When they say Flash Flood, you better listen!

This is the creek by our house during the flash floods over the past week. I live in Douglas County, GA that got a good brunt of the worst of the flooding. My son took these pictures as he was walking the dog. Yes, I know he is close to the water and yes he got in a lot of trouble and was grounded. This creek is usually just a little lazy small creek and he fishes out of it from time to time. This little creek took out two roads of our subdivision leaving only one road in and out. There are over 100 roads that are impassable in our county and the major interstate from here to Atlanta was closed for almost three days as the flood waters from the Chattahoochee River and Sweetwater Creek took it over. Now that the interstate is open it takes forever to get anywhere as that is the only way in and out of our county now.

We were very lucky as we had no flooding in our house but we do have some new leaks in the roof. We just fixed some about two weeks before the floods so that was great. Others in our county and the surrounding counties were not that lucky. There are many people in our community with no home or belongings and 10 people lost their lives. I have lived in this area for 44 years and I have never seen anything like this before. My banner is a picture of Sweetwater Creek State Park here in Douglas County. It was completely flooded and I have seen aerial shots but you can't get to park to see it now as the roads leading to it are impassable.

Unfortunately, its raining again. Pray for us here.

Reuse and Recycle

I have been using the sewing machine as you can see. I am just doing some small things to learn as I go. This is the Kokeshi Stuffie from Melly & Me.




Cute and very easy. I have to work on sewing around the curves as these didn’t turn out as neat as I would have liked. I also ran out of stuffing material and it isn’t stuffed as much as it should. But overall I really like it. The embroidery was fast (as its all backstitch and few lazy daisies) and simple with minimal sewing. I am getting better at the ladder stitch to close up the turning holes.

This will show you the backing material I used.

This was my next project. These are crooked coasters from thelongthread.com.

I learned machine quilting and changing the feet on my sewing machine. I had to use the walking foot with the thickness of the material and batting. The linen set is some linen material from a shirt that I don’t wear anymore (the kokeshi doll was made from this shirt also). The white set is just some white cotton material I have had for a while to use with embroidery. I absolutely love these. I have a linen and white coaster on my desk at work. I haven’t washed these yet so they don’t have that quilted wrinkley goodness yet, but they will.

This set of coasters comes from a pattern from foofanagle.wordpress.com.

These were very fun to make. I learned to piece for quilting with this. The first few I made didn’t match up in size with the backing and batting and I realized I was using too large of seam. I changed that and they worked great. So, so fun. These were made from that linen shirt also with some scraps from some fat quarters I had.

These have been great to work on and have gotten me comfortable with my sewing machine and even hand sewing. I want to start a small quilt now.

As for the title of this post, I have used one linen shirt to make all of these projects and I still have more (I think I may make another Kokeshi doll). I have been going through my closet and the kid's closet for good material of things we don't use anymore or are stained or torn. I don't have a big budget for material so this has been a great way to reuse things that are old and really no one would want to wear. I have a closet full of acid wash jeans from my skinny days. I think I might make something from those.