Double Four Patch

So I finanlly managed to grab some time at the sewing machine to get the bindings on four quilts this past weekend. The Heartstrings Quilt, the Double Four Patch, the Zig Zag Contrary Wife and the Citrus Fizz quilts now all have bindings on the fronts at least. I also sat on the couch with DH and watched a couple episodes of Murder She Wrote and Saw III while I worked on the hand stitching parts of the bidnings. The Double Four Patch, and the Zig Zag Contrary Wife got finished, the Heartstrings quilt got about 3/4 done. What a relief to have some of these bidnings actually finished! Now I just need to sit and watch tv some more and I'll get this bunch all set so I can be motivated to work on the rest of the pile.

More hats

I didn't do any quilting again this week. I did manage to cut pieces for two quilts that will be going to my guild's community service project, but no sewing at all.

I did manage to knit 18 more hats on my knifty knitter looms. Back during the Christmas vacation week I made a whole mess of hats from some donated yarn and decided that it would be neat to make 100 of them and donate them 'somewhere'. Then last week, on the Friends of PineRidge yahoo group, someone threw out a challenge for people to donate 100 of some item to a group on the reservation...well, there it was, a home for 100 hats. Perfect. I've now got about 60 finished. I've been having a blast making them, and it is absolutely mindless, great for watching movies and tv shows. Even Thing One has made a couple hats. I know some 'real' knitters might sneer at the Knifty Knitter looms, but hey, it works for me :-)

My goal for this weekend is to bind my double four patch quilt.

Citrus Fizz

A group that used to meet a now closed local fabric store made a bunch of half square triangles at some point for a mini workshop or something, and when the store was recently closing, the triangles were found in one of the storage closets. My friend Ruth, who works there knows that I do a lot of charity quilts, so she gave me this pile of triangle squares. They were sewed in rows of seven, and the sizes were all different, they had never been trimmed. I took them home, unsewed the squares and trimmed them all to uniform sizes. Then I put them together in the broken dishes setting that you see here. This quilt is quilted, but like most of the others that I've done in the last few months, it lacks binding.

I think I've got at least a dozen quilts here that need binding. I actually like to do the binding, its the only hand stitching part I do. However, lately I just haven't been able to motivate myself to do it. I've been too busy knitting. This week I am going to make it my goal to work on bindings at least a couple days.

Heartstrings Quilt Project

Well, it still needs the binding, but here is the (first, I hope) quilt for Heartstrings. It is about 44X60. It still needs a binding, but that shouldn't take long. This is the first quilt I did a panto on, and I'm not entirely thrilled with how the quilting turned out, but it was a learning experience...I had a lot of trouble getting the rows to line up correctly but I guess its just a matter of experience and practice.

This quilt didn't even put a dent in a small grocery sack of strips that I had. I could probably make a hundred of these quilts before I made a real dent in the scrap piles.

Wind, Ice and my adventures with the power company

Well, this week my DH was in England. He was in London on Thursday during the big windstorm that battered Europe.
While he was on his trip, I was dealing with the aftermath of a wind and ice storm here. All week I had been watching the Vermont weather with a wary eye. Rain and sleet, followed by temperatures below zero and high wind. Hmmm...I had that funny feeling in my gut that I know not to ignore, so on Thursday, I took a ride up to our house. About a mile and a half from our house, I noticed that the trees had a thick coating of ice and there were tons of branches everywhere. Then I saw a number of trucks and various equipment from a power company other than our own. Uh oh. There was that knot in my stomach again. When I got to the house, there was part of a tree blocking the driveway. There were lots of big branches everywhere, including on our back deck. But the biggest problem was the branch that was laying on the power wires to our house...




So of course when the branch knocked the wire down into the driveway, it pulled the pipe containing the wires off the side of the house....



Luckily the power was still actually on in spite of this. I later found out that power was off throughout much of the valley for about 12 hours the day before. So I called the power company, expecting that it would be forever before they would come and do my repairs...the nice lady on the phone told me they would fix it that afternoon, so I came back home. According to what they tell me on the phone, my wires are all fixed at this point. We'll see when I go up there tomorrow.
The lesson here is that you have to follow that gut feeling you get...
The local Vermont paper has a reporter (or photographer?) who has recently started a blog iSquangle which has better pictures of the storm.

I killed my ipod

I am anxiously awaiting the arrival of my new Ipod in the mail in the next few days.

Unfortunately, I ran over my old one last week in the grocery store parking lot, I think. It fell out of my pocket while I was loading groceries into the car, and I didn't notice until I was out of the parking lot. When I went back, it was on the ground, right where it would have been in the path of my car and the car that had parked there after I left. So maybe I ran it over, maybe the other car did, or maybe not. Either way, it was still functional, as long as you didn't want to see the screen.
Sigh. Oh well...I have taken the opportunity to upgrade to a new second generation Nano with a bigger memory than my old one. The bonus is that this one will be a spiffy red and engraved with my name.

No quilting today, somehow I managed to waste the entire day and get absolutely nothing done.

2007 off to a slow start

So 2007 has gotten off to a very slow start for me. I haven't accomplished much outside of my quilting life so far this year. My mom has been hospitalized for a heart attack, but thankfully she is doing well and came home from the hospital today. I haven't been blogging because I've actually been quilting!

Last weekend was productive, quilting wise. I made a string pieced top for the Heartstrings Quilt project (though mine at 40X60 is smaller than the size they suggested, but it works for where I am going to donate it) I machine quilted one of my Contrary Wife quilts, I made 6 pillowcases and I made 90 4 patch blocks.

In the last couple days I've been working on turning those 4 patches into double four patch blocks.

No pictures today, I'm too lazy to go out to the car and get my camera. Besides, the tree service guys are next door taking down a couple trees and I don't want to get in their way.

A new year, same old thing

Happy New Year! I'm not going to bother listing accomplishments from last year or goals for this year, because I just never seem to follow thru. Why bother if I know I'm not going to complete what I set out to do. As usualy, I'll work on the projects that I feel like working on, I'll create a ton of new UFOs, I'll finish a lot of projects but not as many as I start and I'll buy too much fabric.

I already broke my intention of 'not buying too much fabric' yesterday when I went to Joanns intending to buy batting. I did buy the 10 yards of Warm and Natural, but I also bought about 20 yards of black and white fabrics. I want to work on the 'parts department' as described in Freddy Moran and Gwen Marstons book, but I have virtually no black and white prints, which I think I need to pull together all the mess of other fabrics I do have. Now that I have a bunch of them (they are yummy and were all on a good sale!), I can start sewing and have some fun.

Over the Christmas vacation, I planned to quilt a bunch of quilts while I was in Vermont, but I ran out of batting after quilting just one. I didn't feel like driving over an hour to get to the store where I could buy Warm and Natural on the roll, so I just sat on the couch and knitted with my Knifty Knitter. I watched a bunch of movies and tv shows on DVD and knitted and knitted and by the end of the week I had 26 hats! It was fun and relaxing.

Carol posted a picture of what she sees from her sewing room. I'll post a picture of the mess that I see, too. Since my sewing 'area' is one side of the playroom, what yow will see in the picture is some portion of the mess of toys my kids have, DH's excercise bike, and probably part of my huge quilting area mess. This view is from my sewing machine.