Flannel Quilt

Two months ago, someone gave me a box filled with flannel scraps. There were lots of long, skinny strips and hundreds of irregularly shaped small pieces. The two largest pieces in the box were 9 inches square. The smart thing to do would have been to shove the box into a dark corner of my sewing room and forget about it. Instead, I made this 38 x 38-inch flannel quilt.

Working with stretchy flannel was challenging for me. After I cut my pieces, I sprayed them with Magic Sizing and ironed them flat before I sewed them. The directions on the sizing spray can said to use a lower heat setting than the one appropriate for the fabric, but this didn't work for me. I set my iron on cotton and left it there. After I sewed my seams, I sprayed them with sizing and ironed them open instead of pressing them to one side because I thought the seams would have been too thick otherwise.

I started quilting using a straight stitch in the ditch. But, when I was about half way finished I decided I didn't like the way it looked so I picked out everything and quilted using a zig zag stitch which I liked a lot better. I used my Singer 401 with a walking foot for the whole project, including the zig zag stitches. You can see the zig zag stitching in this photo of one of my favorite squares – The one and only piece of sock monkey fabric in the entire box.

The binding is made from scraps, too. I made it 2.5 inches wide, but would make it 3 inches if I had it to do over again. I machine stitched the binding to the top side and hand stitched it to the back. The back, shown below, is a piece of flannel from my stash.

There are a ton of scraps left in the box and I have a couple of ideas for what I might like to do with them, so stay tuned. Happy sewing, everyone!

New Pilot Makes His First Pilots 'n Paws Flight

Chances Angel Rescue and Education rescued Marvin and Baxter and found foster homes to care for them until they were ready to take their next step toward permanent homes. Yesterday, Chances Angel volunteers brought the two pups to the airport in Roxboro, North Carolina, and helped load them into E's Cherokee. 

Two hours later, E landed in Frederick, Maryland where he met Chris who got his private pilot's license less than a week ago and immediately signed up to fly for Pilots 'n Paws. 

Chris flew Marvin and Baxter to Wings Field near Philadelphia, where he was met by Almost Home Dog Rescue, which will find permanent homes for these two little guys. If you look closely at the left edge of the photo, you can see Marvin peeking out from the rear window.

Welcome to Pilots 'n Paws, Chris!

Something to Smile About

Ah, the joys of Spring. The grass is green. The flowers are blooming. And the goats are smiling.

Train Travel Art

I recently bought a used book and inside was a 3x5-inch yellow and green envelope which held two reservation tickets for a passenger who traveled by train in early March 1954. The drawings on the front and the reverse of the envelope are terrific. The front shows a lineup of trains in North Western's 400 Streamliner Fleet.

The reverse shows a map of the Chicago and North Western System. If you enlarge the map, you can see things like the carvings on Mount Rushmore, the geyser of Old Faithful at Yellowstone, and a dairy cow in Madison, Wisconsin. (These two photos are both of the reverse of the envelope, but the second one is a little bit more of a closeup and is in black and blue instead of yellow and green.) 

I love how the railroad took such care to reproduce these clever drawings on something which it probably expected people to throw away once they finished their travels.

The reservations show the passenger went from Martinsburg, West Virginia to Chicago, Illinois, on the B&O Railroad, and from Chicago to Ames, Iowa on the North Western Railroad.

The book also contained a Police Traffic Bureau Warning issued to the train passenger in Des Moines Iowa in September 1954, for being parked at 4:13 p.m. in a place which didn't allow parking between 4:00 and 6:00 p.m. The warning said it was not a summons to appear in court.  Rather, it "is extended to you as a COURTESY and also gives us an opportunity to say HELLO and WELCOME." The capital letters are in the original. 

Zipper Pouch

I was roaming around youtube after watching another episode of The Great British Sewing Bee, and I ran across a Missouri Star Quilt Company tutorial for a zipper pouch. I gave it a whirl and here's the result:

The lining is red and there's a layer of fleece sandwiched between the outside and the lining so the pouch is nice and soft. This one is 9 x 9 inches, but you can make them any size you want. I bought a dozen handbag zippers (assorted colors) from an eBay seller for less than $10 so I can make a few more pouches and use up more of the scraps I have stashed away. If you have any scraps you'd like to put to good use, take a look at the MSQC tutorial and see how easy these are to make. Happy sewing, everyone!

Getting Ready For Spring

The 2014-15 winter threw a lot at us here in the mid-Atlantic region. We had brutally cold temperatures. We had snow. And ice. And freezing rain and sleet. And more snow. And more cold temperatures. We sanded, shoveled, scraped, made lots of chili, and filled the bird feeders hundreds of times. Weeks ago, we ran the white flag up the frozen pole, but Mother Nature refused to accept our surrender. Tomorrow's forecast is for 8+ inches of snow followed by single-digit temperatures.

This morning, we decided to ignore winter and get ready for spring by starting some seeds. We have one of those little cube refrigerators and it's stuffed with seeds. There are flower seeds which my late grandmother gave us decades ago. The hottest of our hot pepper seeds are from my 90-year old aunt's garden. A friend gave me seeds from two varieties of tomatoes she's grown for many years. Some seeds we saved from plants we got at plant exchanges. There are a few packets of “store bought” seeds and some seeds whose origins are a mystery. We sifted through all of them today and decided to start twenty varieties of peppers and four varieties of tomatoes. After we finished tamping the seeds into containers of potting soil, we put the containers into trays, covered the trays with clear tops, put the covered trays on shelves in a little plastic greenhouse, and closed the two zippers in the front. (In the photo, the front is open, so you'll have to imagine it zipped closed.) 

The greenhouse sits in a corner of the dining room which will be sunny the next time we see the sun.  When spring arrives, we'll be ready! 

Bird Strike Deterrent

Hello fellow bird watchers. Once in a while, a bird slams into one of our dining room windows. We always run outside, scoop them up, and hold them until they're ready to fly away. Nearly all of them live, but we still feel awful about it. So, this morning I used some scraps of clear vinyl (approximately .004" thick - bought it at JoAnn's) left over from another project and a black marker and made two of these:

The vinyl is really transparent and I had to take more than one photo to make it show so you could see it. When you're in the dining room, you sort of look through the webs and hardly notice them. The vinyl sticks to the windows by itself, just like a screen protector on an iPad, without any adhesive. Our hope is the birds will see the webs and choose a different route.  I mean, who doesn't hate running into a spider web, right?