New Wall Decor

I actually have something on my living room wall now!

As you can see from this first picture, it was just a big, ugly, beige wall.  From the second picture you can see that it now has decor.  It is just a cheap poster frame with some fabric in it but it sure is better than nothing.

I got the frame from JoAnn.  It was originally $60 but I had a 40% off coupon and a 20% off the entire purchase coupon so I didn't pay anywhere close to $60.  The fabric is left over from when I re-upholstered my kitchen bar stools.

The plan for the future is to paint the frame the same green color that is on the opposite wall, but I don't really want to do that now.  My goal for this iteration was just to get something up there so the wall wouldn't look so empty.

Now for that room all I need to do is replace those ugly folding chairs with actual sitting chairs. I have my eye on some old restaurant chairs that I've seen on KSL that I'll re-upolster and re-paint but I haven't gotten around to buying them yet.  Hopefully they are still available when I do go to buy them.

Latest Quilt

 I've made another quilt. This is the first one I've made for someone who isn't born yet. Barracuda is due at the beginning of March so I tried to make this quilt spring-y.

I chose a subway tile type pattern because, well, it looked fun.  Somehow my longest tiles ended up  being 1/8 of an inch too long each so I had to sew a little extra to all the background rows between but, luckily, the background pattern is really busy so it is nearly impossible to tell that I had to add those pieces.

While I was at the fabric store I chose the paisley fabric first, I just fell in love with it.  From there I chose the other two greens and decided to use the yellow as binding because it added a little brightness to the whole quilt.

It took me a while to decide how to quilt the quilt but I ended up doing a whimsical, curly line around all the tiles.  I did this the same way I did c.b.'s quilt: freehand using the embroidery foot. The biggest lesson I learned was to make sure the fabric was pulled tight as I quilted because I ended up with some loose fabric between tiles.

I also used the whimsical, curly line for my binding.  I thought it would be super cute and, well, it is.  I learned several lessons here (see the next picture for the big, nasty one), one of which is that if you forget to put your sewing machine's feet down when sewing free-hand, it isn't a huge deal.  I also learned that if the fabric is too thick for the sewing machine needle, the machine will beep at me.  I ended up having to do a little of the binding by hand - in some places you can tell but in one place (on the front) it looks pretty good.

The biggest lesson that I learned with this binding was that I didn't do it very well.  As you can see, my tension was off. Even though I did a test with several layers of fabric (I got the tension perfect in the test, it really was beautiful)  I just couldn't get the tension right while actually quilting.  I ended up giving up on trying to fix the tension so I'll just try to convince everyone to never look at the back side of this quilt.

I think a contributing factor was the the quilt side was just two layers of fabric and one layer of 6 oz batting while the binding side was up to 6 layers of fabric plus the binding, so getting the same tension to work on both was a tall order to begin with.

If anyone has any ideas about how I could have done this better, I'd love to hear it.