What's Up

I've been busy around here. November is a crazy month for us here.  There are 3 family birthdays in one week - me and both of my kids!  We've had major windstorms and power outages, unseasonably freezing weather (twice in November!) and we also do Turkey Day.  And my dear husband was gone for 2 weeks to China on business, arriving home the day before T-Day.  Whew!

I think I'm finally recovered from hosting Thanksgiving!  We had the whole family here, except for my niece, who's in Vermont.  10 people.  It was crazy but fun, and all the food was soooo good.  Probably too good, if you know what I mean.  But, the house is cleaned up, most of the food is gone/eaten and I'm rested up - now I get to sew!

Here's what I've been working on:

One Big-O block

My first Block Lotto block for the December Lotto drawing.  Easy-peasy and fun.  I made a mistake in measuring a pillowcase and had to cut some off.  This was made from what I cut off.  Now to make 11 more!  Dark background (in this case black) and quilter's choice for the other fabric.

9 Easy X blocks

Here are my blocks I made for the November Block Lotto drawing.  I didn't win. *pout*  But that's OK.  There's always the next month!  These were also easy and fun.  Jewel tones and black.  I always love that combo.

I finally got around to finishing a couple of pillowcases for my youngest son's host "mom" in Spain.  It was taken me an embarassingly long time to get these done.  There was internets research and learning opportunities involved in this process.  It turns out that Spanish bed pillows are quite different from what we have here in the U.S.A.  And they're different sizes depending on the bed they are on too.  And, it also involved translating centimeters to inches.  (Maths)  So I had to guess, especially when I misplaced my measuring tape.  Then when I found it I discovered that there is centimeters on the "other" side!  Which is why I ended up cutting off some fabric - one pillowcase came out way longer that the other one.  Now they're the same.  Not saying they're the right size - but they are consistent.  The host mom really got a kick out of my son's pillowcases he took with him (we both travel with our own pillows and I make all his pillowcases in fun fabrics), so I thought she might like a couple too.  This ended up being much more involved than I ever would have guessed, but I really hope they fit and that she likes them!

B's Scrappy Trips

This past summer, I taught a workshop on Bonnie Hunter's Scrappy Trips pattern to my guild.  They had a lot of fun doing those blocks!  Some of the ladies actually got their quilt finished in time for our quilt show this year.  (not me, though)  So I thought you might like to see how well they did.  I think the quilts came out great!

B's quilt is so bright and cheery!  I love blue and yellow together.

J's Scrappy Trips

J. used a Jelly Roll of Minick and Simpson fabrics.  I love all those rich reds!

M's Scrappy Trips

M. used a jelly roll.  She chose to use black sashing in her quilt.

Right now I'm in the midst of working on a mystery quilt from the year 2000.  I think it may have aged enough by now to get finished.  It's going to be a twin size, and hoo boy, it's taking me a while.  There are about a million units to this one!  No real block, per se, just lots of units to form an over-all design.  Yes, I cheated and looked at the last clue already.  I started running out of fabric and had to substitute, so I wanted to know if that would work.  Fortunately, I started this out doing scrappy so throwing in another couple of fabrics isn't the end of the world.  I'm on Step 4 of 6.  No photos yet.  Soon, hopefully.  Next up is sewing a few thousand flying geese units.  Well, it feels like a few thousand of them!

The cats were playing the other night, and I tried to take a photo of them because they were so cute.  But, the flash didn't come out like I thought it would.  

Cat headlights.  Dunkel has his regular beams on and Shade has his high beams on!  hee hee!

A Finish!

String Thing 2
50 x 66 inches

 This quilt is finally finished - Yay!  I made these string blocks waaayyy back in the spring of 2009, during my retreat that was "The Great Spring String Fling".  My friend Katie and I made sooo many string blocks during that retreat.  We were trying to finish off those strings that I've toted around for 20 years or so.  I still have enough blocks like these to do another quilt, after making  I-don't-know-how-many quilts with strings.  I've got a bunch and Kate has a bunch too.

This photo doesn't do the quilt justice.  This quilt is pretty "loud", as my Mom used to say.  The strings aren't that bright, which is what led me to make this so loud.  I'm getting pretty tired of some of these strings and wanted to jazz them up some.  So, I went with this wild batik, a la Freddy Moran.  Trouble is, this batik will knock your eye out!   When I was showing my friend, she asked me if I was on drugs when I made this quilt!  Hee hee!  I still haven't decided quite how I feel about this quilt.  It may be one only a mother could love.  But it is filled with all sorts of memory fabrics.  So I'll enjoy looking at it.

As usual, Shari did a super job of quilting this.  I asked her for something that "went" with the batik and then something that didn't clash with the strings.  So she did this wonderful leafy vine on the strings....

...and then did this great swirly bit over the batik!  I love it!

(click for the closeup)

Here is the backing and the binding.  The backing was something from the stash that I had enough of.  And for the binding - well, I went through a lot of different colors trying to figure out what looked the best before I settled on this black & white plaid.  It gives an over-all impression of kind-of-grey, that I think works pretty well.

The other week The Kid and I went to W*lmart for some things.  I always check the fabric dept. - just in case.  Well, this time was a good one!  I found these 2 black & white dots that are good quality.  Check out the year on the selvage!

Then, doing some wandering around, I found these cool stickers that are for laptops.  I had the idea that maybe I could cut them apart and jazz up my machine with them.  They're removable stickers, so no long-term commitment, right?.

front with stickers and "jewels"

Well, here's my machine, all jazzed up.  I had fun doing this, and so far I'm enjoying looking at this too.  It gives me a flashback to my hippie youth.  (Ooops, just gave away my age!)

the end piece

The sticker doesn't fit perfectly, due to the curve in the machine, but it's close enough for government work, right?

the back of the machine

 Hope you have fun this week!

A Flimsy, Finally

Here's some early May Day flowers for you!

My granddaughters came over on Saturday, and A~ wanted to make paper flowers.  I kept making them after she left!  They were fun.  I used this tutorial.  They call them carnations, but I think mine look more like ranunculus. They were fun to make!  A~ and I made more and different flowers than this, but I forgot to get a picture of them.  She wanted some flowers for the pottery vase that DH made for her - how sweet!  

I have to put these up where Dunkel can't get to them, because he gets them and carries them around the house at night.  When I woke up yesterday there was one lying in the upstairs hallway.  At least it wasn't in bed with me!  (Have I ever mentioned what a crazy cat Dunkel is??  He often brings his toys and puts them in bed with us at night.)

The pipe cleaners were still out on the counter when The Kid got home and made a disturbing discovery with his package of Twizzlers.  Weird, huh?  Is all that food coloring even good for you?  I'm guessing Not.

OK, enough silliness - back to quilting now!  Here is my Liberated Log Cabins from the other day.   I finally got it all sewn together and the first border on it.  

I had started the Liberated Equilateral Sawtooth border in the class with Gwen Marston last year.  Gwen had demonstrated it for us.  I was a little worried because I couldn't quite remember how to do it.  So you can imagine how relieved I was to find that the instructions are also in her Liberated Quiltmaking II book! (page 67)  It was easier than I remembered it.  I had so much fun I made 2 borders!

The 2nd border I managed to get even wonkier.  I got brave enough to play around with it, and I'm really happy with how it worked.  I like it so much I may have to make a whole quilt like this someday!.

I thought maybe all triangles in the borders might be overpowering for the log cabins, and I wanted to mix things up some, so then I made the pieced insert borders.  Those were fun too.  Finally I tied it all together with more of the plaid that is in the centers of the log cabins.  And look, there's even points on some of those triangles!  So, it's now a liberated not-really-but-kind-of-medallion!  

And this is all that's left of the plaid fabric.  Enough to do a little something on the back of the quilt, hopefully.  Which I will try to do sometime this week.  I want to get this basted and ready to quilt soon.

My crumb blocks quilt is back from the long-armer, and I'm currently getting the binding done.  I'm almost 1/2 way around the quilt, so pictures to come soon!  Which is a good thing, because the next quilt is already in the mail and on it's way here.  Whoo hoo!  I LOVE getting quilts back from the quilter!

Letters. . . We've Got Letters

Remember that little ditty? (Was that from a TV show? I remember the ditty, but not where it's from. I couldn't even find any info from Google or Wikipedia!)

First, I want to apologize to everyone I upset with my last post. Yes, I really did throw that ugly quilt-ish thing in the trash. I had no idea everyone would be so upset by that! I'm sorry. If I'd known that others thought it wasn't that ugly, I would have gladly sent it to whoever wanted it. I will be sending the ugly fabric strips that I've culled from my stash to Wendy at Inky Threads and Donna (no blog), who are willing to put them to good use.

I have made good progress on my color challenge quilt. And we're going to play a little game with it today. I play with my letters before I sew them together! I put them on the design wall and see how many phrases or words I can come up with, before I get to the one I'm really doing. I think it's fun. So, see if you can guess what phrase I'm really making before you get to the bottom of the post and the photo with the real phrase. This is kind of like Wheel of Fortune. . . just picture me as Vanna! And you don't get to buy any letters, they just show up. *grin* Sorry, there's no prizes, just some general silliness. Remember, playing is good for you!

OK, here we go:

Here's the second bit I came up with. Actually, the first bit is in my previous post, if you want to start there. But if you scroll down to look at it, you'll see the end of this post (and the answer), so maybe you should click here instead.

I don't know how other people do this, but when I'm going to make letters, I start out by writing down the word or phrase, and figure out what letters I'll be making. This phrase is the longest I've done yet, so I thought it was particularly important this time. I figured out how many of which letters, and then started making the easiest ones. Mostly to see what size things were coming out, and as kind of a warm-up before I got to the tougher letters.

I started with the U's, then went to the T's. There's quite a few T's. I got a couple of the T's too short, so I made some more that were taller. They're easy to trim to the height I want when I start sewing things together. I left the shorter T in "got" because it fit well with the other letters in that word.

I wasn't going to make O's, as I wanted to do them with some embellishment. But I quickly determined that wasn't gonna happen, so I made some O's. Then, because I was warmed up on the O's, I decided to do the E and the G, since they're similar construction. Next came the B's. They're a little harder, but still similar construction. I think I got them a little on the small side, but I'm not gonna re-make them! This isn't supposed to be perfect, right?

My biggest problem with this was getting confused with which fabric was for the letters and which was the background! I guess my brain is used to dark letters on a light background, and as you can see, this is backwards from that. This little problem happened way too many times!

By this time, I had all the easy letters done, and had to move on to the more difficult ones. I'm getting better at N's and H's. My first H, which you can see in "the", turned out to really be too small. So I made another H, and then discovered that I can't count. . . I need 2 H's! So, then I made the N's a little big, but I figured they're easy enough to trim to the right height.

On to the "S" - that came out a little small too, but acceptable. I'm getting better at them too, as long as I have a sketch or photo to follow. Lastly, the W. I thought I'd just do that like I did the N's, only upside down, and I think it came out pretty good! And not giganto, either!

Also, please notice my punctuation. It's my first punctuation, and it took some thought. It was pretty easy to sew, once I determined how to do it.

So, have you figured out my phrase yet? This picture up above has all the letters needed for the phrase, just not in the right order. Last chance to guess!

And here's the "real" phrase! Did you guess correctly? If you did, then you should be proud of yourself. That was a hard one.

Please notice my cool question mark! It's maybe a little big, but I think it's good. Another first!

So, now I'm putting together my words. These will be the center of the quilt. The minimum size is 24 inches by 24 inches. I was worried that this would be a lot bigger than that, and now I can see that this is shrinking considerably as I put it together. The top "button" is 17 inches long. I scrunched the next one a little bit, so it's not quite so long. I think this will work well.

Now I get to figure out what border I want to add. It will be "liberated" too. Then I'll be sewing on a whole bunch of buttons!

Here I Go Again

I'm not sure if the title refers to the fact that I'm starting another challenge quilt, or that I've been heavily into procrastination!

On a bright note, today is the first time we've made it to 75*F this year! It's been something like 270 days since we made that mark. Whew! What a looooong spring. It's wonderful to have some sunshine and warm temps! Yay! And I think most of my seeds I planted haven't drowned and are starting to sprout! I may yet have some flowers this year.

I'm supposed to be starting the color challenge for my local quilt guild, but I was definitely in stall mode. I went into the quilt studio and was supposed to be clearing the decks for the next quilt. Instead, I got distracted with the scraps from Snuggle. They were just too pretty to be tossed, and really too small to put away. So I just starting sewing scraps together, and came up with the above quilt top. It's 19" wide by 21" high. And all scraps. The batik border is what I used for the back of Snuggle. I feel better now. . . .got this out of my system!

I really like how the dark pieces kind of fade into the background, which was an unexpected effect. And yes, the border is kind of crooked, and I like that too. I've used up all the scraps, except for some teeny-tiny pieces. Which I'm saving. I just love that Cherrywood fabric!

I finally got the quilt studio all cleaned up. I even dusted! The cleaning was necessary, as I had piles of books and magazines and stacks of fabric all at critical mass. And it was really hard to tell what color the carpet was, what with all the threads and stuff. It was becoming dangerous in there! So, it's all put away and vacuumed and spiffed up now. It must be time to make a mess again!

So, I got in the studio last night and started making more letters for my color challenge. I made good progress! This is not what the quilt will be saying. . . I was just playing! The background is a dark red-purple, which you can't tell from the photo. I have more to go.

In the midst of my procrastinating last week, I decided to try a lasagne-style quilt with some of my 2 1/2" strips. My drawer of them was over-flowing, and I've been wanting to do this. I also need to make more charity quilts.

I managed to come up with just about the ugliest thing I've ever made. I wouldn't even show it to you, except my DD pressured me to! I'm really embarrassed at how ugly this is. In fact, it's so ugly, it's going in the trash. I don't think anyone, except maybe a really visually-impaired person, would enjoy this. And I can't bear to work on it! Ugh. I also decided to cull my strips drawer of all the ugly fabric. Ugly fabrics = ugly quilt. So, I have a large pile of strips to give to the charity quilts committee, and more space in my drawer. I'll try another lasagne quilt another time.

After I took the photo of the ugly quilt-ish thing, I left it on the floor. As expected, it attracted the local wildlife. Above, you see what I found after a little while. What you can't hear is the awful growling coming from the cat burrito. Dunkel was way too close!

Yes, it's Shade in there. He really didn't want to be seen.

I finally got him to look at me. Sorry for the blurry photo!

Dunkel is begging for Shade to please, play with him. Isn't he silly? If you look closely, you can see that Shade's tail tip is sticking out of the burrito. It was too much for Dunkel to resist, in spite of the growling.

It wasn't too many minutes after I took this photo that Shade got up and walked away, trailing the quilt-ish top behind him. After that, neither cat wanted it any more. It's still in the floor, but someone has wadded it up into a ball that will be convenient to pick up and put in the trash!

Oh, by the way, Cats on Quilts website is looking for photos of cats (or any pets) on/with quilts or even quilt pieces. Both Dunkel and Shade have had their internets Moment of Glory. Just click on the icon on my right-hand side bar. You can see my babies, and learn how to have your pet have their internets Moment of Glory!

Time to go work on that challenge quilt!

09-09-09

Happy #9 Day! I love these "fun" dates. Now the next one will be next year, October 10th.

String Thing 2 is now at the flimsy stage. Yay!

I think I jumped the gun a little when I took the picture. I forgot that all the row labels were still pinned to the quilt. So, please excuse. I still need to straighten the right-hand edge - I only lined up the left-hand edge when sewing the rows together. I offset each row of the black&white fabric a bit. It seemed to look better without everything all lined up. It's hard to tell in the photo, because the wind was blowing, but it really is straight! I don't know if you can see them, but I put in 3 free-pieced stars amongst the strings. I thought it needed a little relief from all the strings. This one was all done with fabrics from my stash. . . . now I need to go find a backing fabric from the stash too. That may be harder. *grin*

Here is my in-process binding. I'm going slow on this, because my thumb is still twinging a bit. I only sew one 18 inch length of thread at a time. So, very slow progress. But better than none, I figure.

The deadline to send boxes to the Iraqi Bundles of Love project has now passed. Yesterday was the last day. The latest IBOL count is at 500 boxes of fabrics and sewing supplies. That's pretty awesome for a project that IBOL Guy, Major Art LaFlamme, thought it would be great to get 30 or so boxes. In about a week to 10 days, I think he'll see an absolute avalanche of boxes - awesome! I'm having fun watching all those boxes pile up over there in Iraq. I can't wait to see the distribution of said boxes.

I found this great street sign link over at Jean's blog. So, of course, I had to go make one too!


What d'ya think? Looks good to me! If you want to make your own street sign, go here. You can even have your choice of 4 different backgrounds. Fun!

I haven't gotten back in the quilt studio yet to finish the project that I hinted at in my last post. I'm hoping to get to it tomorrow . . . I'd love to take it to my quilt guild meeting on Friday. My fingers are crossed that life doesn't get in my way!

Avast!

Hear ye! Hear ye!

I thought everyone would want to know about this:

Friday, September 19th is the Official Talk Like A Pirate Day! However, due to it bein' on a Friday and all, you can actually extend this to the entire weekend.

To find out more about this unsung holiday, click here.

Aaaarrrrgggghhhh!