Finding Time for Stitching

This week has been a busy one! My day job has had me working a conference all week, day in and day out, arriving before sunrise and leaving for home after dinner. We had about 150 people come to San Antonio to discuss new processes for migrating Air Force data to the cloud. Very exciting!

I stayed away from the pastry table!

Needless to say, after the drive home, my brain was not ready to shut down yet.

Being away from the sewing machine all week was stressful in itself for this girl. Monday night my darkened sewing room seemed so sad and desolate without the bright lights and the hum of a machine going in the background. So on the 2nd day of the conference, when I got home, I just needed to do something… anything, to satisfy the need to create and sew. I didn’t want anything too intensive so I dug out a simple Villa Rosa Designs pattern that called for four patches made from 5″ blocks. Hello Phoebe!

It said that 40 different prints from a package of 10″ squares could be used. I didn’t want to waste half of a layer cake so I went in search of a Jolly Bar that I thought would be perfect for this project. I know I had a couple of them around somewhere in my recently re-organized sewing room. I chose Bonnie and Camille’s “The Good Life”. So happy and fun! Of course I didn’t take a picture of it before I cut it but here is an image of the layer cake.

Jolly Bars are the brain child of Kim Jolly from the Fat Quarter Shop and are distributed by Moda. They are 5″ x 10″ rectangles, (half of a layer cake) and were perfect for this project. In less than 10 minutes the entire Jolly Bar was cut in half, sorted, stacked and ready to go.

I just needed to get some fabric under a presser foot. This was so beneficial to me. It helped me to refocus my mind, calm my thoughts, and yet feel a sense of accomplishment at the same time. For me, this accomplished what sitting mindlessly in front of a TV could never do.

In less than an hour, I had the main four patch squares of this quilt completed.

I still needed two yards of fabric for sashing and borders so on the 3rd day of the conference I snuck away to the quilt store during lunch. I chose a soft gray with light circles of dots for the sashing/borders and a red print for the binding. I have auditioned it here below. For the backing I found 4 yards of the dark gray print in the image below on Etsy for $4 a yard. Score!!

These Villa Rosa patterns are wonderful in their simplicity and yield a gorgeous result. The sashing was done by the end of day 3. I couldn’t do this pattern match again if I tried. Can you believe this was happenstance?

Borders were done and on at the end of day four. Yay! I’ll say it again… Hello Phoebe!

It feels so good to sew something from my stash and also feel a wonderful sense of accomplishment at the end of a very busy week.😊