Boy, I Missed you!

I'm back! Did you miss me? Well, I miss all of you! The past couple of months has been incredibly stressful, and while I'm not out of the woods by a long shot I had my first weekend off recently and I was finally able to get back to some sewing. Woot! (And I'm not even going to mention how sad I was that I couldn't make it to the Sewing Summit over the weekend. I had it on my calendar, with every intention of going, since it was announced. Alas, as work intensified in August it became quickly evident that I was not going to be able to make it. I did hold on to hope but, regretfully, couldn't go. I hope every one that was lucky enough to get to Salt Lake City had an amazing time. I'll be there next year!)

Since my sewing machines have been on an unexpected hiatus I've gotten dreadfully behind on projects and have a To Do List a mile long. I did make my deadlines on a couple swaps, but I owe some bee blocks from months past. Over the next week I'll be playing a little catch up here and there so bear with me.

I started limiting myself to the number of swaps I'm joining and I've decided that I'm keeping it to the MMM Swap and the Pillow Talk Swap. Occasionally, if something else strikes my fancy I'll join in, but for now that's about all I can manage. I did get nudged into the For The Love Of Solids Swap on Flickr and I will admit that I was up to the deadline on that one. Thankfully, I was able to eek it out in time.

My secret partner didn't give me a lot to go on, but I knew she wanted a sewing machine cover and I used her mosaic to hopefully pin down her style. Using her favorite Kona Ash as the primary solid I picked out some complementary colors for the project. I don't know why but I was really feeling yellow for her sewing machine cover. And I wanted to add a few pops of color here and there but keep the overall look on the subtle side.

I chose a variety of buttery yellow hues as my baseline. Then I added in a few shades of soft greens and finally a pop of purple. I was really excited about this project because I finally got to rip open my brand new Sizzix Big Shot for a test run! (I'll be giving a full review on the Big Shot very soon, I just want to get a few more projects under my belt first.) I used the 5" Square Die to cut out the squares for my HSTs.

I experimented with the layout and ended up playing with shading as well as geometry to get to my final layout. I quilted the sewing machine cover with Gutterman variegated yellow 100% cotton thread and decided to echo quilt in the negative spaces of the Kona Ash. I really like the geometric shapes made by the quilting on the underside of the cover. Since I didn't know my partner's machine dimensions I had to guess and use my own machine as a a model, so I hope it fits! Unfortunately, my partner has gone MIA so I have never heard if she likes it or even if she received it. One of the perils of blind swapping. I do hope she's okay!

So that's update number one. Expect more catching up this week and then I'll try and get everything back to normal around here. It feels good to be back. I really, really missed you guys!