She's Arrived!!!

Hooray, after weeks and weeks of nervous anticipation... my Juki TL-98P finally arrived!!!! Oh joy of joys she is everything I had hoped she would be.   Its like going from 4 cylinder sewing to a roaring V8.  She goes from 0 to flat out in a second.  It's lucky there are no speeding fines in sewing or I would have lost my licence for sure ;) haha

We've had lots of playtime together, mostly piecing and I'm really happy with my purchase.  I did, however, have to make another purchase to make room for her in my little studio (sometimes one thing leads to another!).  I still use my old Janome for teaching students and piecing work (I bought the Juki mostly for FMQ) so I soon realised that if I was going to make the space functional I required a better setup.

So I purchased these two desks from Officeworks and did a bit of rearranging.

My studio is now a lot more manageable and the light from the window is a godsend.  I was working in my shadow before - sew annoying ;).  I also made myself a design wall from a large piece of batting and a dowel rod.  I just folded the batting over the top and stitched down to make a rod pocket - too easy and much better than laying out on the floor.

This is actually the meals area of the house, which is great because its right next to the kitchen, makes me accessible to the kids and I can keep an eye on dinner and sew at the same time!  I usually pull out my cutting mat and place it on our dining table if I need to cut yardage, otherwise my old cutting mat is under my Janome so I can trim up blocks or do paper foundation trimming... perfect!  Storage is aways an issue for me, but I cleaned out my linen cupboard in the hallway so my batting and large items live there.  It did lead me to wonder though, why hasn't someone invented and ironing board with straight legs?  That way we could store things underneath it.  I may (shhhhh don't tell DH) get another shelving unit and just have an ironing board mounted on top to solve this problem.... need to think about it a bit more.

I had a new student start a few weeks ago and there is also talk of a custom quilt job on the horizon so having a space that can cope with all of these things is quite important.

I've been quite busy working on a mystery quilt for our guild members.  It's a garden themed quilt.  At this stage I can only reveal the first block as the members have only just been given this block... but as you can see, its quite pretty.

Dresden plate centre block

The colours were picked with the help of my friend Lorraine, from Patchwork Passion in Cranbourne and what a marvellous job she did.  Beautiful fabrics are always a pleasure to work with.. and.. this will be my first quilt where I haven't pre-washed the fabrics! Eeeeek!  That scares the crap out of me but sometimes we have to live on the edge a bit ;)

I've been delving into my scraps making some quilts for a worthy cause... more about that in the next few days... and also a baby quilt for a friend who's daughter is expecting a baby in August... my friends first grandchild :)

I also played around with my Dresden plate ruler and came up with this little beauty... I might do a tutorial on this soon :) I call it my Kaleidoscope Cushion -  it was so much fun!

There is lots going on here, especially being school holidays, so I have lots to share... I'm lucky I'm getting a lot of time of late to spend in the sewing room... going to dig into my growing pile of UFO's and get some things finished so you may see some 'oldies but goodies' popup.

Can I just say that the very inspiring Victoria Findlay-Wolfe has a lot to answer for and I'm itching to play in my fabrics and make some truly unique quilts, so expect to see more of that from me in the future :)

I'm linking up with Mollie Sparkles Sunday Stash, Confessions of a Fabric Addict, My Quilt Infatuation and Pink Doxies.

Ok until next time

Yours in Stitches

Leanne x