W.I.P.'s on a Rainy Day

This has been a rainy, wet, miserable kind of day--perfect weather for staying indoors and sewing! In fact, it's actually a bit icy outside, so my piano lesson was cancelled, giving me even more time to spend playing with fabric.

My daughter complained that I kept posting the same things and she's right. The past few blog posts were very similar and I apologize for that. So I'm going to try and kick it up with some variety this week.

I have one of those "big board" ironing boards that I absolutely love, but the canvas cover on it had gotten a bit grungy. I saw a cover in the store, but it was almost $40 so I decided I would just make my own. I already had some of the Iron Quick fabric and I cut out a piece and laid it right over the cover. That was a couple of weeks ago!

So on Monday I decided it was time to make it a little more permanent. First I traced around a cup to get the curved corners in the fabric. Then I stitched white, regular bias tape all around the edge and turned it to make a casing, leaving an opening at the end to insert a drawstring. The drawstring was the challenging part because we just don't use string that much anymore. I finally found a roll of garden twine out in the shed and used a safety pin to pull it through the casing. I put it over the ironing board, pulled it up snug to fit and then tied it in a bow. It works great and didn't take much time or money!

A friend came over last week to let me see and play with her AccuQuilt cutter. She only brought the die that makes these apple core pieces because that's what she's been working on. I can see how it would be a wonderful tool if you were going to make a whole quilt with these, but for everyday use, I can't imagine how I would use it.

If you have one of these types of devices, do you use it and what do you use it for? How often do you use it? Unless I had some really good reasons to use it, the cost of the machine and then the additional costs of the dies seem prohibitive.

So now I have this cute little apple core block and I need to figure on something I can do with it. Any ideas?

Since Mom's Egg Money quilt is finished, I decided it was time to take a break from the big projects and work on some smaller, fun things that I had put off. One of them was this Winter Wonderland Round Robin that's being done over at Patchwork Posse. There are different people designing each row and they introduce a new one twice a month, ending in July with a finished quilt. This is the first row, "Delectable Mountains."

Now, I don't really want to start any more LARGE quilts, if I can help it, but this one should be easy enough to do (all the rows so far--there are 3--have been quite simple) and you have 2 weeks to do them. In addition, I don't think it's going to be that large--about 4 feet wide and who knows how long. I decided that I would make it all in flannels from my stash since I have more than I wish I did and I'm trying to use up some of them. I figure that when it's done, I'll also use flannel as the backing and it will make Charles a really nice, warm lap quilt. So that's the plan. I have the other two rows cut out and I'm going to be working on them and get caught up.

Isn't this just the cutest block? Well, you can't tell from the picture, but it's only 4.5 inches square! Tiny! This is a block from Heartspun Quilts. She did a weekly series in January and February called "Pocket Patchwork-Orphans and Scraps." I couldn't make the blocks when she was posting them, so I'm trying to get them made now. There are only 4 blocks and she made them into a cute little table runner, which is probably what I'll be doing with them.

So, how's that for a little variety?! And the day is still fairly young (it's only 5 p.m.) so there's still time to "Get More Done...Today!"