Thanksgiving Pumpkin

Pumpkin muffins, anyone?!?!?

The day after Halloween, I bought a pumpkin for $1 at Walmart and put it in the garage where it's cool. Today, the day before Thanksgiving, I chopped it into six chunks and stuck it in the oven at 350 degrees for 45 minutes. After the pumpkin finished baking, I let it cool for a few minutes, peeled off the skin, and ended up with a heaping two quarts of pumpkin flesh pieces. 

After a few minutes with the potato masher, the pieces were reduced to a nice mash.

We used some of the mash to make pumpkin muffins, which are excellent. We set some aside to eat with dinner tonight, saved two cups to make a pumpkin pie tomorrow, and froze the rest to add to soups this winter. We're definitely getting our money's worth out of a $1 pumpkin. 

Happy Thanksgiving, Everyone!  

Sewing Machine Stool

About a year ago, I began looking for a stool to match a mid-century modern Copenhagen-style sewing machine cabinet. I found several which were too expensive (more than $100) and one which needed too much restoration work (the legs were painted blue and the seat had been recovered with a printed patchwork cotton fabric). Finally, a month ago, I found a stool with a reasonable price ($20) and its original upholstery. The upholstery was in good shape, but the legs needed some work.

The legs had a coat of tan paint over the original blonde finish and they’d been scuffed up a bit.

I didn’t care about the paint or the scuff marks because I was going to refinish the legs to match my cabinet. I used wood stripper and a teflon pad to remove the old paint and the original finish.

Next, I applied a walnut stain which I knew would be too dark. I wiped off most of the stain immediately after I applied it and then used mineral spirits to make the walnut stain even lighter.

I brushed on a coat of polyurethane which contained a cherry stain. If I’d wanted the legs to be more red, I could have applied another coat of the polyurethane/stain, but they were exactly the color I wanted after one coat. 

I’m thrilled to pieces with my “new” stool and I'm sure I'll use it a lot. Happy Sewing everyone!

Renovated Bird Bath

Our bird bath developed a bunch of cracks and would no longer hold water. It was a shame, because the bird bath was great. It’s made from light weight plastic and has a little solar panel in the middle which runs a pump so the birds can have a shower as well as a bath. For a while, epoxy worked to seal the cracks and stop the leaks. Eventually, though, epoxy couldn’t keep up with the cracks. When we looked for a replacement, we couldn’t find anything we liked.

Plasti Dip to the rescue! If you haven’t used Plasti Dip before, enter it as a search term on youtube and you’ll see people using it in all kinds of creative ways. It’s a product which creates a flexible plastic barrier that feels sort of like rubber. We used a can of yellow Plasti Dip (because that’s what we could find) and a paint brush to fill and cover the cracks in the bird bath. We didn’t want a yellow bird bath, so when the yellow Plasti Dip dried/cured, we used a rattle can of gray Plasti Dip to cover the entire top surface of the bird bath.

Plasti Dip was easy to use and worked exactly as we hoped it would. 

The bird bath is now getting heavy use and isn’t leaking.  The birds are happy and we are, too. 

New To Me Serger

Today, our small town held its annual "Big Flea," which gives people the opportunity to set up folding tables on the common and sell all the unwanted stuff they've accumulated in their garages since last year's Big Flea. We didn't see anything interesting until we came to a table with a serger. I've never used a serger, but I've always been curious about them. This one was a White Speedylock 1600 and it came with a box of accessories, a manual, a plastic cover, and four spools of thread. The only thing missing was a little plastic tray which is meant to snap on the front and collect the pieces of fabric as they're cut off by the serger's blade. The person selling it seemed to think it probably worked and she had it priced at $30, so we decided to take a chance.

The Bird's Eye View

We got it home, cleaned it a bit, oiled it, threaded it, and lo and behold it works fine. Now all I need to do is think of a reason to use a serger.  Happy sewing (and serging) everyone!

Hidden Gems

Last week, we were on our way into an office building when we spotted two giraffes. Giraffes??

E is a little less than six feet tall, so you can gauge how tall the statues are. According to one of the tenants in the building, the building's owner saw these on his travels in another country, fell in love with them, bought them, and shipped them to the United States. We are grateful he installed them where lots of people can enjoy them. 

Unexpected art is always a treat!

Dogs in the Garden Quilt

In looking through my remaining flannel scraps, I found flowers, lady bugs, butterflies, salamanders, birds, and dogs. There were some scraps of pink, too. I jumbled all of these together to make squares for the quilt I finished today – Dogs in The Garden. This is another small quilt, 36 x 42 inches. I pieced the top with my Singer 201 and finished it with my Singer 401.

The back of the quilt is a piece of flannel from my stash and it continues the garden theme. No dogs on the back, though.

I used a polka dot scrap for the binding and had less than one inch left over. There was just barely enough to join the two pieces of binding. Yikes! Someone asked me how to join the two ends of the binding with a bias seam and this photo shows how to do this. One end needs to overlap the other end by the width of the binding. My binding was three inches wide, so I needed to overlap the ends by three inches. Right sides together.  Make sure the folds in the binding are as shown in the photo and also note the twist (or lack of twist) in the ends. Sew on the diagonal along the pins in the photo. That's all there is to it. 

Frieda enjoyed exploring the scrap bag while I sewed.

I hope Spring has arrived where you are. Our high temperature today was 45 degrees with stiff winds and spitting rain which is supposed to change to wet snow later this afternoon. Perfect weather for a lap quilt.

Happy sewing, everyone!

DIY Cutting Table

For a long time, I used my dining room table as my fabric cutting table. I liked the large work surface, but I didn't like the low height of the table (oh, my aching back!) and I didn't like making a mess in the dining room every time I cut a piece of fabric.

Eventually, I abandoned the dining room table and started using the twin bed in the spare bedroom as my cutting table. I put a hollow core door on top of the bed and used bed risers (those plastic things you put under the feet of a bed to raise it up) to make the work surface higher. I liked having a higher work surface, but it wasn't ideal because there was no overhang which meant I was bending over the whole time I was using it. Plus, I didn't like giving up the spare bedroom. And, the hollow core door wasn't as large as my cutting mat, which is 3x4 feet.

I looked online to see if I could find a cutting table I liked. A lot of them weren't tall enough for me. Others were designed to hold a sewing machine, which I didn't need. Others had lots of drawers, but I wanted a large open space under the table. Still others were (in my view) ridiculously expensive.

So, one morning after breakfast, I made a quick sketch of what I wanted and E headed to the shop. The end result was my new cutting table. The table top is 4x4 feet of 3/4 inch plywood, which is big enough for my cutting mat and leaves space along the back edge for a lamp, fabric weights, boxes of pins, etc. The framework is made of 2x4s and it's 36 inches wide and 33 inches deep, so I have a nice overhang on each edge. The wheels caster so I can roll it around the room in any direction and wherever I want. The height to the top of the work surface is 37 inches, which is exactly what I wanted. The sides and the back are pegboard where I can hang my rulers and my smaller cutting board. In the big open space in the front, I put an old two-door chest which holds all of my spray "stuff" -- starch, sizing, temporary bond, permanent bond, etc. Next to the chest is my embroidery machine. (Pay no attention to the cow. She's purely decorative.)

My sewing room is on the second floor of our house and there was no way we could possibly carry this up a flight of stairs or get it through any of the doors. So, we turned it into a flat pack and put some of the pieces together in the shop, carried them upstairs to the sewing room, and assembled it there.

I am thrilled with my cutting table and look forward to using it soon. Happy sewing, everyone!

Darcy and the UFOs

We don’t write about all of E’s animal rescue flights, but the presence of UFOs made this flight more interesting than some others.

In early December 2015, animal control officers in eastern North Carolina picked up a homeless, stray dog and her five tiny puppies. The dog was caring for the puppies as best she could without shelter or food, and she was also coping with a deep wound on her abdomen. Pam, an animal rescue volunteer, stepped in to give the dogs a foster home and she named the dog Darcy. Pam tended to Darcy’s wound, made sure all of the puppies stayed healthy, and gave them lots of toys and attention.

After six weeks, the dogs were ready to travel to their rescue group 400 miles away in New Jersey. Pam regularly works with Pilots ‘n Paws and she reached out to pilots who’d flown dogs for her before and asked if they could help. E volunteered to fly and so did a friend of his, John. Both E and John have flown hundreds of dogs for Pilots 'n Paws. 

On January 20, 2016, E flew to Roanoke Rapids, NC, where he picked up Darcy and the puppies and loaded them into his plane.

E flew to Westminster, MD, where he met John. They transferred the dogs to John’s plane and he flew them to their rescue group in New Jersey which will find permanent, loving homes for them.

This flight was unusual because both E and John are UFOs – United Flying Octogenarians. UFOs are pilots who flew a fixed or rotary wing, glider, sport or balloon aircraft as pilot in command on or after their 80th birthdays. I'm sure this isn’t the first time two UFO pilots have teamed up to make a Pilots ‘n Paws flight, but it is definitely not a common occurrence. 

If you want more information about Pilots ‘n Paws, you can find it here and here. If you want more information about the UFOs, you can find it here. 

Dresden Circle Flannel Quilt

This is the fourth quilt I've made from the box of flannel scraps someone gave me several months ago. The box contained some skinny triangles and I trimmed twenty of them and stitched them together into this Dresden circle. I pieced together enough of the pink (with tiny pink dots which you can maybe see in the next photo) to make a border and I used the last few bits of the off-white to make the binding, which I attached using my Singer 401.

I put some extra batting under the circle so it stands up about an inch from the face of the quilt, and I didn't quilt the Dresden pieces because I decided I liked the way it looks as it is. This quilt is 36 x 36 inches, which is about the same size as the previous three small flannel quilts I made from this same box of scraps. The box isn't quite empty, but it's getting close. It's been fun, and a little challenging, to sift through the pile of scraps and come up with ideas for combining them into a series of small quilts. 

Happy sewing, everyone!  

The Featherweight's New Clothes

This afternoon, I had a couple of spare hours and a pile of fleece scraps, and the Featherweight ended up with some snazzy new duds. There's a tiger striped sock which protects the bed, including the hinged piece.

There's also a gusseted bag which gives the machine some extra protection when it's in the case.

Happy sewing, everyone!