Restringing my wire necklace

One of my favourite wire necklaces broke.  I started restringing it but the beads rolled around wildly - even on a nice, soft, non-roll bead mat. The round glass beads really had a mind of their own! No photo of that but I did take one of the bead mat afterwards. It works well for smaller, lighter beads.

As my husband would say, time for Plan B: I transferred the broken string to my bead design board that lives at the back of the cupboard. With the broken string of beads lying in one groove, I could control the beads and transfer them to the new wire. It was easy to keep the beads in the same sequence.

The light wasn't good when I took the any of the photos but this one gives you a better idea of the colour. I love the pretty greyish blue as well as the shape of the big beads.

It didn't take long to restring the necklace.  I also added a few spare beads I had to the ends to lengthen it. 

A special trip to the bead shop was necessary before I could go any further. I had run out of crimps for the ends! Luckily The Big Tree bead shop (also known as Big Tree Design and Big Tree Yarn) is fairly close by.

It's nice to know I can wear my necklace again.

Things always take longer than you think

Last week I finished binding one of the quilts I have been working on and it's ready to go off to my youngest grandson. He ran around excitedly pointing and saying 'that's my quilt' when he saw the pieced top on the table. That was a few months ago. Why the delay in finishing it? I'll tell you more about that in another post. 

Blue fabric for binding?

Auditioning it against the quilt ... and, yes it's a go.

I used fleece on the back of the quilt for a soft snugly feel. It's easy to machine quilt too. I think I stretched the fleece when I laid it out with the quilt top over it and tacked the two layers together. After quilting, the quilt top is not as smooth as I would have liked.

I trimmed the excess off the edges off the quilted layers, cut 6 cm binding strips on the straight, joined them and ironed them in half lengthwise. The 6 cm strip finishes to a 1 cm wide binding.

I sewed the binding to the front of the quilt matching the raw edges. 

The walking foot for my machine fed the layers through evenly with no pinning necessary.

Checking on-line to refresh my memory about binding a quilt, I came across Jenny Doan's excellent video. I had forgotten how easy mitred corners can be when you sew straight off the end as you get to the corner, lift the foot, make a quick fold and sew straight down the second side. Believe it or not that odd looking corner below turns over into a neatly mitred corner. Watch Jenny show you how in her video here. 

Correct way to machine stitch corner for a mitre.

I hand stitched the binding down on the back and put a few stitches in the corner to hold the mitre in place.

Finally, it's done. 

Now to finish my granddaughter's quilt.

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Disclosure: I did have a bit of unpicking to do. Thinking 'mitre' when I sewed the binding to the quilt, I folded a 45 degree angle by mistake - twice! This does not work no matter how hard you try.

Wrong way to machine sew a mitre for binding on quilt!

Till next time, Happy stitching!