My new venture

So I decided I wanted to start sewing again. I took a sewing class about 3 years ago and LOVED it! We made everything from clothes to pillows to bags. So for my next birthday after that sewing class I got my very own sewing machine. It's something I've always secretly like to do but never really made the time to do it. So needless to say my sewing machine has spent most of it's life in my closet. When I was little I used to use my mom's sewing machine and make clothes for my dog, yes my dog!! HA So now I'm finding time to do it and I'm really enjoying it. Here is my first big project that I finished. Since Blake lost all that weight a year ago he had a stack of t-shirts in our guest closet of firefighter shirts he's collected from all over. Every place we travel he likes to trade or get a fire shirt from the local department. He didn't want to toss these shirts but since they were too big and couldn't wear them, I thought perfect...I can make a quilt. So as a surprise to him I started making this before Christmas and then finished to shortly after that (it's just taken me awhile to blog about it). So if you've seen firefighters shirts they usually have a their local emblem on the front of the shirt and then a bigger picture on the back. I wanted to incorporate both of those parts of the shirt in this quilt. So I took the little emblem and sewed them in the corners of each square. It was like a giant puzzle because not all shirts had something on the front and back. But it was so much fun. Blake loved it so much he wanted to take it his station and use it at work. But with all the hard work that went into this I couldn't part with it, selfishly I wanted to show it off at the house. So to compromise I told Blake I would make him another quilt to take to work with him that he can use at the station. So he brought my home 20 more shirts (all from his department) to create another quilt. So I'm excited to start this next quilt, I will post pictures as soon as I'm done. I'm going to try another style on this next one because it will need to be washable. So here's a picture of the first one I made! It now resides folded on the side of our couch, the perfect blanket to keep warm.

I also decided that I'm going to re-arrange a little nook area at the top of our stairs as my sewing area. It's an area that isn't be used right now (just has a desk sitting there, which neither of us use) so I'm hoping that by leaving my sewing machine out I will use it more.