start feeding pairs of these through to make four patches...this box is getting full! One day these will be a big postage stamp quilt, all sewn while sewing other quilts.

If you'd like to learn more about Leader/Ender quilts click here. You don't have to sew tiny squares as L&E...you can sew any second quilt.

=^..^=

Now it is YOUR turn...we want to see your ORTs! Leave a comment on this post with a link to your March TUSAL post so we can come visit! If I hold a Totally Useless giveaway your comment will earn you an extra entry.

Wondering what a TUSAL is and why all these people are posting pictures of rubbish? Click here to learn more and join the fun!

Thank you for visiting my blog today!

xox 

More Mystery Quilt

One more post to end off the year...2017 is peeking around the corner! 

I've been hard at work and Clue 5 of my Mystery Quilt is Complete! Bonnie's Essential Triangle Tool is da bomb! I've tried triangle pieces on my own before with so-so results. It's all those "special" measurements one has to figure out that throw me off! This thing makes it SUPER EASY! 

I got to work right away on Clue 6! This one also uses the Essential Triangle Tool.

I made this looooong chain of triangles.

These were ironed open and since they were fed through the machine in order I just cut the chain between every pair and left the chain of pairs together so they wouldn't get mixed up. I only had to snip between the pairs and nest the seams and soon I had them all finished!

Bear in mind...I have not made these last two units before this. I was scared to do these! And yet, I have completed both of them in record time. Bonnie is such a good teacher!

Do you like my pink cutting mat? It was a Christmas gift from Dash. Along with the large Olfa rotating mat you see in the photos above. So handy!

My leader/ender pieces are adding up! I only get a few when I'm doing lots of chain piecing like this but look how full that box is! One day I'll have to move on to piecing these as four patches between my regular sewing. Bonnie is the genius behind leaders/enders too.

Ok, my studio is still trashed. I have piles of papers, fabric, tools, Christmas gifts, and every bit of junk imaginable still lying around everywhere. Now, I must be firm with myself and go clean it up!

See you in 2017!

Thank you for visiting my blog today!

xox