Tid-Bits of another week

These weekly bits are rather discombobulated and partially unrelated, but that's my life!

I made these blocks (2 on left) for Pat as part of flickr's Quilt Block Round Robin . There;s also a link on my sidebar of progress of this monthly block swap. Pat made the two blocks on the right, I made the two on the left, and then I mailed them off to someone who will continue this progress. She requested floral posey pinwheels to this pattern.
I did a couple of quilts last week for local clients. This one gave me a bit of a scare. It's all done in lovely batiks. Just after I loaded the quilt, I had a minor needle incident, and then when I started quilting, I was having stitches skipping. I was frantic. Turns out after giving HQ a call, it was most likely tension related and a result of the batik fabric. Who would have known! After a couple basic adjustments, it sewed just fine. PHEW! The owner was very pleased and liked my all-over ferns.

Another client sent me a couple of lap quilts. She wanted some kind of cameo in the yellow blocks, either flowers or hearts. I chose to do a variety of different flowers, and then I did curve cross-hatching in the squares. I try to do something other than just an ugly stippling when people only want a basic type of quilting. It really doesn't take that much longer, honestly, if a pattern can be done without stopping and starting.

Here is her 2nd quilt. It was a tad more challenging because of the many seams, and inherrent bulk. I didn't want to stipple the entire quilt, even though the owner suggested it as a possibility.

I used a wedgewood blue thread and did a simple feathering in the stars (which who knows...it didn't really show much at all) and a very basic leaf in the yellow part of the pinwheels. The quilting shows best in dim light.

So, that's about it for the week's quilting. OK, so that was really last week's quilting. I was waiting for a quilt to arrive and some thread so I didn't do much this week there.

These wonky log cabin blocks have been arriving. These are part of the Fresh Comfort Two quilting Bee. February is my month, and they started rolling in early (yay!). Later in the month, when I have most of them I will show a picture of the entire projected quilt. It's a bit avant-gard for me.

And...a little of my own handiwork. I started this last fall with the gorgeous hand-dyes my husband got me for my birthday. It's all hand appliqued, with plenty of bias strip work. I have decided I will put forth a stron effort this month to work on the border (the 4 triangles) to see if it may be possible to finish it in time for the Maine Quilt Show this summer. Why worry now??...just figured if I got it far enough along I could decide if I wanted it "just in the show" or as a judged quilt. It'll be about 40" square when it is done. That corner (or half of it) took me about 2-3 hours to hand applique this week.

And lastly...tomorrow is my first Project Linus Blanket event in nearly 2 years. Our chapter has been lacking $$ and a coordinator, sadly. Now we have the coordinator and hopefully after the raffling of this quilt which I made, they will have a little bit of $$ too. I have also made this quilt for them to raffle (when I thought I didn't really want the other one to go away), but in last week's flurry, I was notified by the editor of Machine Quilting Unlimmited that they'd like to have it in the magazine. It has since been shipped to Colorado to be photographed! Pretty exciting for my humble little ladybug :-) So... to get ready for tomorrow's blanket day, I've been combing through mountains of scraps. And I do mean mountains. I made 18 12-1/2" string blocks and have NOT made a dent. I have a box of 5-600 squares to make up into flimsies tomorrow and other odds and ends.

STRING BLOCK MAKERS... I have a LOT of strings of various lengths and widths (1-3") and would be willing to send you these if you want them (postage at your expense). Just leave a message here and I will contact you.

Have a great weekend!