Beautiful Bead Embroidery

Hello, everyone.  I have mentioned in my last post that I made a trip up north. While there I visited the Alaska Native Heritage Center, a kind of hybrid between cultural demonstration and art museum.

This beautiful piece was on display there. It is bead work on smoked moose hide and the design and execution are wonderful. It was inspirational. 

An amazing sight

Hello,  everyone. Today I am sharing the most amazing view.

This is Mt. Denali and its two companion peaks, Mt. Foraker at the left and Mt. Hunter, plus the rest of the range, fully visible! 

They say that only 30 percent of visitors get to see the mountain without its veil of obscuring clouds.

It's amazing.

Another project is done

Hello, everyone.  It's completion season in the sewing room. Yesterday finished a gift, today finished a pouch that will probably be a gift as well.

The first time I made boxed corners by myself. 

The butterfly is an included design in my Janome embroidery machine. 

The fabrics are from stash...I think this finishes the blue print binding strips that were made for the butterfly quilt a while back. Cotton, of course. The zipper is also from stash.

Getting use out of my magnetic hoop

Hello, everyone.  As usual,  there are a bunch of crafty projects underway. 

A friend asked me to embroider on some coated canvas and the fabric turned out to be too thick or stiff to go into my regular hoop. Before I tried something that would not have worked (floating such a stiff project) I remembered that I have a magnetic hoop. It doesn't require the fabric to bend around the upper half of the hoop to hold the fabric.

It is a little tricky to line up the center, but I was able to check centering by laying the grid from my other hoop on top of the marked edges and get it lined up.

Also, my new "hair clips" are hard at work controlling the bulk of the portfolio. 😀 

I used topper to encourage the letters to sit nicely on the top of the blue fabric. The stabilizer is a medium weight cut-away. 

Now to find some use for the test pieces!

A little TLC for my pressing mat

Hello, everyone.  Today it is, as usual in this part of the year, hot outside. I have been sewing during the hottest part of the day instead of working outside. 

I have a wool pressing mat that is wonderful.  It had developed a little bit of pilling--it is wool, after all--and I  thought maybe it needed something protective to keep abrasion and debris off of the felt.

Behold the mat pillowcase.  I measured it from the mat and allowed a little extra for turn of the cloth. There's a little pleat at the folded end for the thickness. The fabric is some cotton from the stash. After sewing the seams, I serged the raw edges to prevent fraying. 

A pincushion is done

Hello, everyone.  It's confession time: the stash is immense around here! So I'm looking to use up random pieced strips, orphan blocks, beads, ribbons, and anything else that can become part of something.

This was made from two pieced strips plus three random half-square triangles. It happened that the colors matched. I think it's got a modern-quilting vibe.

The back side.

This little pincushion is about 3 inches square. I used scrap shreds for the stuffing, and scrap batting for the quilting of the two pieces. When you make a quilt, there are always strips of batting that get trimmed from the edges. They're great for little projects.

One project completed (edited for mis-typed word)

Hello, everyone.  A small weather update, we have had a number of days with rain lately. This is very welcome. The sweet potatoes are so vigorous that some tendrils are climbing a volunteer aster plant in the bed. Perhaps we will place some tomato cages for them.

On the topic of this post, a scrap sourced purse. 

The blue strips are from a large amount of binding that was created for the butterfly quilt a while back. (I got excited and just kept adding pretty blue pieces.) The lining is some orange bubble-print in the stash. I digitized the embroidery myself. The coordinating buttons and zipper are, of course, from stash. 

The purse is a shoulder bag, sized for an older girl or a petite woman. 

Still on the "to do" list, another purse in cotton, a shoulder or cross body pouch in cream damask, a gift (already cut out), another quilt, this one in pinks and pastels (blocks 3/4 assembled, needing a top strip to be ready for arrangement), and some more bags and purses.