I have decided to join the challenge posted by Vicky at LA Quilter— No Fabric Purchases for the Month of August. (Thanks to Kim at A Peach in Stitches for designing this very cute logo / button to commemorate this challenge).

I feel confident that I can accept this challenge because there are exceptions that will allow us to still make a fabric purchases:
– Fabric purchased at quilt shows doesn’t count.
– Fabric purchased as a souvenir while on vacation doesn’t count.
– Fabric purchased as an emergency doesn’t count – If you are trying to finish up a quilt in August and you run short of something you desperately need, this is an emergency.

Vicky also included allowing Blocks of the Month. I don’t currently subscribe to any BOMs so I won’t have a need to exercise this option.

Here’s to one month of no new fabric purchases!

I tried to add the same sort of scrappy border to my Double 4 Patch that Lucy added to her quilt. However, I don’t seem to have achieved the same effect. My daughter nixed the bright orange fabric on the lower right side. My husband wanted to know “What that thing was that was attached to the quilt.” This comment was followed by, “Its coming off, isn’t it?”. I auditioned several of the other fabrics that I have in my stash and………………….
………..this is the one that finally received approval from my husband. It has brown stars on a beige background–a little boring if you ask me, but probably better suited to this quilt than the scrap pieces I had picked out.
I have two chunks of this fabric. I will have to do some piecing to get the borders long enough, but this will end up a scrap quilt made entirely out of my stash.

In a post back in March, I talked about the making of my first quilt – a crazy quilt that I called, Crazy About Chickens. I talked about making this quilt on my Grandmother’s treadle sewing machine. This is a picture of that machine.

While my Grandmother was still alive, she gave me her Singer sewing machine. She owned newer, more sophisticated sewing machines since the Singer, but this was my favorite. This machine has character and personality. This machine is the one that I remember fondly while growing up. I was allowed to sew at this machine when I visited with my grandparents. As I look back on it now, I guess I was helping my grandmother “stash bust”! I will never part with this machine, even though, like my grandmother, I have own more modern sewing machines. There is no machine that can sew a more perfect straight stitch than this machine!

My grandfather sold sewing machines for Singer at one time and it was while he was selling for Singer that he bought this machine for my grandmother. Sometime after purchasing this treadle machine, my grandfather converted it to electrical power. It now has a light and foot peddle. A very modern addition to a very traditional machine.

Thanks to the Singer website, you can now look up the year and location your machine was manufactured, just by cross referencing the serial number on the front of the machine.

My machine has the serial number JB134596. According to Singer, she is a French Canadian–manufactured in 1936 at Saint-Jean-sur-Richelieu, Quebec, Canada!

Today I am going to quilt! I have a day off from work so I am going to make sure I fit in something for me!

Last weekend, I was looking through my inspiration pictures that I have collected from the internet over the years and I came across a quilt that Lucy from Quilting With The Past had posted back in December. Lucy called her quilt, UFO number 5.

I am calling my version of this quilt, Double 4 Patch. (Not very creative I know, just descriptive of the block pattern.) I have decided to make my quilt from my box of pre-cut 3″ squares. This means that my blocks finish 10″ square. With 24 blocks and an outside 5″ border, my quilt should finish about 63″ x 88″. If I keep to this size range I can make use of existing fabrics in my stash for the backing–a true stash buster.
This is a picture of some of the blocks that I have made already – they are being auditioned on the fabric that I intend to use for the sashings. The three fabrics to the left are the fabrics that I am considering for cornerstones – beige, yellow, and red. I am leaning towards the yellow.