Making It to the Top and Back

This past weekend our little grandson was born, so I really need to get hopping on Dot to Dot.  Here is the progress so far:

The corner stars and sashing

The blocks and sashing

Putting them together

With the inner and outer borders

Leftovers for the back

I am more than half way through on the quilting designs, so hopefully by next week I will be starting on the quilting.  Fun! 

A Banner Day

Our younger son and daughter-in-law recently hosted a baby shower for his older brother and wife.  This will be our first grandbaby, and we are very excited.  I was commissioned to make a flag banner out of fabric as part of the decorations.  Here is a photo of the finished project:

Most of the fabrics are leftovers from Starry-eyed Grandma.  To make the flags I purchased some Stitch Witchery to fuse two pieces of each fabric together.  Stitch Witchery comes with a paper backing on one side and is applied with a hot iron.  Laying it on wrong side of the fabric with the paper side up, I pressed the hot iron over the paper to fuse it to the fabric.  Being the orderly person I am, I went through this process with all the different fabrics.  Going back to remove the paper, I realized that it needed to be hot for the paper to come off.  So I pressed the paper again on the first flag, but the paper tore when I was removing it, leaving a sliver of paper on one edge.  Well, silly me, I ran my iron over it again to remove the sliver, which resulted in a layer of Stitch Witchery stuck to the bottom of my iron.  Sigh....  I couldn't do anything about it until the iron was cool, so I went ahead and finished fusing all the flags

Once the iron cooled, my first thought was to try some orange solvent on it.  That didn't do much, so once again I was grateful for the internet.  Surely there was something about removing Stitch Witchery from the bottom of an iron.  I learned that Rowenta makes an iron cleaner that evidently works well, but one woman--not wanting to spend the money--told of how she learned to use dryer sheets.  You know what?  It works!

It took three dryer sheets in all, but the process was simply to take an old towel, lay the dryer sheet on the towel, heat up the iron, run the iron over the dryer sheet, and then over the towel.  Repeat this process until the iron is clean.  On the one hand, I gained a new respect for dryer sheets, and on the other hand, I wondered what in the world do the put in those things.  So, if you ever gunk up your iron, now you know what to do. :-)