A week of puttering

I have been mostly either doing things this week that I am not prepared to show yet, or treading water (politically correct way to say "unproductive"!!). This morning, after I was just sick and tired of working on a very large and very not flat quilt, doing a fairly boring pantograph for 102", I decided I'd better get these blocks out and bordered. They were cut a couple months ago with the intention of making a quilt for a Project Linus book-blanket challenge which is barely over a month away. Do I hear, "E-Gads"??? A month away and it is only 8 blocks?? Yup. That's right. I have a ton of work to do so I am doing my darndest to simplify this so a completed top can be done in a relatively short amount of time.

As I am sure you figured, the book I have for the challenge is an Olivia book. It is not the Olivia's Christmas book, but I stumbled upon a piece of Olivia stocking panel fabric for a couple dollars and couldn't refuse. The quilts will be distributed closer to the holiday season so I think it is ok. Below is a close up of this. It's pretty cute, in a novelty-ish sort of way.
This week, my brother's family has been here. They just moved back to the states after 2-1/2 years of living in Italy. As a result, I had 3 days with next to no sewing. It is hard to knock down the backlog of quilts at that pace :-) Back in the spring, I made my SIL a quilted bag with indigo batiks she had. I failed to photograph it back then, so here is a heavily loaded picture. She loves it. It has a couple pockets inside, and a drawstring top that is tucked inside.

I have knocked out 2 of my Bee blocks. These are heading to Emily (of the Fresh Comfort Bee). I'm not exactly sure that they qualify as "Drunken Love", as she requested. Perhaps I should have had a glass of vino before starting them. I do like how the larger owl is eyeing the one in the corner though!

And one sneakie peek of a very cute sampler quilt that is nearly finished up. It's off frame now, and being bound. I am doing the entire quilt & finish job on this one. It is the Tisket a Tasket pattern and is so darn adorable!

I am tasking myself to do several quilts this week. My boys are off at camp 2 full days and I plan to take advantage of it. I have a CW repros quilt on frame now that is for a local guild. It's given me fits from the start. I've had thread battles, backing size inadequacies, and the general gamut of unflatness issues. I'm most ready to get this large beast off!

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!

Friday This-n-Thats

Lots of little things here...

I received the 3 FQ I won in a recent giveaway. Since I love these sea creatures SO much, I was very much delighted to hear I had won. Now, what to do with them??... I have an idea, perhaps. It has to do with this next bit of rambling.

As many of you know there are a number of online quilting bees being started right now. I am in one set to start in January, and have joined another provided another 5-6 people join too (this is where you, the reader can help!). This is a swap in which you make 1-2 blocks per month, and on your month you will receive the loot of blocks. If you are interested, visit here!

A post without pictures would just be boring so let's rectify that. This is a twin sized quilt that I got around to finishing the binding on recently. It is made from Tina Given's fabrics from the Cloe's Imagination line. I just drool for these! They are so fun and whimsical. I love them so much that I bought a spread of them in the blue-purple colorway too for when I have time to make another large quilt. I found that they are hard to photograph well, so here is a closeup of the fabrics...
...and another closeup of just the quilting. It's a feathered leaf-n-swirls pantograph I have used on a few recent quilts. I really like it, and it's not totally mindless as real "pantos" are.

This will go to my Etsy store, as most of the others I made have. To m y pleasure, I have been able to sell three quilts in the last month. I just hope that this trend continues. I hurried to get the binding on so that I could list this in hopes of downloading it prior to Christmas. Fingers crossed.

The orange-ish bees are totally my favorite!

My backlog of customer quilts in in that preChristmas lull, but I expected it honestly. I have one on the machine currently, and have another 7-8 expected to arrive in a week or so. If you happen to have a quilt you'd love to get quilted, I can give you a heck of a deal if you contact me!

Have a great weekend (and hopefully a warmer one than I will be having)!

Block Party

Are you interested in joining a virtual quilting bee?

I, myself had eyed the work of the Block Party group for quite a while. In fact, I tried to start my own block swap on flickr a while ago, but there was not adequate interest so I dropped it. Well, I read recently that this group is coordinating a year-long quilting bee, whereby some of the group's works may be published in a book they are co-authoring! That is pretty exciting.

Go on over to flickr if you are interested in a monthly block swap, with just 1 block committment! Sign up quick, or flickr mail Jessica (aka give.it.a.go) about your interest.

Colorful Block Swaps

Here are about 70 blocks I now have from a 9-patch swap hosted here. These are all 6.5" square blocks, or sort of. I have been kind of pokey about doing/starting anything with them. What you don't see, is the other pile of these blocks that are anywhere between 6" square and somewhere under 6.25" square. There are 18 mis-sized blocks out of a swap where only 48 were sent!!! And this is AFTER I took many of them apart and tried to fix them too. Apparently they were cut incorrectly and are unsalvageable. I will however try to connect them and use them on a quilt backing. Oh, and a great thank you to Vanessa, who sent me her 32 blocks (with about 10-12 bad ones of course - which do factor into that 18 erroneous blocks) after the first two of three rounds of this swap. She, too, got tired of the complete lack of quality controls and sent me the blocks last month. I hate that the hostess said she'd send back undersized blocks and in the end, did absolutely nothing. It goes against everything that I believe in, sadly. It bothers me to send blocks back to people, but it bothers me more to send along blocks that are most evidently unacceptable.

Here's another set of blocks. These are from my Colorblocks swap. OK, the swap made only 40 blocks (a few people did 60) - I. personally, made a ton (ok, about 100) of blocks! They are fun, colorful and very nearly all 6-1/2" square. Who would have thought that they could mostly all be sent the correct size??? ...snicker of sarcasm. I have not really decided what I am doing with any of these blocks, but they will likely all become donation quilts when I procure more batting.

It's 11th hour now, but if you are interested in joing a monthly block swap, check this one out on flickr. I will post August blocks I received there later this week.

Looking for a simple and colorful block swap?

Then look no further. The Four Seasons Quilt Swap is branching out on a different venture. Won't you join us?

It's been an uninspiring week...

I'm not really sure what I accomplished this week besides sewing 25 squares together. This is just the top. The borders will be done once the fabric arrives (hmm...I should just order 4 yards too many each time I place an order!). My son likes it this far, so maybe he will still when it is done. I did design the borders, but that didn't take too much precious time. Mostly I procrastinated this week :-)
I have been puttering, mostly this week. Without a stack of flimsies to quilt or a pile of blocks to sew, my direction is confused! I have hand sewn/appliqued one of my birthday block swap blocks. I'll show all of them soon - one is still on paper, as it is a New York Beauty. I'm not that motivated to conquer it. HA!

I am going to a local fabric fair tomorrow morning. I heard of it a couple years ago - it's known for having dirt cheap bargains! Just hope my daughter won't be still under the weather so she can go to her last day of daycare (and I can have my morning in peace.).

I sewed up 40 9-patch blocks for the 3 by 3 swap I joined. These are fast!

And, if you are a follower of the Four Seasons Quilt Swap, you know that I am gearing up for a Block Swap, of some form or fashion. Check it out if you think you might be interested or may have some block suggestions for me to consider.

The week's events

in no particular order...

Yesterday I attended an annual Project Linus Make a Blanket event in my area. I was easily the youngest person there, but it's a great day of fun, happy quilters. I dug out 2 of my unfinished tops to sandwich & bind. My mom and aunt came too, and I knew they wouldn't bring projects so I was able to put at least one of them to work for me! Here's one of the lively tops that is now a finished quilt. The other is here, although this is not a finished picture, as the quilt is already packed away downstairs.
One of the other tremendous perks of going to the Linus events is that there is usually free fabric, and copious amounts of it. I was able to get many, many pretty pieces of at least a quarter yard, some as much as a couple yards, 2 pieces of red (from Red Cross) fleece that are for a king sized bed - probably 15+ yards of fabric not counting the fleece. It's fun to supplement the stash for free!

A week or so ago I got a bit of fabric (I know, shame on me!) from Ebay. It's mostly batiks and Kaffe large prints - drop dead gorgeous, but the larger prints are challenging to work with for me. Here's part of a mini-quilt top that I will pbobably not use for a swap. It's more just a fun play with color, but I don't think it's my partner's taste.

So here is onto my 3rd try at a quilt for Kate's ALQS. Without giving away too much info about my partner's likes, dislikes & style, I am trying to do something unconventionally, traditional (if that makes sense), in simple colors (or not too many), yet modern fabrics. Several of the ones I have used came from the AWESOME little packet of squares Janice sent me with this. They are leafy and swirly and I just love the little kiwi's (she's from New Zealand). It was kind of hard to use them to make something for someone else, but they do look good. It kind of reminds me of a frog in a blender, but I will probably need to come up with a better name!
I'm going to use some of these too. Not sure of the exact placement of the curves yet.
And some curvy paper pieced flying geese. How fun!
Phew...
Something simpler.
A little skirt in some fun, flirty fabrics for my daughter. I made the pattern so if anyone is interested, let me know. It's not hard, and doesn't take a ton of fabric.
Once I get the elastic in the waist, I'll take a shot of her in it. She loves to twirl in circles, so I knew it needed to be a full circle skirt. At 20 months she couldn't care less that we can see her undies!
The rick-rack remindes me of more flower petals.
And when the ruffle flares up, there is fun orange swirls underneath.
Enough for the pictures...Here's the rest of the week's accomplishments/events:

• I was lucky enough to inherit 40-50 quilt books and old quilty magazines from my aunt, who is clearing out her sewing room. These are awesome.
• I mailed my block of the month block to somebody
• Mailed my Doll Quilt SwapIII to somebody. I'll post about this quilt after it is received.
• Lucky got his binding. I'll show pictures of him soon enough. He's quilted now obviously.
• I am also pushing away with my Amish star hand quilting. It's nearing the half-way point.
• doing all the fun (ha ha) quilt tracking for the 4-Seasons quilt swap which is nearing it's shipping date.

For those of you that opt to leave comments, thank you. I love to read them. Even if I do not respond or always comment myself, I do enjoy snooping at what everyone else in the quilt world is doing. It is a source for wonderful inspiration.

Spring Quilt has flown to a warmer climate

My spring quilt should be reaching it's new home tomorrow. I'm very sad to see it go. I've never done a quilt almost all by hand like this one. I just hope (and I think I know my partner's taste well enough to be confident here) she likes it. Here's one last glimpse at spring... (more pics after it is received)


The making of this quilt is shown here and here and here.

I have rejoined the quilt block swap. Here's my April "nautical & scrappy" block. Hopefully my partner is not snooping this out! Those are supposed to be like the triangular flags on sail boats.