Free Friday: Heart Box

Happy Friday, everyone!  Well, we're one week closer to spring, which at least is progress, right?  I'm just starting to feel a little cabin fever, so I need to keep myself positive and stay busy.  I think I might also be getting that nasty cold my hubby had :( it's been making the rounds through my entire family, and even sent my dad to the hospital.  I had some medicinal tea this morning and I plan on taking it pretty easy today so maybe I can fight it off before it takes hold. 

This week's free pattern is another lovely Valentine's day design!  It's an adorable little box that you can put treats or gifts in for your loved ones.  It's just the right size for a piece of jewelry or some good chocolate.  Also, it's just cute and would look good as a decoration!

Heart Box

Skill level:

Beginner

Size:

2 ½ x 2 ½ x 2 inches

Materials:

• 7-count plastic canvas
• Red Heart yarn in colors listed in key
• #16 plastic canvas needle

Instructions:

1. Cut and stitch plastic canvas according to graphs.
2. Whipstitch lid top and sides together, using Boysenberry to attach lid sides and top, and Perfect Pink to attach lid sides together. Overcast unfinished edge with Boysenberry.
3. For box, whipstitch sides and bottom together with Boysenberry. Overcast unfinished top edge with Boysenberry. ♥

Click the image above to see it larger.  You may share this pattern however you please as long as you don't alter it or claim it as your own.  Please link back if you share this pattern.  You may sell items made from this pattern.  However, you may not sell this pattern.

Well, I'd better go find a comfy spot sit and try to get better.  Have a great weekend everyone!

What's Up Wednesday

Happy Wednesday, everyone!  Oy, another laundry day for me!  I guess I shouldn't gripe too much; at least it's only two people in my house so it only takes me half a day to do the laundry.  I can't imagine what you poor ladies with multiple kids go through!  Oh goodness, I just thought of my poor grandma.  She had 12 kids (yes 12!) and lived on a farm and probably didn't have a modern washing machine until most of her kids were grown up.  Can you imagine washing 14 people's clothes with a ringer washer?  Ugh!

So with that, I'll stop griping and start writing about my week!  After two weeks of total chaos, between my sister having an emergency C-section and my husband getting extremely sick, I'm so ready to get back to normal life.  I want 2018 to be an amazing year, so I've been doing a lot of journaling and reading motivating books, and I set some goals for myself.  My goals are:

• Make one new pattern to sell every two weeks
• Write in my blog at least twice a week
• Find new blogs I love and meet people who have similar interests
• STOP READING SO MUCH NEWS because it's bad for me

I've been doing really well so far this week.  I realize it's only Wednesday, but I feel like I'm really on track!  I got one blog post written, and here I am writing another.  I posted my Swedish Hearts Coasters on my Etsy shop on Monday, and I have another pattern in the works already.  I haven't started looking for new blogs to read yet, but I have a couple in mind to check out.  AND I haven't read any news all week!  That's pretty big, considering I used to be a huge news consumer.  I don't know why because all it did was make me angry.  Maybe I liked being angry? 

Along with working on my design business and my blog, I decided I needed to start sewing more frequently.  I love to sew, after all, so why do I do it so infrequently?  It's not like I don't have the time for it.  I'm a stay at home wife/designer, so I can do a little sewing between projects or while dinner cooks. 

I decided to start a new quilt to get me off on the right foot.  I bought three Moda scrap bags last fall, which I just love!  They're selvages with about 3 inches of fabric.  So essentially, they're extremely cheap jelly rolls and as a bonus, they have lots of selvages too if you like making selvage quilts (which I do).  I cut as many of the pieces into 2 1/2 strips as I could and decided to try making a strip tube quilt.  My MIL bought a cool ruler and book that explains how to do it, but it's basically this: you sew a bunch a strips together, then sew those into a tube.  Then you use the nifty ruler to cut it into triangles, and when you open it up, it's a neat square.  Then you sew those together to make neat blocks.  I discovered, though, that I already had a half square triangle ruler!

This one is really nice too because it has built in grippy bits and lots of extra lines to help you with your HST blocks.  

I decided to do a really simple version of the quilt.  Here's what the blocks look like.

All together, my three bags of scraps made 20 blocks, so it'll be a 40x50 inch quilt when I'm done.  I like using quilts as table cloths, and I think this one will be just perfect for our table.

I have just a small pile of blocks to make yet, and then I can start piecing the blocks together!

I decided this was the perfect project to help me get to know my lovely vintage Singer 301A better.  She's such a fun machine!

She sews like a dream.  I bought her on Shopgoodwill.com for about $60!  She was pretty dirty and needed a thorough oiling and greasing.  I still have a little work to do before she's up to tip top shape, but even still, she's working like a dream.  Her stitches are so smooth and even, and at full speed, this machine can do 1600 stitches a minute.  By the way, that's on par with my Brother PQ1500S, which cost me $650

I still prefer the brother for large pieces because it's got a deep throat, but the 301A is nice for piecing.  Plus I found out it's great for dragging around the house!  Its only 16 pounds despite being entirely made of metal, and it has a cool handle.  I had to sew downstairs a lot last week because my husband worked from home while he was sick, and I didn't want to annoy him with my sewing. 

Another cool thing about my little Singer is that, unlike older machines and even a lot of modern machines, it has a 1/4 inch marking built right into the cover plate.

I like using the marking on the machine much better than a 1/4 inch foot, but that's just a personal preference.  I guess I feel like it's easier to see, and also, the line is much longer than a foot would be, so you can keep the piece of fabric on the line a lot further and not swerve off track at the beginning or end of fabric.

I guess that's all for sewing talk today.  The other thing I have to report on this week is that my Aerogarden is starting to really produce a lot of lettuce!

Here's what I harvested yesterday.  I harvested it on Friday, and then by Tuesday it needed to be harvested again, so this is what it grew in just FOUR days!

Yay salad!

Alright everyone, I'd better go work on my laundry some more.  I hope you're all having a great week so far!

Tuesday Tip: Yarn Storage Update

Happy Tuesday, everyone!  Are you having a good week so far?  I'm trying to get back into a normal routine and a more sane schedule, which is really hard after the chaos of Christmas and then having both me and my hubby being sick! 

As part of getting back into a normal routine, I decided that I need to start posting more Tuesday tips, because I have a lot of them I want to share!  And hopefully they'll be useful to someone out there. 

In the week before Christmas, I had a burning desire to get my crafting space into better order.  I get that way every year, usually in the depth of winter, but I guess it came early for me this year.  I just want to sort through and pare down and make my space more efficient and pleasant to be in.  Since I spend a very large chunk of my time crafting every day, I need it to be easy to access and I also want it to look orderly and cheery.  For whatever reason, if my space is messy, I have a hard time actually working on my projects.  Is that just me or is that a woman thing? 

So one of the biggest things I did in my pre-Christmas organizing spree was to move my yarn stash out of my closet and into my crafting room so it's easier to access.  After all, I need to get to my yarn on a pretty frequent basis.  In case you're new to the blog, here's how my yarn stash looked before.

It was sorted by color and stored in milk crates, then stacked right inside a very large storage closet in my computer room.  It was out of the way there, but also kind of a pain to get to.  If I wanted a color that was in a lower crate, I had to take all the other crates off first.  And if I needed something from the back of the closet, I had to move a whole stack out of the way and squeeze my big butt through.  It was annoying, to say the least!

I'm not one of those people that dreads organizing.  In fact, I really love organizing.  It might be because I'm a Virgo and Virgos are supposed to be very well organized and tidy.  It might also be because I'm mildly OCD!  But whatever the case, I love sorting and ordering and thinking about how things could be more efficient.  I have two problems with organizing, though.  The first is finding the time to actually get around to doing it, because it usually takes several days at the very least, and I'm the type that dumps everything in the middle of the floor in the beginning of the project, so I have to do it at a time when I'll be ok living with a huge mess for three plus days. 

My second problem is that I have a tendency to want to buy my way to better order.  I grew up poor, so I don't know where this comes from, but for some reason I feel like I need fancy organizing apparatuses in order to be truly put together.  For this project, I spent probably a week looking at possible things I could buy to organizing my yarn.  I went back and forth between buying a new book shelf and buying a cube shelf and baskets.  However, I really want to cut down on my consumerism and the false belief that new things will solve my problems, so I decided to challenge myself to use what I already had on hand and buying as little as possible for this project. 

It ended up being a fun challenge, actually.  What I discovered was that I already have a bookshelf that's the perfect size to hold all of my milk crates!  The book shelf is in my studio already, so it would be easy to access it.  I could pull out a crate, grab the yarn I want, and stick it back.  Easy!

I'm sorry to say I didn't get many pictures of the process, but it was basically a big pile of crap in the middle of my tiny studio floor.  I decided to reorder all of my shelves in my studio, get rid of as much as I could, so that I could clear off my old bookshelf.  Here's what it looked like before.

It used to hold my crafting books, my scrap fabric, my journals and notebooks, and on top is my collection of 90s cooking and crafting magazines.  I took everything off and sorted through it.  I ended up getting rid of about half the books in the process, but I kept everything else.  It got new homes in spots where I purged other things I don't need (like lots of scrapbooking supplies I don't use anymore).  Here's what the bookcase looks like now.

Now I'm going to be the first to admit that this is pretty ugly.  The bookcase is old and the shelves are sagging, and the crates are not very aesthetically pleasing in the least.  However, it's way more useful and that's a huge bonus!  I plan on covering the crates in the near future to make it look nicer and to also protect the yarn from dust and sunlight. 

There's a cool tutorial over at Sew Many Ways that I plan on using to help me cover my crates when I get that far.  I'll be sure to take lots of pictures! 

For anyone interested, this bookshelf is a super cheap Walmart creation.  It was gifted to us as a housewarming present 11 (!) years ago, but I looked, you can still find them for between $25 and $50.  The top two crates are cheapy Sterilite crates I got for $3 a piece, but the rest are authentic milk crates which I like a lot better because they're a lot sturdier and also they're a standard size.  You can buy those in Home Depot right now for about $7 a piece.

Well, that's all for today, everyone.  I hope you're all having a great Tuesday!  Happy crafting!

Swedish Heart Coasters

Happy Monday, everyone!  I hope you all had an excellent weekend and are ready to tackle this bright new week!  I know I sure am.  I have a brand new pattern up in my Etsy shop today, just in time for Valentine's day!

Swedish Heart Coasters Pattern, $4 on Etsy

These little cuties are really easy and fast to make, and would make an adorable gift for any of your sweeties this Valentine's day!

Ok everyone, I have lots of chores I need to get to today.  Have a lovely week!

Free Friday: Lacy Heart Basket

Happy Friday, everyone!  I hope you're doing well.  Can you believe that it's almost been three weeks since the new year started?  Goodness!  Part of me feels like it's been absolutely ages, like maybe two months, but the other part of me feels like we just celebrated Christmas yesterday!  I wonder if I'm the only one who gets those competing feelings. 

Well, Valentine's day is coming up and it'll be here before you know it!  So you'd better start thinking about what you want to make for your sweethearts now.  Today's free pattern would make a really nice gift for someone you love, filled with candy hearts of better yet some really good chocolate! 

Lacy Heart Basket

Skill Level:
Beginner

Size:
2 ¾ x 3 ¾ x 4 inches

Materials:

• 7-count plastic canvas
• Red Heart yarn in colors listed in key
• Hot Glue
• #16 plastic canvas needle

Instructions:

1. Cut and stitch plastic canvas according to graphs.
2. Overcast edges of handle piece with white yarn.
3. Whipstitch sides and bottom together with white yarn. Leave top edge unfinished.
4. Use hot glue to attach ends of handle piece to the inside of long sides, as shown in picture above. ♥

Click the image above to see it larger.  You may share this pattern however you please as long as you don't alter it or claim it as your own.  Please link back if you share this pattern.  You may sell items made from this pattern.  However, you may not sell this pattern.

Have a wonderful weekend, everyone!

Watermelon Tissue Box Cover

Happy Monday, everyone!  I don't have a lot of time today, so I'll just say that I got my newest pattern posted onto Etsy today!

Watermelon Tissue Box Cover Pattern, $4 on Etsy

Isn't it cute!  Ok, I'll hopefully be able to post again tomorrow once things are a little calmer! 

Just a little note

Happy Wednesday, everyone.  I just wanted to let you all know that I might not be posting much this week.  My sister just had an emergency c-section to deliver her baby.  She doesn't have anyone else in her life right now, so it's up to me and my mom to help her and so I don't know what my days are going to look like or if I'll have time to design or blog or anything.  Hopefully I'll be back soon :)