A Finish! Garden Party

Hi!

Here's the finished quilt I promised you yesterday. This is from the mystery class I took last spring with Charlotte Angotti. It was such a fun pattern to sew that I've already got fabric to make a second one in another color way. Each block has like eleventeen pieces in it.

Yesterday wasn't the best light for taking pictures. I dragged this one down to the beach and climbed up the life guard towers to get the picture. The snow drift wasn't very level so the quilt looks pretty crooked. I suppose I could have spent more time looking for a spot, but it was doing this yesterday:

The wind was blowing in off the lake around 30 mph which is no picnic. It was almost above freezing though. Warm days here are very gloomy. The snow melts and puts a lot of humidity in the air. A beautiful sunny day is almost always below freezing.

I finished cutting all my 2 1/2" squares last night, so Carolina Fall step 3 will hopefully be finished today. I'm also halfway through a stack of 30 snowball blocks. I'm still waiting on one turquoise fabric to finish cutting those squares, then that project can move forward.

Those are the highlights for now. Have a great rest of the weekend.

A

Yay! Finally some sewing...too bad it's not for me.

Hi,

Finally some sewing to show. Ok, I'll have another picture tomorrow because I did get a binding finished up, but for today I have these blocks. They're 6" blocks. Do they look familiar yet? No? Keep looking, I'll wait. /insert Jeopardy theme.

Yes, they're blocks from the Olde Hickory pattern. I showed my recently finished nephew quilt off at the quilt group a few months ago, and they loved it. They decided to use the pattern to make a quilt for Quilts of Valor (www.qov.org). We're making it in red, white and blue. I think it will look really nice.

In other news, I made a quilt label this week and got it sewed on. Yes, I know very exciting. This is another quilt for the same group. It's going to a silent auction fundraiser next week. I'll try to get a picture then. It's the last project the group did while I was the chair.

I'm also finishing up step 3 of Carolina Fall. Unfortunately, I'm to the part that calls for cutting 600 two inch squares. I've gotten about a third of them done. I also cut about 200 rectangles for the same step this week. It's a little tedious.

So, I've been pretty busy, but not much worth taking pictures of. I will get a picture of my completed quilt, Garden Party, today.

Stay tuned.

International traveller

Greetings,

Another slow week here and not a lot of quilting going on. Sigh. Most of the fabric order came in except for one solid that's backordered still. sigh. Of course that's the one I really want. So the project waiting on the turquoise has ground to a halt. I have been fondling the fabric from the new French General line, Rural Jardin. Absolutely delightful prints. Can't wait to get some more at the quilt show in April.

The quilt above is another oldie. It was a kit that came from Keepsake Quilting. Great catalog. When it came, though, I worked on it for awhile, then I kind of lost my excitement for it and it sat in a closet for 100 years. Part of the reason is because it's a paper piecing pattern. While I love the results of paper piecing, I really hate pulling all the paper off. Really hate it. I finally pulled it back out and finished it in 2006 for a silent auction fundraiser for a women's group I belong to. As I recall it did quite well. The purchaser sent it to a friend in Germany as a birthday present. So this is my international traveller. Here's a detail shot.

That's all for now. Later! A

No quilting going on here

Sorry. No pictures this time. I've done very little quilting in the last week or so. I started working on a stack of blocks last week and had to tear the first one apart four times. I took that as a sign to come back to it later. Thanks to the Olympics, I've had some to do some handwork. I'm finishing the binding on the Garden Party quilt. Pictures when it's done. And I'm still working on my Le Jardin blocks. I realize how out of practice I am on my hand applique.

I received my class confirmation for the International Quilt Festival recently. I'm taking three all-day classes from Charlotte Angotti, John Flynn and Kaffee Fassett. Should be really exciting. The materials are provided for the first two classes, but I need to buy fabric for the Fassett class. I can't decide what colors to make it. I've still got almost two months though.

Other than that I've been spending most of my free time job-hunting. My goal is to have a different job by April 1st. So far I'm not having much luck, but I'll keep you posted.

Until next time...

A

When buying fabric is annoying....

Bet you didn't think that was possible, eh? I'm doing a lot of cutting right now. If I have a quilt cut out I'm more apt to sit down and sew a few blocks when I get home from work. I'm working on the quilts on the cover of the book shown above. The one on the right is called Scotch Granny. I'm using the first Chez Moi line by Moda fabrics that came out about 5 years ago maybe. I bought a whole tower of fat quarters because I loved the line so much. I have all of those cut...144 6" squares. I also have all the squares cut that are the little red triangles in their version. 144 of those. The problem is that little tan stripe in all the blocks. I need 144 of those too. It takes 2 1/2 yards of fabric. I know, sounds like a lot, but you get two blocks out of it.

Anyway, I'm using a turquoise fabric. I pulled it out last night to iron it. Somehow I had the fabric stored with part of it exposed to direct sunlight. Normally a few faded spots wouldn't bother me. I had this stupid fabric folded so there is a line going from selvedge to selvedge every 12" or so along the entire 2+ yards. There's also a fade line running through the center intersecting all the other lines. /growl Of course, since this fabric (the first metro blue line by Michele D'Amore) is almost five years old too, it's out of print.

Now, I have two choices. Get in the car and drive about 45 minutes each way to the nearest quilt shop and find a substitute or hit the web and find a replacement. If I spent enough time, I could probably find the same fabric, but I opted to try something I could get more of if I needed it. The disadvantage to shopping on the web is that the colors are really hard to match. So I found the four best likely candidates and ordered enough of all of them. Sigh. Yes 10 yards of fabric, 7 1/2 yards or so won't get used for this project. Good thing I like turquoise. I suppose I could have ordered one, waited til it arrived, checked it for a color match, then ordered another one. Again, it's a time factor. Though I think one fabric is backordered anyway. This way I can pick the best and toss the other three into the stash. Of course, the really bad part is all the other stuff I ordered to make the shipping worthwhile. hee.

So what's the fate of the faded fabric? I'm going to cut it up and put the unfaded parts together and toss the faded bits in the scrap pile. They all look fine, just not right next to each other. I'm sure I'll have a charity project where a soft pale turquoise will look nice.

In unrelated news, I'm up to 22 minutes on the Behemoth. It doesn't sound like much, but the first few days after my back got better, I could only do about 2 minutes. No, it's not a hard machine to use. I'm just that out of shape. The fun part is it gives me an excuse to download what Mr. Belfry calls obnoxious dance music from iTunes.

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