Another old project...

I first started this project about 10 years ago. It got buried in a storage box, too.  It's a pattern, still available, from this company.

http://www.swdecoratives.com/proddetail.php?prod=111102

Everything was done except the decorative elements, quilting and binding.  

I used silver conchos on the belt, the necklace has real beads, and the basket's decorative braids have silver beads at the ends. 

I free-motion quilted the sky and the sand dunes, outlined quilted the cacti and woman. Did some crosshatch on the lowest cactus, too. The borders are stitched in the ditch. 

I didn't want to quilt the skirt or top - I washed the quilt so it'd wrinkle a bit, giving the skirt fabric authentic folds. 

Stashbusting:

All the fabrics used were scraps I had laying around, except the gray borders. 

The backing fabric was given to me by a neighbor many years ago. 

Used several bobbins of different colored threads for the quilting.

Old Project, finally finished...

Back when I first started getting serious about learning to quilt, I took a class to learn to make this specific quilt.  That was about 20 years ago. The quilt is from a Trudi Hughes quilt book.

Although I finished taking the class, I never finished the quilt because there were several flaws in my sewing, and it made the quilt wonky. It was also supposed to have an additional border to make it twin-size. The additional border was to be made up of 9 patches that matched the center of the hearts (so that's what that extra fabric was for!!).  

I had hand-quilted the entire middle when I discovered that it was supposed to have this extra border and that the back was all crooked. Being an inexperienced quilter at the time, I had no idea what to do, so I put it away to finish later.  

We then moved a couple times and the quilt ended up in storage.  The extra fabric for it ended up in different boxes. At one point, due to mice getting into our stored stuff, several boxes were thrown away due to the nasty mess they made. The extra fabric was part of that garbage. So now I had a dilemma...how to finish the quilt.  So I took the easy way out.  I put it back in a box and forgot it. 

Well, in my current quest to finish everything on my project list...this one came up. I decided to just finish it as is.  The entire center is hand-quilted around the hearts, the blocks and the first border. So, bind it, and stitch down the outer borders and call 'er done!  

As you can see by the sides, I ate up some of the blue flowered border by folding the wonky back over the front to make the border. 

It took me about half an hour to finish this quilt of Damocles that has been hanging over my head for 20 years!  LOL

Project-busting:

1 quilt - DONE!

Small gifts...

In the past few days, I've mostly been doing clothing repair:

3 pairs of pants hemmed

1 shirt collar remade for better fit

1 pair pants cut into shorts and holes repaired

1 pair of pants repaired hole

I took some old flour sack towels, cut them into 4ths, and made cloth "paper" towels for kitchen use to cut down on the waste of paper towels. 

Then I made 2 of these clothespin bags for gifts.  The hole is a bit larger than I thought, so I re-worked the pattern I created for future use. I bought the fabric specifically for the project, as well as the child's hangers. 

Stashbusting:

About a yard of binding tape

1/2 spool of thread