Dancing to the oldies

Anyone else out there having 80's flashbacks while looking at this quilt? A friend of my sister made this quilt several years ago. She had it basted and I guess she thought that someday she would hand quilt it. Here it is 12 years later and now it is done.
I don't know if you can see the lace around the edge of the fan - but I nearly drove myself off the deep end this morning after it got caught under the hopping foot. Pain in the backside!

But now it is done and will be taken to my mom who will be putting the binding on for Tammy. I told her I wold have to charge $50 an hour to apply binding because of my great hatred of binding! Mom kindly agreed to do it for her!

Off to pack for the beach!

Quick quilt

This is a quilt for another one of my pregnant cousins. Her and her sister are both expecting their first baby sometime late this year. My mom pieced the top - mostly from my stash! She was kindly directed to Bonnie's site for the pattern.

Very sweet and simple!

I am debating on what to do next. I have a quilt sitting here waiting to be quilted for a friend of my sister. She made the quilt about 12 years ago and never got around to quilting it! It is basted so I will have to take it apart first. And then there is the commission baby quilt that is ready to be quilted, just have to find a backing.

My kids are spending a week or so at my parents' house in June. My dad and Ian are going to drive to Wisconsin to visit my grandfather. Mom and Maddie are going to stay home and get in trouble ! What am I going to do with a week to myself? Hopefully get a lot of tops quilted. Mom sent me an email yesterday saying that Joann's has batting on sale so I will have to stock up while I am up there.

What are you doing with your summer?

Copy Cat

This little quilt came together VERY quickly. It is the same pattern as Nina's latest QOV , just took a couple of rows off and left off the wide final border. I think it makes a cute baby quilt. This is a commission quilt for the same lady that hired me to make a baby quilt for her son's first child about two years ago. She wanted this one to be in the same colors, just a different pattern. So I used 30's repros again.

I am hoping to get this quilted and mailed off this week. I also want to get the top quilted for my cousin's baby. Then it will be taken back to my mom for the binding. Then we can discuss what to do for my other two cousins that are expecting. One of them is having baby # 2 - so we need to decide if we are gonna stick to our one quilt per family rule. Charlie is my one of only two cousins on my dad's side of the family. My other cousin is only 6 months older than my daughter. Yes, my first cousin. On my mom's side of the family I have 9 cousins - all within about 6 years in age of one another. That could be a lot of babies in a very short time! So we are thinking about breaking the rule for Charlie and then making sure that all the other quilts are very gender neutral. Mom is the top piece-er and then I quilt them on the long-arm.

What family traditions do you have regarding quilts?

May goal #2 - check!

Yeah! Goal number 2 is done! Just gotta slap the label on the back this afternoon and I can give Nicole the quilt tonight at bible class. I love how it turned out.

So I have got one week left to accomplish goal #3 - curtains for Ella's room. Ella is the baby I made this quilt for back in January. Her mama and I went shopping for the fabric several weeks before she was born - so yes, I am a little slow. Hopefully Ella has not yet noticed that her nursery has no curtains.

Once I get the curtains done I need to move on to the birthday challenge. I think I have already changed my mind about what I want I to do. By the time I get around to actually making it, maybe my mind will be changed back!

Only three days of school left! Our summer already seems to short with all we have planned. My sister's answer to this complaint would be "Home schooling!" - but since she refuses to offer a distance learning program, we will have to learn to accept our overly short summer. We are starting our summer off with a trip to Panama City Beach where hubby is participating in a mini triathlon. The kids are worried that he will have no energy to haul himself down to the beach afterwards! I am looking forward to some (read that as LOTS!) of fresh gulf shrimp. My favorite!

What are your plans for the summer?

I Will Survive!

Can't you just hear Gloria Gaynor singing that now? If you need a chuckle, go watch this video on YouTube.

Nines will be glad to know that I did indeed survive my day of getting the binding done on this huge quilt. It is gone - out of my home - out of my life. I got the binding done around 2 p.m. Took a very short nap and then put the label on it and took it to Jessica.

Thankfully she loved it. The only direction she had really given me was that she wanted it to be pink and brown. I was worried she wouldn't like the pattern I decided on.

Here is a picture of the finished product. It was so big I couldn't get a picture of the entire thing!

I am hoping to be able to finish the blue and brown baby quilt by Sunday. Nicole's baby shower is a week from Saturday, but we will be in Boston. So I am hoping to get done by Sunday in order to give it to her for Mother's Day!

Forced

Today is being spent forcing myself to work on the binding for the pink and brown quilt. So far I have trimmed the quilt and ironed the binding. Why am I sitting here surfing the net? Avoidance.

I thought by posting this maybe it would force me to be productive. Send me some encouraging thoughts or comments.

Or you can come help.

Please?

Working, working, working....

The girl who commissioned this quilt is moving home to Birmingham next Friday - and I would really love to be done with (a.k.a - rid of) this by then. I am tired of it hanging over me. Maybe that's why I make so many baby quilts - because I lose interest by the time I am almost done with a big quilt. Anyway... I made myself work on quilting it yesterday - for a total of about 5 hours. Until I came to a point where I had a HUGE amount of fullness - just on one side. So in the midst of freaking out, I call Nina and beg her to tele-transport herself down to my house and help me. I even said "PLEASE" several times. Still a no-go.


Can you see all that fullness? And that is after I quilted it! The next row is just as bad. All I can figure out is that the pieced blocks are stretching. Only one, maybe two, more passes to go. And then I can move on to my favorite part, binding this monster. Can you hear the sarcasm in my voice? Good.



You can tell by the amount of batting hanging off the bottom that I am almost done. Unless I made a huge mistake measuring the batting....which is entirely possible! Anyone want to come help put the binding on?

UPDATE: 9:45 pm - it id DONE!!! Unpinned and waiting to be trimmed and bound.

Another top in need of quilting!

My question for you today is : Is this quilt finished? Or does it need another border? Size-wise it is big enough to be finished, but I don't know if it looks finished.

What do you think?

I have plenty of fabric to put another border around it. What should I do?

Waiting anxiously for all of your opinions!

Current vote: 14 votes for adding a border

Thanks for all of the sweet comments!

Friday's sewing time

Well, I finally got enough pieced blocks done and got the rows put together. Getting the rows sewn together is like a wrestling match. I remember why I like small quilts - not so much fabric to wrestle through the sewing machine. Now I need to go make my bed so I can lay the top out on it and see if it is big enough or if I need to add a border. Hopefully it will be big enough!

We are attending a going-away party tomorrow for the girl that commissioned me to make her this quilt. I had brief thoughts earlier this week of trying to finish the quilt in time for the party, but quickly realized I had lost touch with reality! Probably somewhere around the time that I found out I needed to make 7 more of the pineapple blossom blocks! Actually I think I could probably get the thing quilted by tomorrow but then getting the binding on would be a whole 'nother matter!

I also need to get back to the blue and brown baby quilt. Her shower is going to be on May 17th. I will be out of town (in Boston!) but I would like to be able to give it to her on the following Sunday when I see her.

What are you all up to?

Reasons I am not a math teacher!

Apparently I can't even count to 32. 32 is the number of pieced pineapple blossom blocks I need for the commissioned quilt. I realized a few weeks ago that I needed more of the pieced blocks and set to work piecing them. I finished them up and started assembling the rows. Last night I got down to putting the last two rows together. And yes, I was short 7 pieced blocks. I had started them at some point and then they got set aside. Fine, fine, fine. Finish them up. Nope - I don't seem to have enough of the fabric I was using for the triangles. UGH!!! I do a quick search of the internet and can't find it. What to do? I have one strip remaining and I have to get 8 triangles out of it. I was able to squeeze 6. So the last two triangles had to be pieced. This is the result.

Someday, a hundred years from now, Jessica's great-grand-daughter will look at this quilt and noticed these pieced triangles and wonder what happened!

Last week I pulled the kids out of school for a couple of days and we headed to Nashville to see my family. We missed out on spring break because me and Ian had the flu. My mom and I got to make a quick run up to Franklin Kentucky and go to a cute little quilt store. It was mostly Civil War Repro type fabrics.

I did manage to find a few fabrics to make a table runner for the annual Nina and Sarah birthday challenge. This year the table runner are going to other people, but I won't mention names in case she reads this blog. Nina - the person receiving your table runner already knows so you might not want to post any pictures!

Time to go get something accomplished - besides sewing that is!

April Showers

How am I supposed to get any sewing done when my work area looks like this? I kept telling myself I was going to clean it up today, but every time I went in there I just wanted to sew for a few minutes instead. So today I got my 150 4-patches done for Bonnie's Orange Crush mystery quilt. That took a lot longer than I thought it would. Since I had left-over pink and brown 2.5 inch strips scattered everywhere on my table, that's what I used. I cut then down to 2 inches. I need to sit down and re-read her fabric directions and figure out what else to use.

The left-over strips were from this quilt that I have been hired to make by a girl at church. The log cabin squares are actually going to Bonnie's pineapple blossom blocks. And the blue strips should be brown - but I am lazy.

Here are a few of the pineapple blocks to show you the colors I am using. All the pineapple blocks are pieced already - so now I just have to put everything together. I am hoping to have it done by the end of May - so I can have some spending money for mine and Nine's annual birthday get-together. We are supposed to meet up in Tennessee again this year. I can't wait to see her!

Another reason I love Nina!

I knew there was a reason I love Nina so much, a reason she is my quilting hero. It is because she points out the obvious things to make a quilt better. You will notice that I went back and flipped the four-patches to make the blue into a strong diagonal line. Her idea. All hers. So brilliant! I like it SO much better now. I wondered how I had missed this in the first place but I went back and looked at the original pattern and they do not have a strong diagonal color in their block either. The pattern is from the June 2008 issue of American Patchwork and Quilting. It is called the Big Block Beauty - because the block ends up measuring 18 inches.

Anyway - I just wanted to thank my dearest Nines for her very helpful suggestion. How would I survive without you? I tried to call to tell you thanks but of course someone was on the phone line!

What do you think?

I was tired of working on the project I've been plugging along at (32 of Bonnie's pineapple blossom blocks in pink and brown) - so I decided to make a test block of the next quilt I am making. It will be a baby quilt for Maddie's teacher, who is due to have a baby boy in the middle of June. Her due date is the 19th but I told her that the 17th is a great birthday! Mine!

Her colors are chocolate brown, the blue in the block, and then a sagey green (the cross-hatched fabric in the picture). I like the block pattern - it would only require 4 blocks, some sashing, and a couple of borders.

I guess my question is - does the blue stand out too much? Would it work better somewhere else in the block?

I asked Maddie what she thought of it. She said "I like it - make me a quilt just like it." Why isn't she always this easy to please?

So, what do you think?

Boston anyone?

Is there anyone out there in blog land that lives in Massachusetts? I will be going to Boston in May with DH for an AIA conference - the same reason we went to San Antonio last year! We will be at the Hyatt in Cambridge. We won't have a car but I could take the subway. If anyone knows of any quilt stores that are convenient to the mass transit, let me know!

I am also interested in any other must see sights in Boston. I am already planning on seeing as many of the historical sights as I can. Thanks for the help!

Trying something new!

Christie and I were going to try and quilt the quilts we made together a couple of weeks ago. Friday is Christie's day off, but I got asked to sub on Friday - so we decided to do it this afternoon. We got her backing pieced and I found a great green piece in my stash that will work for my backing. Loading on the machine went much quicker with both of us working on it! Nines - I told her about our old schedule of you coming over on Tuesdays, we would load your quilt on, you would quilt it, and then we would load my quilt on. I might have to start paying Christie just to come over and help me pin the quilts on!

We decided to do a a big meander. I demonstrated by doing about two thirds of a row and then Christie took over. Christie couldn't seem to find that free and easy movement you need for a good meander. We are going to load a practice piece on next! So I finished up while she stood and watched. She would hold one handle while I guided it using the other handle.

Anyway, we finished her quilt really quickly and it turned out VERY cute. I love the greens and browns together.
Hope everyone has a great weekend. Hope everyone gets to spend a lot of time quilting! My DD's birthday is on Sunday - she will nine. Saturday Christie and her daughter (also 9) might join Madeleine and I on a movie, lunch, and shopping trip to Columbus Georgia. We have already warned the girls that if we go to Columbus, we might have to hit our favorite quilt store!

You can just imagine the moans and groans!

Remember this quilt?

If you have survived this blog for the past 2.5 years, you might remember when I inherited this quilt top from my mom. She made the top for my nephew but then after it was together, she didn't like it. So she gave it to me......... and here it has sat for two and a half years. Mom keeps asking me when I am going to get around to quilting it. I have been ageing it to perfection!

When Mom and Dad were here a few weeks ago, we dug out the top for her to look at again. She decided that she did want to finish it. So I ever so graciously gave it back to her.

Now she is having second thoughts (or third or fourth). She asked me to post a picture of the quilt and ask all of my quilt expert friends a couple of questions. Are you ready to feel smart and influential?

#1 - Should she take the top apart and put some sort of sashing between the blocks? And maybe a matching border?

#2 - Should she take the time to hand quilt it or trust the quilting to the likes of me? Or maybe Nina? (haha!!!)

#3 - What do you think?

Any and all suggestions will be greatly appreciated! Thanks in advance for the ideas!

Is it purple enough?

A week or so ago, I heard through the grapevine, that the 15 year old daughter of a friend from college was having surgery to remove a tumor from the base of her brain. The surgery went well and they were able to remove most of the tumor. Yesterday they moved her to St. Jude's hospital in Memphis. Monday they will be finding out about the doctors' plans for chemo and radiation. The daughter's favorite color is purple - can you tell? I thought she needed a lovey. I bought the fabric on Wednesday and just finished putting the binding on. Not bad! I want to get it in the mail to her on Monday.

In the light purple strips I quilted words - love, faith, hope, believe, family and her name.

Better, no?

OK, when I had some time to think about it, I realized there were only 12 blocks in the whole quilt. How long would it really take for me to fix it? Answer - about an hour. And I like it SO MUCH better!

What have YOU been up to?

I have finished up the last of the three baby quilts I had in the hopper. The next baby (Maddie's teacher's) isn't due until June - so I have some time off to do other quilting!

Tomorrow I am hosting a baby shower for a girl from church. The bedding she has chosen, from what I can tell from the on-line pictures, looks kind of shabby chic to me. So let's hope she likes the quilt!

My friend Christie decided to work part time this year at a pre-school. Fridays are her day off. Last Friday we drove down to Columbus and both spent an obscene amount at the quilt store there. I was spending someone else's money - I have been "commissioned" to make a queen size brown and pink quilt by a college student at church. She has already given me $100 towards the fabric. It is lots of fun spending someone elses money!! We also bought some cool new patterns. Christie bought a bag pattern and I bought a pattern called BQ by Maple Island Quilts.

We were so anxious to try out the new pattern that we decided to have a crafty day this Friday. Christie hauled her machine and rotary cutting mat over here and we got started. I got my blocks sewn together but Christie only got her strips sewn together. Anyway she took the pattern home with her to finish up the blocks. As you can see, I sewd my blocks together wrong - but I am not changing it. I like it anyway!

I think this would make a great pattern for a Quilt of Valor. You could use blue for the dark brown parts and do the big squares in all different kinds of red prints.

So, what have you been up to?

How did you meet your sweetie?

I spent most of this afternoon stuck in a highway back up caused by an accident that happened at 2;30 this morning. They had to call in a crane to get the vehicle out of the ditch and they chose this afternoon to block the interstate. So the trip that should have taken 45 minutes took three and a half hours. To top it off, I had an 8.5 month pregnant woman with me!! We had gone to Montgomery to get some fabric for me to make a curtain for the babies room. Anna and I had a nice talk about everything from our irritable bowels to our crazy mother-in-laws. We also discussed how we met our hubbies.

When I was in college in Tampa, me and my sister started going to church with my future brother-in-law. This is the same congregation where DH's grandparents were members. So I knew his grandparents for several years before I even met him. His grandfather is also named Stacy - a family name. Anyway, one Sunday morning Stacy's grandma came toddling up to me and my room mate and says that she wants us to meet her grandson. We looked at each other and with our eyes said "Do we really have to?" Grandma Norman was a nut and we were a bit worried about the genetics of the situation. Anyway, she introduced us and he developed a crush on my roomie. I moved 1000 miles away to finish college for a year and a half. After graduating, I moved back to Florida to be near my sister. Everything clicked - we dated for 8 months, got engaged, and were married 8 months later. We have been married for 14 years now. Here are our cute selves!

How did you meet your honey?

Back to the curtains - here is the baby quilt we were trying to match. We went with the brown with pink polka dots for the main portion and the diamond print for the valance part. Anna loved the baby quilt. She asked me the other night if she could pay me to make a curtain for the nursery to match the quilt. So today we went on a search for the fabric to match.

So while searching for fabric, we got to know each other better and became much better friends. making a friend while stuck in traffic! Not a bad way to spend an afternoon.