2017, The Year of my Dream Sewing Room

Ah, 2017, the year a decent portion of our basement becomes the sewing room of my dreams.  We bought our house in 2012 and since before day 1, the basement was going to be my fabric play-land. Our house is a 2,700 sq. ft. ranch, which means the basement is equal in size.  Here are some pictures of the first layer of insulation installed.  The picture to the left is taken from the entrance to the sewing room at the bottom of the basement stairs.  This area will be the main sewing space.  There is a plan to  add another window opposite the existing one to get a little more natural light.

This next picture is a view from further inside the sewing space.  The space past the first set of columns will be for a future longarm and group sewing space.  There is another set of columns in the back where there will be a bathroom some time in the future.  The space continues to the right side a little beyond the white pipe in the back of the picture.  Underneath the staircase you can see on the right is where my office area will be.

This picture is a view looking from the opposite direction of the other pictures.  Below is the same basic view from a little different angle.  The area you can't see in any of these pictures is to the other side of the stairs.  I'll have a storage room which is about 10' x 12'.  I'm hoping this is all the storage I'll ever need and that the space can also accommodate a cutting island.  I think it would be efficient to have the cutting area in the fabric storage room, then I can choose fabric, cut it and put the remainder away immediately.

My DH is going to be doing most of the work himself, so I expect this project to take a while, but good headway is being made!  I couldn't be more excited!!

Sewing up a storm and WEBBING! - En Provence & More!

Made fabric before cutting

I finished my Arcadia Avenue quilt top and have been "making fabric" from the scraps.  The theory is you sew together all the little crumbs and then cut that out into blocks to use in a quilt.  The paper piecing lended itself to this since there were some decent size scraps created.  Before cutting and after about a million hours sewing, trimming, fitting and pressing I ended up with this monstrosity.  I cut as many 4 1/2" blocks as I could and still had a lot of larger pieces I could sew together...back to the sewing machine.  I think I only got 16 blocks out of my first cut.

First 16 blocks

My second round got me more blocks and a smaller pile of crumbs.  I kept going until I couldn't look at the fabric or touch a piece of it any more and ended up with 35 blocks.  I plan to make these into stars by adding flying geese.  I'm not sure I'll do this ever again as it was very tiresome at the end.  I still have enough fabric left to make that one last block required to make a 6 x 6 layout, but I just can't do it.  I did save the stuff, maybe by the time I get around to making a quilt out of this I may have the fortitude to make that a one last block.

My first 25 made-fabric blocks

On to En Provence....to my pleasant surprise Step 7 was released very shortly after Step 6.  Woohoo!  But, Step 7 was like many steps in 1.  I was nowhere near being a being able to start piecing the top. I had to make 80 more QSTs and 16 sets of yellow solid squares.  My only complaint about this mystery would be that the last piecing steps should have been included with some of the other weekly steps so that when we arrived at the reveal we would be ready to start piecing the top together.

Last 80 QSTs

I pieced one block and sashing just to see how they came out, then chain pieced the remaining ones.  Man, that 25 patch block was intense!  I spent a lot of time arranging my fabrics so I didn't have like fabrics together or diagonal from each other.  I wasn't 100% successful, but I'm happy with the resulting blocks.

40 Sashings Complete

Tahnoon poses for a photo

I laid out all the blocks (which my cats loved) and moved everything around until I liked the layout.  As I was stacking my rows one of my cats got on top of the pile. I proceeded to stack everything on top of her and she didn't mind at all.  I had planned to try webbing this quilt together (why haven't I done this before??) but had, out of habit, stacked them up in rows, not columns :(  I sewed the first two rows together as I normally would which was ok since I like the instant gratification of seeing my quilt top come together.  I re-stacked my quilt pile for webbing and webbed the rest together.  WOW!!!!  Why haven't I been doing this all along?  I was a machine, just sitting and sewing it all together.  I didn't clip or press before sewing the columns together either.  That was AWESOME!  I was nervous about the amount of pressing to be done after, but it really wasn't that bad.  I'm definitely a believer!

Daisy enjoying the finished blocks

After several fruitful hours I finished the center of the quilt!  I pieced together the 32 neutral 8 patches and called it a night.  I'm excited to get the borders on this and call this puppy done!

Lucifer 2 getting her photo op