I've been really busy at work lately so I haven't gotten to do as much sewing lately as I wanted but I took a little bit of time tonight to make my first applique'd onesie.  I wanted to make a little halloween outfit for my nephew Greyson and I think it came out pretty cute!  Next time, I'll move the hoop up a little more - I was hoping the design would be a little closer to the chest area instead of the stomach.  Hopefully Mel still likes it!

This weekend was a pretty good one - i did some sewing and we went boating!  On Saturday, I started working on the Alpha Phi quilt while we watched the UF football game.  The gators won by a lot so Ryan was pretty excited!  You can see I moved a bunch of my quilting stuff to the kitchen table.

Did you know that embroidery machines can also do applique? Not just embroidery!  I started playing with my embroidery machine to make Greyson’s quilt and I realized it had this awesome capability that is going to let me make some adorable onesies and tshirts.  Don’t know what I’m talking about?  Regular embroidery is where the machine uses just thread to create a design.  For applique, there is actually another layer of fabric stitched onto the base fabric and then a satin stitch or other nice stitch is applied around the edge. 

On Tuesday, I realized that Melissa only had 2.5 weeks until she was due to have her son.  I thought - holy cow, I better get a baby blanket made pronto!  So I took a look at my fabric stash (budget is a little too tight right now for new designer fabrics) and made a plan.  I figured out I had enough fabric for the quilt top and batting, I just needed flannel backing and satin binding.  So on Wednesday I went to JoAnn's after work and got the supplies I needed with hopes of making the baby blanket this weekend.

Well, Greyson came early!  Of course, I don't know why I didn't start working on the blanket until now - you would think with 9 month's notice I would start these types of projects earlier, LOL!  If you want to see pics or updates, check out Mel's blog:

MooreCraziness.Blogspot.com

And here's a few pics of the blanket I made (hopefully she doesn't see before I give it to her tomorrow, haha).

As most of you know, I have been working on an order for three quilts for quite a while now.  Danielle contacted me in mid to late June asking about pricing and options and in early July she placed an order for 2 baby clothes quilts and 1 double sided tshirt quilt.  It typically takes me 2-3 weeks per quilt once the designs are finalized.  If I was sewing full time and didn’t have a regular Monday – Friday job to go to then I could get them done much faster than that.  It ended up taking me a total of 10 weeks to complete the three quilts so just slightly longer than my usual 2-3 week estimate.  But I learned a lot on this order and really improved my skills by tackling some new challenges.

Last night I was looking through some old Facebook photos and I came across this photo of me on the Florida Tech Cross Country team my freshman year of college (age 18 - 19).  I remember that year I ate more food than you would think is feasible. Sometimes I'd eat an entire pizza and then for dessert I would buy one of the gallons of ice cream and i wouldn't even use a bowl - i'd just keep eating it until I was stuffed.  And yet I was so skinny!  So I started to think...how did i stay so skinny when I ate like crap?  And then I remembered: We ran and ran and ran.  For the first two weeks of cross country we would have a 6am running practice, a 10am weights/abs and a 3pm second run or swim workout.  And we would do this 7 days a week.  Then once classes started we would scale it back but we would still have a running practice 5 days a week, a 5k race each week and then weights/abs at least three times a week.

Yesterday, I had a meeting that lasted most of the day so I wasn't able to get too much sewing done but I did a pretty good job today!  I got all the shirts interfaced and finished the appliqued blocks.

I know Labor day was almost a week ago...but I kept forgetting to post this.  So here it is anyways :)

I hope everyone had a great Labor Day weekend – ours was really fun and really exhausting.  On Thursday, I left work early and drove back to my house where I had to finish packing for the weekend as quickly as possible and change into something cute for a wedding rehearsal.  I rode up to Orlando to the Dubsdread Country Club with Ashley & Matt for our friend Michelle’s wedding rehearsal.  The traffic was kind of bad so we made it just in time.  The rehearsal went smoothly and then we all enjoyed a nice dinner together.  After dinner, a bunch of us went out on the town for some drinks.  There were numerous Alpha Phi sisters there for the wedding so we were out causing trouble, as usual.