Wednesday, March 25, 2015

15 Minute Studio Spiff Up #12

This week's assignment -- 

Time to look at your magazines -- keep them and organize them or dump them and use the space for more fabric or?  The choice is yours.  

I'm keeping what I have as I enjoy rereading/looking at them.  I'm down to one subscription and I actually thought I had canceled it.  Evidently not as it is coming to the house on a regular basis. I also have room for them.  When we moved to Virginia 5 years ago I went through a lot of magazines and dumped what I didn't want then. 

Do you make quilts from magazines?  I find I seldom do but every once and a while I find a terrific quilt to make and actually make it! I do enjoy the tips and even the ads give me new ideas. 

This is short since I'm so late posting it.   One other suggestion.  Check your cutting tables and your sewing space.  Are they still clean?  Is stuff creeping back to those surfaces?  If so, do a quick spiff up of those two areas.   I can tell you right now that my sewing area is fine -- doesn't look too much different from the finished pictures post on the blog.  But the ironing board and both cutting areas are looking like a couple of bags full of scraps exploded all over them!  

Why, you might want to know, have scraps spread themselves far and wide on my flat surfaces? Part of the reason is I'm gathering scraps to take on a road trip.  In less than 2 weeks I will be taking a couple of Bonnie Hunter classes in Maryland at Faithful Circle Quilters.  Both will be using strings.  I'm doing some prep work on one of them.  So I'll have a mess until I get a bunch of little 4 patches done.  Once that is done (and I am close) I'll only have to bag some strings and bits and pieces so I can make the blocks.  

No pictures of the studio this week so I thought I'd share my old spools.  I have a basket where I store used spools and prewound bobbins.  Each year I try to share my thread usage.  I took a picture in mid January but never posted it.  What have I been thinking about?  I enjoy my yearly thread usage report.  Looks pretty good to me! Several older poly threads got used up.  A lot of the rewound bobbins are gone.  (But I have several colors with lots of bobbins in the containers!) Several Gutterman spools and Mettler spools are also in the mix.  You can compare this to last year by clicking here.  Wow, I did substantially better this year than last year.  So far, no big long arm cones have been used up but I am getting close on some colors. 

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That's it from here.  Happy Quilting All!


3 comments:

  1. Now there is an idea to see thread progress. I'm not a list maker but I could save old spools for a year! So far so good. I'm no longer buying many magazines and my one shelf is pretty tidy. Phew, a week off!

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  2. I've made more quilts from magazines than from books. I no longer purchase books and will occasionally buy a magazine. I rip pages out the the magazines that I want to keep and leave the magazine at the library swap shelf for another quilter.

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  3. I was just thinking I needed to go through my magazines. I had started it and stopped to do other things. Here is a photo http://melsquiltingblog.blogspot.com/2015/03/15-minute-spiff-up_26.html My surfaces are staying fairly clean, except the desk, and i'm making progress in my studio. Thanks for keeping me focused.

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