Not much to show

I know I’ve been absent for a while, but I was finishing little bits of this and starting little bits of that without much exciting to show for my time. 

“Road to Freedom”, my Underground Railroad quilt, is finally, finally, completely finished, but it’s still not hanging in its designated wall space over our stairs (we’ve yet to figure out how to hang it because we need to figure out how to put a ladder up on the stairs).

I also finished quilting and binding “Hot Cross”.  To showcase my charm quilts, Mr. Urban hung a curtain rod close to the ceiling over my cutting table.  Thank you honey!

A few years ago I bought a big 36 X 60 cutting mat from Joann’s and Mr. Urban cut a piece of plywood to that size and screwed it down to an old banquet table.  That banquet table was in sorry shape, but after spray painting the legs and the new plywood top, it looked pretty good.  We put the table legs inside those plastic bed riser things and that brought the whole table up to a proper cutting height.  Nothing beautiful, for sure, but it worked fine as a cutting table and gave me a lot of surface area to cut big pieces of fabric and for squaring up quilts.

When we finished the whole basement this year, I wanted a real piece of furniture to use as my cutting table and bought this nice table from IKEA. 

I believe it supposed to be used as a free-standing kitchen island, but it’s great as a cutting table.  It’s the right height and the drawers and shelves provide lots of extra storage.  Well, it’s only 24 inches dee1p, so the old cutting mat was too big.  Mr. Urban thought we’d need a special rotary cutting tool to cut the mat cleanly (think of some kind of blade for a Dremel tool).  I figured either a linoleum blade or some tin snips might work.  After much debate between us, I finally decided to just give it a try with some rusty old tin snips we had in the tool box.  If I ruined the mat, I figured I could buy a new, smaller one.  Guess what?  The tin snips worked pretty well.  Sure they left the edge a little rough, but nothing that three passes with progressively finer metal files didn’t take care of.  I am very proud of my “new”24 X 60 cutting mat (and don’t forget that I was right and we didn’t need any special tool)!!

So, I don’t have a lot of interesting sewing to show for my time, but I have made some progress nonetheless.