2019 Valentines

Valentine cards this year were inspired by some software I inherited from Mom.  Who knows how old it is.  It is a collection of clipart and copyright free images.  There were Victorian Valentine post cards in the set that I printed and used to make cards.

Spring Birthday Cards

I did go to the Polka Dots shop rummage sale.  There wasn’t much at the rummage, but I succumbed and bought 2 water color markers to try.  So to make birthday cards, I stamped a pretty tulip stamp and colored them with my new markers. 

The brand I bought were the Tim Holtz Distress Markers in Fire Brick Red and Walnut Stain.  They make fine tulip colors.  I wasn’t overly thrilled with the markers.  They dry very fast, making it difficult to wash the color into a water color affect.  I may have to try some other brand, as I did like the end result.

I tried stamping and coloring on cardstock and on manilla file cards.  The file cards are from a resale shop and had a price tag of 50 cents on them.  They are wonderful.

First Finish of 2019

This is another table runner that was started last summer.  The interesting part is that it doesn’t show up in my list of projects.  Wonder how that can be?  Oh well.  Never said recordkeeping was my strong suit. 

The printed Victorian Christmas scenes were squares that were given away by the Woolen Mill Quilt Shop when they were in business in Cedarburg.  I suspect that the squares were collected over a few years.  They would show up in a free give away box during Quilt Shop Hops.

No interesting quilting was done.  Simply stitched next to the seam and across all printed squares.

More Christmas fabric was used up.  Hurray.  There will always be new Christmas fabric that catches my eye.  I wanted to work down the inventory of fabric and use up some scraps.

New Wallhanging

This is one of those things that came out of mindless sewing.  Mindless sewing in the Nancy world is hunting up a bunch of strips that are hanging out in the scrap bins and sewing them together.  You then can slice them up and in this case put them into a wall hanging.  The blue fabric is more of the backing from my college quilt.  So nicely aged, 1970s fabric. 

I opted to try a rope quilting design.  I had a stencil I picked up somewhere.  So I marked the quilt with the stencil.  I went bold and used thread you can see.  I started out quilting the rope with the feed dogs up and later switched put the feed dogs down.  I realized this was a nice repetitive pattern to practice free motion quilting.  No matter which method I used, they are not perfect.  This is a slow process and takes patience.