Christmas Came Early for Me!

Aine had her birthday yesterday, and I got an early Christmas on Sunday night! I told DH I'd love a treadle sewing machine, purely as decoration, but also one that I could try my hand at at some point too, maybe try to make a small wall hanging on one.

We have an ad magazine called Buy and Sell here, which is great for getting secondhand stuff, so he typed in treadle sewing machine and found a working one not too far away. He said he better get it now, because if he let it sit, he'd forget it altogether, so he trekked out Sunday night and came home with this!

It needs a cleaning and some TLC but it works and looks well loved. I love the pincushion they fashioned around it! Any fellow treadle owners have some good tips on how to clean it up gently?

I did a bit more scrap organization and STILL have a mountain of unsorted scraps for pillow stuffing. I'm also trying to figure out what boxes baskets or drawers I want to use. I've got big baskets of neutral, brown, green and blue, good sized piles of orange/autumnal, yellow, pink, red, and purple, then I've got the troube ones which I'm just going to call "lights" and "darks". I also have my "Barbara" fabrics, lol, a stack of shabby chic soft florals which have really grown on me as I have admired the quilts she makes, lol. Of course I have my civil war repros, but they have their own 3 drawer plastic bin already!! Oh...and I have a separate novelty and brights stash for kids quilts, and some hand dyes! So many!!

If you can believe it, most of my scraps have been given to me ( I begged on Stashbuster 2 years ago and was rewarded with so many amazing envelopes of gorgeous scraps to my parents house on a trip home to the states, I've been using them ever since). I seem to only buy a fat quarter or two, and always a bolt of natural muslin when I run out...something I use a lot. I am getting better at buying more, there is such a thing as being too frugal! My entire stash of repros grew over the time I was making my Dear Jane by trading fabric and Irish goodies with fellow DJers!! For my "Frugal Jane" I think I bought the muslin and maybe 3 FQs for the entire quilt, the rest was traded. I love swapping and if anyone ever wants to do one, just let me know!