Open Sewing & Ten-Minute Table Runner

At Gruber's Quilt Shop in Waite Park (suburb of St. Cloud), Minnesota, there is open sewing on the third Monday of each month. Today was one of those fun days of sewing when we not only had a great time visiting, eating lunch, and sewing but Teresa of Gruber's gave us a challenge. The shop supplied the fabric to make a "Ten-Minute Table Runner" if we were willing to be timed to see how long it actually took us to sew one of the table runners. Well, my friend Maureen finished first at twelve minutes. There were six of us that had taken up the challenge.

Mary sewing her table runner.

Maureen squaring up the end of her table runner.

Bev pressing her table runner

From left to right: Bev, Mary, Diane, *Me*, Maureen, Rosie with our finished table runners.

Everyone had a fun day but here they are looking all together too serious!! LOL Can't let that happen for long! 

Hope you all had as fun a day as I did.

 Hugs, Beth

Open Sewing and Kitchen Curtains

Well, I finally got my kitchen curtains done. Whew---  Am I glad. At JoAnn Fabrics, I bought all of the fabric that was on the bolt for the curtains but after cutting out, there wasn't enough fabric to make the curtains as full as I had hoped. I do not like skimpy curtains, so I started checking out other JoAnn Fabrics hoping to find more fabric. They couldn't order more. When I was about to give up finding any more fabric, I did find more at a JoAnn's in St. Paul, MN. They are now done and I am happy with them. The fabric has many of the colors that I have in Fiesta dish colors.

This is the dining area window. We do not want too much covering over the windows because we like to look over the country side.

My son made this cornice for above the door and I was able to add fabric and padding to it. Still need to get something to cover the doors when there is too much sunlight coming in.

This is the curtain above the kitchen sink. 

Today, two of my friends came to spend the day sewing. Mary came the earliest. Her husband brought her and he visited with my hubby for a little while. Nice when the husbands can visit.

Mary is working on a cute Valentine quilt for herself. She has always wanted one. Since she was concerned about not having enough fabric, she practiced using the Easy Angle ruler in place of cutting squares and then cutting on the diagonal to get her triangles.

I was sewing cancer bags at the serger. A lot faster finishing the edges using the serger instead of the regular sewing machine.

This is Maureen. We used to work together at a quilt shop. Now we like to get together to tease and cause mischief!!  LOL (She does not like to have her picture taken).

 Maureen is sewing crumb or scrap blocks in a very random manner. They are really fun and an easy way to use up scraps. Although her scrap basket did not shrink in amount of scraps (they have babies while you are using them). Some of the blocks have little orphan blocks in them. See the sample block below.

All in all, it was a fun day. We try to get together once a month. Since I am hoping adult son will soon be moving out, then I will be able to have quilt camp and some friends will be able to stay over night and we can sew, eat, laugh, sew and eat.  What more can we ask for??

Beth