Real life and mug rugs!

There has been very little crafting done in the FairyFace household this week. After finishing the PictureBox quilt I found myself somewhat mentally exhausted from big projects and decided to take a little break for a night or two. But then real life, in the form of my job, rudely interrupted my sewing plans for the week, and suddenly I found myself here this weekend with barely a stitch sewn! It's been truely, exhaustingly busy in work this week; I had a massive deadline to meet for Friday and it took a lot of hours and every last ounce of energy I had to get there. I was completely incapable of even doing some handsewing in the evenings when I got home.

I felt like I barely saw the kids or Himself all week too, so when I finally got home on Friday night, I spent a nice evening on the sofa enjoying my lovey hubbie's company and spent all day yesterday doing things with the kids. We went to Fitzgerald's park - a lovely big park with a great playground - in the city, and then I treated us to pizza in Milanos for lunch, the kids favourites. We have eaten out very very rarely in the last number of months, so it was a real treat. We then went and bought E her long promised big girl's bed, a real milestone! Its all made up today and ready for her first big sleep in it tonight.

All the time supervising colouring/drawing/painting this weekend gave me a little time to sketch out some designs for blankets and quilts, which are still very much work in progress but getting there. I also made some progress writing up my tute for the PictureBox quilt but its not finished yet unfortunately!

Seeing as I'm spending so much time in work these days (that's not looking set to change in the short term either) and I wanted a quick and easy little project to make me feel I'd achieved something, I took some inspiration from my friend Fi and made my first mug rug. I'm going to bring it in to work to brighten up my desk :-) I wanted to try out some free motion quilting, as I'm determined my next quilt will be quilted like this, so this was a perfect size project to get in some practice.

I cut some 3" strips of fabric, then piled them on top of each other (the alternate ones upside down) and ironed them together and cut them into a simple wedge shape, all at once. Once I had them sewn together, I trimmed it into a 7" square. I picked a totally different cupcake fabric for the back, to make it reversible, but actually I'm not sure I really like it now its done!

I got out the free motion foot and off I went. I found it a little tricky and the stitching is quite uneven but I got the hang of moving the fabric around to get the quilting line to flow, so next time I'll focus more on the stitches. I also decided to handsew the binding onto the back to finish (I normally machine sew my bindings) and discovered that I much prefer the look of a machine sewn binding to a "proper" hand-finished binding. Glad I figured that one out on a small project, rather than spending all that time doing a big quilt to discover it!!

Free motion quilters, I have a question: - do you set your stitch length to 0 and control your own stitch length or do you let the machine do its thing and set it to 4 or 6 or whatever? And do you have any tips for a beginner?

And - to all the other mammies out there who craft and look after a family and even hold down a job too - any tips for managing it all? Sometimes, it just gets overwhelming, doesn't it?

I'll be linking this up to Fabric Tuesday on Quiltstory, Stitchin' Weekend on That Girl, That Quilt and some other great blogs; check out the links on my sidebar!!