Back home again

Well, I've been gone for 6 weeks, traveling and lazing along the Gulf of Mexico coast.  Don doesn't do winter very well and it's for his sake that I leave my home and journey south. He loves the warm and being able to go outside to play golf. Me?  I can take it or leave it. I grew up in Minnesota and spent much of my adult life in the northern half of the state where winter is something to be embraced and not whined about.  I was quite happy to be back in my own home where we were surprised to find warm temps (70 degrees F) and virtually no snow.  This sojourn to Southern Alabama makes for a very short winter. Indeed!

So, what did I accomplish in the way of quilting while I was gone?  First off, 2 fantastic days of class with Bonnie Hunter, making Jared Takes a Wife and Roll Roll Cotton Boll, two quilts I'd already make up on my own. It's so interesting to use different fabrics and colors and see how the quilt changes!  I managed to make all the turquoise pieced blocks for Roll Roll and have yet to make up the string pieced blocks in neutral.  When this one is finished, it'll be donated to my guild's charity project for this year. We're making quilts and pillow cases for the local children living in foster care.

I also was able to make up all the blocks for the Jared quilt, using my deep purples, plums, and merlots with gold fabrics.  I like this so much better than the one I made before which was every color under the sun!  Way too disorganized for my taste.  I was able to assemble most of the quilt before I ran out of sashing fabric.  I remember that I'd bought the fabric at the Busy Bobbin in Rice Lake, WI so will drive up there tomorrow to see if they have half a yard left for me.  Wish me luck!  If not, I'll have to take it apart and use something else for sashing. (Big sigh)

While I was on the Gulf Coast, I found this pretty fabric of green vines with pink flowers.

 I made it up into a table runner which is for sale in my Etsy store, Jolly Ruby.  I think it's just the right touch for a home in spring time.  And I have enough of the flower fabric to make a dress for an American Girls doll. I think a pink sash would look very good with it. 

I also spent a few hours embroidering a design by Crabapple Hill Studio and made  up a table runner for Easter. It also is for sale in Jolly Ruby.

This is the finished quilt on my dining table. I did the embroidery while I was gone and quilted it up after I got home where I have all my quilting supplies.  I did a simple cross hatch as background in the two end panels where the embroidery is, and I did 4 little nests with eggs in them in the center panel.  

Here's a close up of the embroidery--you can just make out the silver accent on the ribbon and the eggs.  I did this with Cosmo floss and I really like working with the glistening thread.  I hope to find another design where I can use it--or I can make another Easter basket and turn it into a decorative pillow.  Who knows?

I also worked on making up this flowery quilt for myself. I'd bought the fabric a couple of years ago but kept putting off working on it. It's a printed panel of these stylized flowers. I cut them out into approximately 6" squares and made coordinating flying geese units to make the star points. These blocks come out to about 12". I have coordinating border prints of butterflies, dragonflies and bumblebees along with more flowers to use for sashing and the final border. I got a lot done, but there's more to do here at home.  When I find time!

I also finished the top of a throw sized quilt that my daughter Jo had asked me to do as a wedding gift for her friends.  I'd begun making four-patches out of scraps of browns and blacks that I already had and I had the perfect creamy colored fabric to go with them, so I was able to assemble the top while I was gone. I'd brought along extra brown fabrics and used them to make a piano key border for it. Now I need to get it quilted up so it's ready to be given to the couple at their wedding.  Hope they like it--Jo says she thinks they will! I like how I was able to use up so much brown fabric, including the fishing lure design.  I hope they get a laugh out of it!

I also need to work on quilting up the Farmhouse Window Sills quilt if I'm going to get it done in time to enter it in the show next month. I think I'm going to do a little more embroidery on it, outside of the embroidered blocks.  Maybe in the turquoise inner border (not the flanges around the blocks)--some lazy daisy flowers and leaves, I'm thinking. I'll try it out and see if I like it.

On the way home from Alabama, we stopped in Paducah to see the National Quilt Museum  Oh My! What a treat that was!  I'd never been there and was surprised that Don wanted to see the quilts with me.  He absolutely loved it!  And I got lots of ideas on how to make my quilts better than they are now. I was especially thrilled to see some quilts made by some recognized quilters whose blogs I follow.  If you haven't been there yet, please try to make it.  You'll not regret it, I guarantee it!   

Whew!  This is a long post, but it's been a long time since I posted anything.  Too busy on the beach and cooking up Gulf shrimp, I guess!  Anyway, I'm back home and settled into a routine again.  Got to go and get my hair cut right now, so that's it for today!  

Last minute quilting jobs

I've been busy all week finishing all the quilting jobs I can before we leave for 5 weeks on the Gulf of Mexico.  First of all, I had to organize the projects I want to take with me. Don will be  golfing nearly every day and I'll be at my sewing machine while he's on the course. So I have to be sure to have enough projects to keep me busy.  Fortunately, I have many, many ideas of quilts to make--it's a matter of organizing them!

I worked on making a cover for my daughter in law's sewing machine which has neither a case nor a cover, poor thing.

 I took strips of scrap fabrics and some of my mountain of selvedge strips and stitched them into a cover. I even found cowboy fabric for the end/side pieces!  I enjoyed making hers so much, I made one for myself as well, but mine has butterfly fabric instead of cowboys.  Here's Erin's:

Here you can make out the strips of selvedge I inserted.  

And here's the cowboy on the end--Hee Haw!

And I wanted to get the center pieced together of the Allietare! quilt from Bonnie Hunter.  She always has a show and tell at her workshops and I want to take this with me for that. I'll also take along the border fabrics so I can get that top finished up while in the South.  I don't know about you but I think this quilt is turning out absolutely beautifully!  In person, it looks like Mediterranean tiles. 

  

One of the classes I'll be taking with Bonnie is Jared Takes a Wife, one that I've done before at a previous class with Bonnie.  I made it very scrappy and I don't like it very much so I picked out fabrics that I thought would look good. I made a sample block and I like it a lot.  This will be throw sized.

I also had ideas of getting this sandwiched so I could quilt it up and bind it while I'm gone but that's not gonna happen. I appliqued the watermelon seeds on and assembled the blocks but the pieced backing is still in pieces.  I still want to get it finished in time to be put in my Etsy shop for the summer. 

Tomorrow, I'll be cleaning house, doing laundry, packing and getting everything ready so we can leave Saturday morning. Of course, my lovely husband will be helping with all this so it should be pretty darn easy.

Farmhouse Windowsills

Thursday evening when the Handwork Group was at my house, I unstitched the embroidered blocks in the Farmhouse Windowsills quilt that I'm working on. Yesterday, I began the process of stitching a narrow flange around each square and placing them back into the quilt. Today I finished it.  

This is the entire quilt top laying on the floor of my sewing room--very poor lighting in there, I'm afraid.  And below are the individual blocks surrounded by their green and cream pinwheels. These pics look very yellow compared to the real thing.

The aqua flange makes each block stand out. Before, they kind of faded into the background and weren't noticeable at all.  Now to make up a backing and get it quilted. Don't know when that will get done but I'd like it to be finished by the first of April.  There's a show in a nearby town in the middle of April and I want to enter it and see how it does.

Other than working on this quilt, I've been assembling fabrics to take to the 2 Bonnie Hunter workshops I'll be attending on Feb 3 and 4th. She's going to be in Gulf Shores, AL those days and I will be too!  I joined the local guild there and there was an opening for the classes and it was offered to me! We'll be making Jared Takes a Wife one day and Roll Roll Cotton Boll the other day.  I've already made these 2 quilts--Jared in a class with Bonnie in Illinois, and Roll Roll when she offered it as a mystery.  I like the Roll Roll one very much, but my version of Jared leaves much to be desired!  I made it very scrappy and it looks crazy, chaotic to me!  I like to have a bit more of a controlled scrappiness so the second Jared is going to be much more controlled!

Both of these quilts will be throw sized since I need a couple of quilts to donate to charity and that size is so much more manageable to quilt and finish up than bed quilts.

We leave for Alabama a week from today, so I'm trying to get my sewing things organized and ready to pack into the car.  But I think I'll be able to get some stitching done in between packing up!

Not much quilting done yesterday, but I did finish the center of the AAUW quilt that Bonnie and I began this week.  What do you think of our revised Tessellating Stars block?

This is the center of the throw sized quilt.  Instead of placing the 4 sections of  the star blocks together to make the tessellating star, we decided to place them so there is a zigzag design.  We placed a 2" sashing between the rows and I'll add a narrow black border around the entire center. Then I'll make a pieced outer border using the HSTs that I made out of scraps along with more of that brick red fabric.  

Other than assembling this quilt center, I made ready for the Handwork Group which met in the evening at my house.  The group is open to anyone from my guild to come over and work on some hand work--embroidery, knitting, sewing on binding, etc.  Usually 5 or 6 people come over and we take over the living room with the fireplace and have lively conversations while we stitch away.  I always spend more time laughing and giggling than actually stitching!

Last night I worked on taking apart this embroidered Farmhouse Window Sills quilt. This is the picture of the pattern that I used.  

Instead of making multicolored pinwheels in the sashing, I made them all out of the green fabric you can see on the right, and the neutral fabric peeking out in the top right of the pic. The result was that the embroidered blocks didn't stand out--not enough contrast.  

I think these blocks are beautiful and I really want them to be the focus of the quilt. I took one block out and added a narrow flange of turquoise using the same fabric I used for the narrow 1st border. When I put the flanged block back into the quilt, it looked just right!  So last evening, I spent ripping out the other 3 embroidered blocks. Today, my task is to stitch the flanges on them and put them back into the quilt.  Wish me luck that the entire quilt looks better with the flanges inserted!

Before I go to the sewing room, a trip to the grocery store is in the works. Jo's coming today and she want vegetarian "comfort food" for dinner. That used to mean something with mashed potatoes and gravy but now she doesn't eat red meat or poultry and I'm hard put to make gravy out of seafood!  If you know how I can do that, please let me know, okay?  However, I did find veggie balls with pesto sauce and mashed potatoes and onion gravy and that will have to do, along with some veggies and salad.  I'm looking forward to see how the veggie balls taste. If they're good, they'll join my growing collection of vegetarian recipes.

Gotta get going now. Have a wonderful day!  However, if you're in the path of the big storm out east, stay safe and warm,

Quilting with Bonnie

No, not Bonnie Hunter!  My friend Bonnie spent the past 3 days at my house and we sewed until we were collapsing in giggles!  We always have so much fun when we're together!

Our quilting adventure didn't go exactly as planned though.  We were going to use a jelly roll of Kansas Troubles that I had, along with some coordinating fabric that Bonnie chose, to make a Tesselating Star quilt. However, I realized the night before Bonnie got here that I wouldn't be able to get all the cuts out of a jelly roll strip if I stuck to the original pattern.  Needless to say, I should have checked out the instructions at Sew Jewelry before I began anything.

At any rate, I thought that we would simply make the strips 1/2" shorter than what the pattern called for and end up with a slightly smaller star block.  When Bonnie arrived, we set to work and cut all the pieces we'd need for 30 blocks for the throw quilt we want to make. And that's the second mistake we made--should have made one block before doing all the cutting! When we sewed the strips together and set up the block, I realized that changing the length of the strips without changing the width meant that the 4 sections of the star wouldn't fit together. Aaargh!

So, we moved on to Plan B.  We took the 4 sections of the star and rearranged them to come up with a rectangular block that we could work with. We sewed all 30 blocks and retired for the evening with a glass of wine before the fireplace. On Day 3, we laid out the blocks on the floor and decided that we'd put a spacer strip (or sashing) between each row of blocks like this:

We both liked how that was coming along so that will be the center of the quilt.  I'm thinking of putting on a narrow 1st border in a dark color--maybe black--to contain the center and then a pieced border using the half square triangles I salvaged from the scraps we cut off as we were piercing the "stars." I've become addicted to converting these little triangles into additions in the border of my quilts or to be used in another way--a doll quilt maybe.

In addition to working on the quilt, we went for a walk on a cold winter day, saw "The Revenant" at the movies (Don't ask me why this film was nominated for so many awards!  We all agreed that it was a colossal waste of time.) and fixed several yummy meals and consumed a couple bottles of wine.  All in all, a wonderful 3 days!

Now, back to normal. I have people coming over tonight for "Handwork Group" and have to do a bit of housework and preparing for that.

Happy Birthday to me!

Yesterday was my birthday, and it was a pretty darn good day!  I won't let you know how many years the planet has been blessed by my presence but some would say that I'm older than dirt! If I'd had a cake (watching the calories, you know!) it would likely have looked like this one!  LOL

Don and I had done the majority of housework throughout the week so it was nice to have a clean house for the day. But I needed some groceries since my friend, Bonnie, is spending a few days here to make a quilt with me. I've been wanting to make this recipe for beef-bourguignonne-pot-pie that I got from Barbara who lives at Three Cats Ranch and blogs at Cat Patches.  So I spent the majority of the afternoon cooking and fussing with it. I have to say that although I didn't make it into a pot pie but served it over egg noodles, it was amazingly delicious!  This recipe will definitely stay in my book. I don't eat animal food most of the time but when I do, I want it to be as tasty as this dish was.

Other than that, I just took it easy, and received phone calls and so forth from family and friends. The best birthday present is yet to come:  Bonnie arrives tomorrow and I get to spend 3 days with her! She and I have been friends for at least 40 years and we are closer than sisters.  I think every woman should have a sister-friend like Bonnie and I do.  People like that make life just so much more rewarding.

Since I took the day off yesterday, today, I need to get in the sewing room and clean it up so Bonnie and I can work in there.  So, off I go.  Another year older and another year better(?)  I hope so.

Clothes for Vera's dolly, Emma

As you may recall from a previous post, I've been making American Girl doll clothes for my friend Barb's granddaughter, Vera. I met Barb yesterday for lunch and I brought all the clothes for her to "shop" through. She was delighted with everything I'd made and ended up purchasing 7 outfits. Apparently Vera has been playing with her doll every day since she arrived for Christmas and has no clothes to change her into. Well, come Sunday when she gets her birthday present, she'll have lots of outfits.  Barb also had purchased several pairs of socks, shoes and boots at JoAnn's--half price even!

I've included pics of the outfits I remembered to take pictures of.  Sorry for the blurry ones, but anyone who's followed this blog for a time knows that my photography skills leave a lot to be desired.  But anyway, you can get the gist of the clothes.

Twirley skirt and Tee

Fuschia wool coat and beret (from a $4 skirt at Goodwill)

Tie dyed Tee to go with a pair of jeans I'd also made

Knitted skirt and white tee

School jumper and blouse

In addition to these outfits, I'd made a pair of pajamas from the pattern I had for Molly's clothes, and I also had made a little pink dress trimmed with tiny pink rick rack--it was very cute.  So now, I think Emma will be one of the best dressed dolls in the house!  Oh, I also picked up a remnant of pale pink fleece and made Emma a little tied fleece throw to snuggle in when she watches a movie with Vera. This was my gift to the little girl who shares the same birthday as me!  

Now I have to work on a couple of outfits for my own granddaughter's doll, Marie Grace.  I'll make a period gown and a couple of modern outfits as well.  

After I finished the doll clothes, I took out my Allietare units and finished all the Echoes of Pisa blocks like this.  

Now I have to finish the alternate block, Allietare Star, like this.

I think I have about 10 of these blocks left to make. Then setting triangles and corner squares and I'll be ready to assemble the quilt top.  Bonnie called for a scalloped border and she used a white gel pen to mark her black border.  I'll have to see if I can find one like hers--the white marking pencil I have really doesn't work very well and I should throw it out.  

What else is on my sewing table?  Well, I've used all my brown scraps to make 3 1/2" 4 patch blocks. I'll alternate them with cream colored blocks and will set them on point for the center of a throw quilt I'm making for my daughter's friend's wedding gift.  The border will be in the cream fabric with single brown diamonds surrounding the center. How much fabric I have will determine if the binding is brown or white.  Jo's coming home this weekend and I'll see how she likes what I've done so far.  

That's it for today. A little vacuuming and dusting are calling to me and then into the sewing room to make the doll clothes for Lily's doll and to work on the Allietare Star blocks.