Pins and Needles

Currently, my favorite thing to do when I am not cleaning, cooking, spending time with my husband or reading outloud with him, is sewing.
Yes, that's right! I have another hobby to take up space and time in our little "home." But, I am loving it. Sharon Forrester is my teacher and is really good at it too.
I have found that one of favorite things to sew is pillows. Well...that is about one of the only things that I have sewn. My first project was a tablecloth for our two person, round table. It is red checked and round. Then I went on to coming up with ideas of pillows. My favorite pillows I have done is the heart shaped one and the patchwork pillow. I really enjoy doing the lacework on the pillows and hope to learn new techniques for edging.
Soon I will be sewing squares together for a quilt project I have been working on for a couple of weeks. I have all the squares completely cut out and stacked in the proper order that I want them on the quilt. All I have to do is iron and sew. That is the easy part.
I am of course doing this all on a sewing machine and not by hand. The pinning that has to take place before the sewing is the tedious part, but I find it relaxing and enjoyable especially if Nathan is home and we are talking together or listening to an audio book together.
As I am typing this I have two heart shaped pillows that are all pinned and ready to be sewn together and then stuffed with Poly-Fil. He he. Actually, on one of them, I got to the very end of pinning the lace on one side and had taken nearly 30 minutes of frustration around the curves, when upon placing the last pin in place, I found that I had totally pinned the lace on the wrong side of the material instead of the right side. This, of course, makes all the difference in the world. When sewing two pieces of material together to make a pillow, you must place the right sides together and if there is lace it must be pinned upside down and in between right sides so that when it is turned inside out, the lace is on the outside of the pillow and not the inside!!! Quite funny, byt also stupid on my part to do so. I have done several pillows thus far, and know better than this!! So I unpinned it and instead of fretting for 30 minutes, I merely pinned it on the right side of the material and in nearly 10 minutes. Now I have already pinned the other side to it and am ready to sew it up and stuff it. Then comes the hand sewing that I am getting better at by now. I have to hand sew the gap that I purposefully leave in the pillow when I am sewing by machine.
I'll leave pictures up of the finished product if I am pleased with it instead of embarrased, as I have been in the past by my tragic blunders of pillow sewing. Well...to sewing I must go...errrr after lunch, I mean. I know it says I wrote this at 9:50am but it is really 12:50, I can't correct it, sorry.