Tuesdays are Just For Me

Seems that I have been a bad swap girl lately. I kind of let my monthly block making slide when things got really busy last month. Over the weekend, I pulled out the packages to discover that there were blocks due from September - gasp!...I got busy. I don't know who each is for, or which month or even which specific swap at the moment - just have pics to show.
I despise making modern-style blocks. The strips that came were all the wrong lengths or widths; I nearly ran out of fabric. I hope that these play well enough with her others.

These are 2 8" strings made from vintage sheet fabrics.

Two spider webs which are unironed here. It's a poor pattern, in that she will soon find that it results in at least 16 layers of fabric at each point! That would not be my friend to quilt :-)

Here's a 24" nice and simple HST block.

Over the last year I participated in the Quilt Block round robin on Flickr. It is a good group of ladies I have swapped with several times/years before. It all was going well until Lynn decided to steal 3 or 4 packets of people's blocks, and not send them back. I consider myself lucky to have gotten mine back. Clearly, I chose trees. They were all supposed to be done with a white or tan background, but I think it will be fine as is. Maybe next year I'll get this assembled as a Christmas quilt!

Or maybe I will just sell it - who knows!

And alas, a glimpse at the last and simplest border that is being assembled for my Italian floor quilt. I seriously thought that this would take me no time whatsoever. Again, I am the idiot. Underestimation ought to be my middle name. I have all the parts assembled - 4 corners, 260" of that striping, and 4 of the mini checkered units. It was all great until I discovered I was short a few inches of that damn black fabric! It is currently on order, along with some nice 108" wide backing and I will put this aside for a few days and focus on more pressing issues. Like Christmas, or a couple client quilts! Or how in the world I might quilt this beast. So many thoughts, so little time.

Happy Tuesday.

BTW, For the nosey and inquiring minds out there...my daughter's spree of mischevious behavior has not really lessened. I have gotten smarter, though, and at the very least removed her chair and all ointments. Oh, wait, she used all of them up on Sunday. I did find her a little while ago emptying her drawers in search of swimsuits to try on. The mess was manageable, but seriously, I am sick of cleaning up little messes everywhere!

More Awesome Backwards Weather

But who's complaining??! Not me. It is early March and it's 55F here today. Rare I tell you, but becomming more the norm this year.

It's a peaceful day here at Casa Quilts of Love. My husband and younger two kids went to my mom's for the day. My daughter was dying to play with my cousin's girls (he's up from CT this weekend), but I dummied up and goofed dates on my oldest's friend's birthday party. Thought it was yesterday, turns out it was today. So he and I stayed home so I could shuttle him to the party and "take care of business". I have a good bit of school prep to do (and Lord knows I can find some sewing to do as well!).

I have done my next blocks for the Quilt block round robin. It's a bit of a tedious star, but my 2 blocks (on right) are done. Now to mail on to Carol.
And here's the black & white houses for the Bees Knees quilting bee. Seems simple enough. Really sucks that I made one errant cut on her original fabrics. I had to go dig out black and whites from stash and remake them! Hopefully it will be ok.

And a few sneek peeks of a client's quilts. They will get mailed back to her once I finish removing chalk marks. She's actually local to me, within an hour's drive but prefers the USPS!
This one I finished this afternoon. It's a 45" wall hanging. I was actually cursing it a bit because the damn brown threads were showing here and there through the white fabric. I don't know what the white is, but I need to tell her about heavier weights like Kona. Once I laid it in my hallway and opened the door to allow lots of natural light, I loved the texture.

I tried to keep the quilting relatively simple - ie., no outline/ditch stitching. I put leaf wreaths in each card-trick block, and a leaf motif in the center. The background is just filled with a peacock fill. This client generally prefers less quilting to more, but since it is a wallhanging, I probably did more than I might have otherwise done.

I like it, and hope she does. Who doesn't love a feathered bordered?

This is another of her quilts. It's a similar pattern, but with different borders, and a bit larger.

Again, more simple, but pretty quilting. I copied a flower motif that is in the owl fabric into the loopy-flower fill I used. Because of the pink, it is obviously for a girl and it can handle the flowers and swirls to make it more feminine.

And lastly, a very bright DP9. And as advertised, this simple quilting scheme produces the softest quilts! They just mold around you.

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!

Quilt Block Round Robin - Join Us

If you love making quilts, but prefer the slow, month by month approach, consider this...

The Quilt Block Round Robin, coordinated by Alicia on flickr, will operate like this. You will make a block of your choice and size. You'll get to set some guidelines as well so that you don't end up with 12 maverick stars when you really wanted 9-patches. You get my drift... You send this block to another person in the swap. She will make another block to coordinate with your block, and then she will send them to the next person, who will do the same and so on. You will make a block for someone approximately once a month. After about a year (assuming the swap gets 12 people), you will get all your blocks back to make a quilt with. I don't know this for a fact, but in past months, most people have been very agreeable to make say 2 blocks rather than 1, so getting over 12 blocks for the year may be possible too. That still needs confirming though.

I have swapped with Alicia, and many of the other ladies that are signed up for this swap many times. I can vouch for the quality of people's sewing hands down. So...Come and join us. We are starting this month, but I think that the swap technically needs a few more people.

Not having any brown thread to longarm quilt the three brown quilts I currently have, I decided to make my block for this swap. As usual, I am a day late and a dollar short. I never think to make Christmassy things in October, before Christmas. But I want to get a set of modern and/or traditional Christmas trees. I made 3 because I suspect my quilt will want to be larger than what 12 blocks will make. These fun trees are under my skin now...I suspect I'll make a few more until my needed brown Superior thread arrives!

Sidenote...

Apparently my post roused enough interest the last couple days. We got another 3-4 people to sign up and now I believe this swap is closed!