Thrift Store Treasures

So I was going to go to the Stokes Auction yesterday and bid on a few things for myself and on behalf of my sister... but given that I woke up with a tension headache which despite painkillers never really went away... yeah, that didn't happen.  I'm not too upset... the only thing I really wanted was a 1928 Singer 99 in a bentwood case, and I honestly need to play more with my other vintage machines anyway.  (But it had its knee bar with it, and I've never had one with that!  Ah well.)

Instead Wonderful Husband drove us all to Lunchbox Laboratory for lunch, and then to the Galaxy Theater to see Spirited Away.  They have these big huge individual recliner chairs with trays... and honestly I'd rather they had simpler seats where I could've raised the armrests and snuggled with a little boy on either side.  Going to a movie does not need to be a dinner experience!  Both boys were good and sat through the entire film.  (Wonderful Husband hadn't wanted to take them both on his own because he worried that Jazzy might not.)  And I'd forgotten that Zeniba is much harsher in her first appearance in the dub than she is in Japanese....

Since I have no pictures of a new-to-me 92-year-old sewing machine to show you, however, let me show you some of what I got during my three-thrift-store adventure with my sister on Friday!  (Where we saw two other vintage Singers... another 99 in a bentwood case for $99, and a 15 in neither case nor table for $75.)

I got a couple of baskets, one of them having already been utilized to organize and corral little boy toys.  A set of placemats.  Some washable finger paints.  And a couple small toys (tiny dinosaur on wheels for Jazzy, and a balance robot for Squiddle).  For mama, however, I found these:

Three new books and a back issue of Piecework (which only cost a quarter, ignore that price sticker).

Two vintage runners, hand-embroidered on linen, and a $.10 pattern for making an indoor playhouse out of a card table.

Left to right: three yards of a 90" wide red fabric, which will make a nice backing.  A yard and a quarter of the orange check, a yard and a half of the floral, which I'm hoping will make a couple bolster pillows for the family room sofa, and a gallon bag of batik scraps.  Most of which are mere strings, but some of which are sizeable enough to make me pleased at the $.75 price.  (Part of me is thinking miniature log cabin blocks with the strings.)

So that was my haul of treasure for the week!  But this morning I should work on the Cloverleaf quilt, now that it's labelled and basted, with binding prepped.  Because this afternoon is a birthday party for one of the neighbor boys at a trampoline park....

Cloverleaf Quilt, Backing and Binding

I don't make them often, so I always forget one of the glorious parts of baby quilts is not having to piece the backing!  I hauled in my newly rediscovered green fabrics, and asked Wonderful Husband's help in picking out a backing and binding.  After pressing, here are the results!

The quilt is laid out on the backing here to make sure it fits.  Though it would make a good second border if I wanted to make it bigger!  (Which I don't.)

I have a little over three yards of this Cranston Fabrics print, which must be about twenty years old at this point!  I remember I bought it to go with a bunch of green block-of-the-month kits from Joanns, which got given away at some point along the line.

And Wonderful Husband disregarded my theory that bindings should be as dark as the darkest color in the quilt, and picked this, which brings out some of the lighter greens in the blocks and the flange:

I didn't actually get to cut anything yesterday, due to gallivanting with my sister, and I can't write out the label until Wonderful Husband wakes up, as the name of the little girl this is for is in his e-mail somewhere.  So, quiet holding pattern this morning.  I shall drink tea and catch up on the Internet until other people rise.

A Finish or Two

One new car battery acquired!  And while I sat in the dealership waiting room, I just kept stitching and stitching and stitching, until this was finished just before my car was ready:

The label has been corrected, it has been washed (losing almost no color to the color catchers!), and placed on Squiddle's bed, as he requested:

Disappointingly, at Squiddle's eye appointment, his amblyopia showed no improvement.  So treatment has been stepped up from "a couple hours a day with an eyepatch" to "as soon as he gets home from school until he goes to sleep at night with an eyepatch."  He has another appointment in two and a half months - hopefully the increased and stricter regiment will have an effect.  If not, we will pursue treatment with a specialist.

On a slightly happier note, I stopped at Joann's on the way back from the dealership, where I was virtuous, and bought NO fabric!  But I did pick up the floss I needed to finish this little project:

And the backside, for honesty's sake:

Here the liner is, back in its basket.  I E-6000'd a hook onto the back of the basket a couple days ago, so the whole shebang is now ready to be hung on Jazzy's wall and filled with diapers, getting their storage up off the floor:

Next, I sew together the backing fabric for the Cloverleaf quilt and get that quilted.

Rainbows!

Yesterday was kind of a dud, as it included the conclusion that my car battery probably needs to be replaced.  Well, back to the dealership this morning to ask their opinion on it!  I'll be taking the orange nine-patch with me and using the time to push the binding toward finished.  Bright side: I no longer fear jump-starting a car, as I've now had to use our little jump box a couple times.

I did, however, get to work a bit on this little embroidery project:

I think the green is a little dark, but I'm not inclined to rip it out and replace it.  I actually don't have any red or orange floss at the moment, so hopefully on the way back from getting my battery assessed and either fixed or replaced, I will stop at JoAnn's and get what I need to finish this.

Regarding rainbows... as I was driving yesterday, through fitful spates of anemic rain, Cyndi Lauper's song "True Colors" came on.  And as the line "beautiful, like a rainbow" came into my car, I looked up at the sky and there in front of me was a rainbow.  It was gone not ten seconds later.  I love cosmic timing.

Guild Night!

Last night was the first meeting of West Sound Quilters at their new location, and though I'm not entirely enamored of the long tables setup the Elks Club has going, I think that being in a much larger room made the meeting more enjoyable (for me, at least).  The speaker was a representative from Hoffman Fabrics, who gave us a talk on how batiks are made.

I sat there through the meeting, quietly doing this:

I didn't quite get it finished, but given the binding was a quarter stitched down when I got to the meeting, and three-quarters done by the time I left, I feel that I made good progress.  I showed off that quilt, as well as the Disney Star quilt.

After I finish the binding, this is my next project:

It's the fabric liner for the basket in which I keep Jazzy's diapers.  I plan to hang the basket on the wall, and tried soaking this stain out of the liner, but OxyClean failed me.  So I thought, looks kind of like a storm cloud.  I'll just embroider on a sun and rainbow, which can faintly bee seen in blue wash-out ink on the left, and then it'll be fit to be seen.

The Orange and the Black

Wow, this post marks one whole month where I've kept up with blogging every single day!  (Some posts, admittedly, less stellar than others, but life ebbs and flows like that.)

To amuse: over the weekend, for whatever reason the topic of discussion turned to vampires.  Then I stopped, and asked Squiddle if he knew what a vampire was.  His answer: "A vampire is a scary person who lives in a haunted house.  Well, they're not really a person...."  Can't say he's wrong!

Is it Monday that's traditionally for washing?  Because regardless, yesterday I churned through four loads of laundry, filled the dishwasher twice, made dinner for five (Squiddle's friend Koltin came over to play after school), as well as muffins, and sewed the binding to the Orange Nine-Patch quilt.

The work du jour, all trimmed and awaiting its binding:

I ended up not having quite enough of the binding fabric to do my usual 2.5" binding, so I went with a 2" binding, here laid out on the ironing board, looking a bit like zebra stripes:

Now I just need to do twenty-four feet of hand-stitching the binding to the back, correct the label, and it'll be all done.  No problem, right? :)

A Finish, and Quilting Finished

Since we had a rare sunny day yesterday, I asked Wonderful Husband to hold the Disney Star quilt over the railing of our back (south-facing) patio so I could get a good photo before it's given away to Niecelet on Friday.

The quilt is bound in the darkest of the four purples, the one on the upper left.  And there's not much left of it!  And while I'm at it, here are the pair of pillowcases that are going with the quilt, one thrifted, and one made to match:

The pink fabric in the homemade pillowcase isn't in the quilt (I didn't have enough of any of the fabrics for the body of a pillowcase), but the other two fabrics are.  Given that Niecelet loves Elsa, I had to use one of the Frozen fabrics for the band, and I made sure Elsa-and-Anna (and Kristoff-and-Sven) were centered.

And my final accomplishment yesterday was quilting all twenty-four remaining nine-patches in the Orange Nine-Patch quilt:

Please note how much thread is left on the spool.  Not much!  I'll finish it up sewing the binding on.