Finishing things

Okay, already falling behind on the blog posting....

Have a couple of smaller size quilts from mom that I have finished since my last post. The first one she didn't even remember sending... I expect she got one of those fancy rulers and this turned in to a side project. I put three kinds of templates that I had on this and I love how it turned out.

This is the second one- I put a pantograph on this one. I seem to need to get my head straightened out about how to do pantos. I seem to want to line up the panto with the quilt blocks; what I need to do is just make a pan to that covers the ENTIRE Surface of the quilt. I lined up this one and I don't think it goes far enough over the edges.

Do you think my mom likes bright colored quilts?

Cleaning the Quilt Room

Having been out of town and then sick for a week, my house is desperately in need of cleaning.  I started off OK- doing general cleanup, loading the dishwasher and the like but soon meandered off the path and started cleaning the sewing room.  (My justification being that tomorrow for Halloween the front door will be open and everybody will be able to see in there...). Soon I started opening drawers and peering into boxes, which is always a big mistake.  I have so many UFOs that I can’t even begin to count them.  It is fortunate (or maybe not) that there is an IKEA opening in Jacksonville next month- I have already planned on adding a couple of bookcases for more storage.  When the longarm arrived last year, the Pod was filled with boxes of attachements and supplies and I have still not managed to integrate it all into my sewing space.  

Maybe I can eventually get all of it into one room.  

Anyway, one of the things I discovered was a “miscellaneous” box.  Apparently I have been saving all sorts of test and blocks that I have accumulated from different places.  I thought I would paste them up on the wall to see if I had any ideas about using them come to mind.

Stationary Blue Streak

Most of my quilting so far has been "custom" quilting...I have been pondering going into business with my long arm, so I thought I should practice some pantos.  So on this quilt I am practicing putting the rows together and nesting them together.

Soggy Sunday

Woke up this morning and it was raining heavily- my perfect kind of Sunday.  Given a choice, I would have rolled over and gone back to sleep but the puppy had other ideas... He was bright-eyed and bushy tailed at 6:00 am.  Sunday is usually our beach day and then we work on the weeds in the garden, but clearly neither of those things are going to work out today.  So off to the quilt room we go...

 My quilt guild has the usual "get your UFOs done" going on right now.  I started to make a current list of all the quilts I have in process but every time I opened a drawer, I found another project.  (And by the way, what is the technical definition of a UFO?  Does that mean only the projects I have started, or the projects that I have purchased all the fabric for?  What about patterns that I intend to make- do those count?!)  I started making a list but then forgot what I was calling some of the quilts and they ended up on the list twice.  Then I started taking pictures (you can see on the corkboard) but that seemed to be a lot of extra work.  Anyway, I started a new policy- open a drawer and pick up the first unfinished project you find.  Get that one done! 

This started out as as Blue Streak from Fons & Porter's Love of Quilting (Nov/Dec 2006).  (Yes, this is a quilt from 11 years ago.  Does that tell you how far behind I am?) At some point along the line I apparently decided to change all the blocks around.  The top is finally together so I think I will be doing some longarm planning today!

Hexagon Quilt

My mom is so funny.  When they packed up the longarm and sent it to me last year, Mom sent everything she could think of- including the kitchen sink.  I will have spare parts for years...

Also sent along to me was a pile of quilt tops (both hers and mine that I had sent to her for quilting). 

After finishing the previously posted wholecloth quilt, I decided to start work on the pile.  I picked out one of hers to start.  So I called to talk to her about what she might want quilted on there and she didn't even remember this quilt!  I guess she got one of those fancy rulers and put this together to play with the new tool....  So I quilted what I wanted on this one.

I really like how it turned out, but I guess I need to send it back to her...

I'm a winner!

Lucky me, I found out that I won one of the baskets on the Quilt Walk! Looks like buying all those raffle tickets finally paid off! The ladies contacted me and delivered my prize...

 

And here it is unpacked....

Many thanks to Sew-Mini Things for their donation to the quilt show!

Quiltfest 2017

Quiltfest was this past weekend.  Here are all the goodies I collected!

I am particularly excited about the Perfect Pounce stencils fulllinestencil.com- I think they will work great on a quilt already loaded to the longarm without all the tedious measuring to do ruler work.

This jacket was woven in Equador- I couldn't resist.  I has all the colors similar to a sweater that my mom crocheted for herself back when I was a kid. 
Now if it would just cool off....

Back to Blogging

My life keeps getting away from me.....

I have a new laptop and I am hoping that it will be easier to keep up with writing this blog.  I just can't seem to manage adding the pictures using the iPad.  The new puppy has finally managed to settle down enough so that I can start sewing again, so hopefully I will have some things to post on a regular basis.

After a bout with health issues, I managed to talk mom into selling me her longarm sewing machine.  It got all packed up and arrived here last September.  After some practice, I decided that I was going to make a wholecloth quilt for one of my friends that took care of my house while I was up north taking care of my mom.  I started working on it in December and just finished it recently.  The top is made of polished cotton, which looks great finished but is not the easiest thing to work with. Particularly for a first project...

So here are some shots of the finished quilt:

 

And the label: