Guild Challenge

Every year, my guild has multiple challenges. The thinking is that with several choices, more people will be encouraged to participate. The problem is that I always feel like I have to do ALL of them. LOL. This year we have 4 challenges:

UFO Challenge: Finish any quilt that you have not previously shown at one of our meetings. That one shouldn't be too much of a stretch.

Friendship Circles Challenge: Make any quilt (or quilty thing) that has circles on it. Circles can be the quilting design, the pattern of the piecing or applique, the fabric, the shape of the quilt, whatever. I have a bullseye quilt in my UFO pile, I'm going to try to finish that for the circle challenge.

Winter Challenge: Make something that either reminds you of winter, or shows what you like to do or where you would like to be in the winter (if I wish I were on the beach, I could do a beach theme quilt, I suppose). I have an idea for this involving coloring and redwork, but I haven't started it yet.

Cheater Quilt Challenge - using any 'cheater' fabric, we are to make a quilt. The only guidelines are that just ading a border to panel is not enough. This is the challenge that I am currently working on. Ann from the Sunshine Quilts list shared a toy block fabric and challenged us to use it to make quilts to donate to either Wrap Them in Love or Wrap A Smile. I figured that I might as well kill two birds with one stone, so I'm going to do this. Here are my fabric choices:




Here are the blocks. Now I need to work on finishing the top.

A raffle quilt

My quilt guild meets in the recreation room at the local Masonic Home and Hospital. We have held our meetings there for many, many years and they are very accomodating and helpful to us. In the past, we have donated many quilts to the residents of the home. Every year they hold a big event called Grand Masters Day. I don't know the particulars of it, but I think it is something that the various Masons organizations hold on a regional level to get together and have meetings, social gatherings and some community interactions. Back in 1997, we noticed that they always raffled a quilt as one of the activities for Grand Masters Day. A guild member who works at the Masonic Home & Hospital found out that the were buying the quilt somewhere down in Lancaster PA or something like that. That year, we decided to make a quilt and donate it to them. It is something that we haven't done since. Fast forward to last year: someone in our group suggested that we make them a raffle quilt again. So we voted to do that, and we used the Union Square block that you see in the quilt above. Each member participating made two blocks for the quilt, and one block for a raffle among ourselves. Some guild members put the top together, another longarmer in our group quilted it. I didn't win the blocks from our raffle, but now I'm going to buy some raffle tickets, and maybe I'll be lucky enough to win the finished quilt. Or more likely, I'll use the pattern and make my own.

Please note that they quilt is displayed folded in half over a pole. The space in the lobby of the Masonic Hospital was not big enough for it to be hung full length. This quilt is probably about a queen size.

Great Guild Meeting & Crumb Quilts

Last night, I was (finally) able to attend my local quilt guild meeting, after missing the last 5 or 6 because of scheduling conflicts with Thing One, Thing Two and the big-but-not-yet-grown-up thing. I am SO glad that I managed to get to this meeting...we had the best program that I've heard in quite some time. Our speaker was Meredith Vastas, an employee at the Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center in Eastern Connecticut. Meredith is a quilter and an anthropologist in addition to being a Native American. As such, her interest revolves around the Native American traditions related to quilting and all things textile. She told us about her grandmother experiences in a boarding school on a reservation in South Dakota and how the nuns taught the students to sew and quilt. We saw a number of slides that depict typical Native American quilts, and she explained the symbolism of the designs, the colors and the 'giveaways' where people were given quilts. It was very interesting, and I am hoping to be able to visit the Museum sometime soon to see all the exhibits there (and maybe I'll visit the casino while I'm there).

Today I am going to share pictures of a few of the quilts in that pile that I showed in my last post. Today, Finn shared a picture of one of her Mile-A-Minute quilts, which is pretty much the same as the crumb quilts I make a lot of . That post inspired me to chose the crumb quilts in my pile to share today. I love them because they are so scrappy. I imagine the child who receives the quilt spending a lot of time looking at all the various fabrics and noticing the silly little novelty things, the bright fabrics, the geometric patterns, etc. I also like taking these humble blocks and looking for new settings for them. Please excuse my lousy photography. Its me, not the pictures. Plus I couldn't get anyone to hold the quilts for me, so I clipped them onto my rolling garment rack and it was a little windy and started to get shady. Sorry! So here they are:






This is one of the tops I put together last weekend. You'll notice it has the same background fabric as the Peppermint Sticks quilt I showed on Monday. Hopefully it will be quilted soon. I think it will get a darker purple border.



I like the setting on this one. It reminds me of how much I want to do a row quilt.



This is another one that I was quite happy with. You probably can't tell from the picture, but the yellow sashing fabric has little bumblebees on it. The black border fabric was donated. Actually most of the fabric in the crumb blocks were donated too.



This one is fun too. I have to remember that I like the crumb blocks side by side a lot more than with a plain block in between. Somehow they look a lot more interesting in fours or in a row.

Chinese Coins

This top is made from some of the extra chinese coins strips I made for Heartstrings. Actually I intended to make Bonnie's String X quilt, but I got carried away with the strings and made way too many rectangles. I still have the 48 sections for the String X, but in the meantime I made this top, which is a variation of a top I saw in a book. Peppermint Sticks is a design by Terry Atkinson in her Spring Cleaning book...this top is pretty much the same, but the size of the blocks and the proportion of the pieced strips vs. background is different. I couldn't find my book when I started piecing, so I went with my faulty memory. My blocks have 4" wide X 10" long finished striped pieces, and the background rectangles are 3" X 10" finished. The ones in the book have 2"X9" finished pieced strips and 3 1/2" X 9" finished background strips. Oh well. In all, this top is about 40X60 and I haven't decided if it will get borders or not. Maybe it will be quilted soon.String X quilt, but I got carried away with the strings and made way too many rectangles. I still have the 48 sections for the String X, but in the meantime I made this top, which is a variation of a top I saw in a book. Peppermint Sticks is a design by Terry Atkinson in her Spring Cleaning book...this top is pretty much the same, but the size of the blocks and the proportion of the pieced strips vs. background is different. I couldn't find my book when I started piecing, so I went with my faulty memory. My blocks have 4" wide X 10" long finished striped pieces, and the background rectangles are 3" X 10" finished. The ones in the book have 2"X9" finished pieced strips and 3 1/2" X 9" finished background strips. Oh well. In all, this top is about 40X60 and I haven't decided if it will get borders or not. Maybe it will be quilted soon.

The pile is going

Tomorrow, this pile of quilts (28 of them!) will be out of my house and headed to their new homes. I think there are still a couple more hiding down in the laundry room, but I'm not in a mood to stress myself looking for them.

Vacation is over!

I lived thru the dance recital week. Then, school vacation started. I spent about 5 days in Vermont with the kids. Did I mention that we had snow and torrential rains during the week?? Anyway, school started again today. Thank goodness.

I did spend a bunch of time working on quilting projects during the vacation week. I quilted and bound two quilts, I pieced two more sets of blocks into tops, and I worked on a bunch more blocks for various projects. I'll share pictures later tonight or tomorrow, I need to find someone to help hold things up for me to take the pictures.

I've got a pile of about 30 donation quilts that I need to get out of here ASAP. Most of them are for Ronald McDonald House, some are for the NICU at UConn Medical Center and a few are for Wrap A Smile or Wrap Them in Love. A lot of them have been hanging around here for a while and just haven't gotten to where they need to go. Since I've got guild tomorrow night, I'm going to drag them out and send them on their way.

The picture that I will share today is an example of why it is often difficult for me to get any quilting done. Their names are Buddy (the Maine Coon mix) and Peanut Butter (the orange one).

Of dance recitals, weather forecasts & sleepless nights

Ugh. Dance recital week. I'm exhausted, stressed and freaked out. Stop reading now if you expect something quilt-y because this isnt going to be quilt-y.

So, our dance studio has somewhere around 500 students. They put on 4 shows because there are just too many dances to do it in any less than that. We always have three dress rehersals (one per show, the fourth show is virtually all repeats of dances in other shows, but they need to run it for seating capacity reasons).

Anyway, the first night of dress rehersal is generally a mess because of needing to block things on stage, check the costumes, set the lights, check the cuts of all the music, and arrange the other million details. Every year we all leave the first dress rehersal going "Wow, what a mess" but it always comes together and looks fantabulous during the show.

On Monday we had the first dress rehersal. It was a total fiasco. Everyone was walking around totally freaking out and noone could figure out what was going so wrong. In the end, we had to end the rehersal at 11 because that is the deadline set by the venue for using the facility (rehersal started at 4). And at that point, TWELVE numbers hadn't even gotten on stage. A lot of them were rushed thru with no blocking done, music still not right, etc. I've never seen it that bad.

Then we came home and I watched the news: SNOW predicted for Thursday. Uh oh. If school is cancelled due to snow, there won't even BE a dress rehersal that night (and therefore for the Saturday night show, which has some of my kids dances in it that aren't in any of the other shows).

As a result of this, I've spent two sleepless nights. I mentioned this to some of the other moms at rehersals tonight, and as it turns out, I'm not the only sleepless mom in town.

Did I mention that there is a lot of pressure for this show to be really good this year because it is the studio's 50th anniversary this year?? They have lots of big sets, several long production numbers and a bunch of extra stuff they don't usually have in the show. Yup, big time stress.

Well, tonights rehersal went much better. And the weather forecast has been changed to maybe a coating of snow on the grass, then changing to rain. Thank goodness.

But perhaps the worst thing about this week is that the dance recital is this week (instead of the normal first week of May)...because this year, the dance recital runs into my Lancaster Quilt Show weekend. This is the first time in 11 years that I have missed the quilt show. I've been there pregnant, with a newborn, with a toddler, with my Mom and no kids, with the whole family, etc. But I've been there every year. And this week I'm not there at all. And I am very unhappy about that.

My afghan

I finally finished weaving all those ends into my afghan! If you are a knitter or a crocheter, please don't enlarge the picture and look to closely! LOL. My edges are very wobbly, apparently I kept messing up the number of stitches at the ends of the rows so it gets wider and narrower all over the place. I also didn't know that I was not supposed to just knot the new yarn color to the one I was running out of, so the joins are pretty ugly in spots. But still, I am very happy with it. It is huge and comfy, warm and very colorful. The next time will be better technically, but this makes me happy anyway.

I guess it is like my quilting mantra: I do this for fun, not perfection. I do it for the joy of creating and I'm not worried about those mismatched points, wobbbly seams, uneven stitches or whatever. I'm having fun doing it, it keeps me out of trouble and it helps keep me sane.

This coming week is the craziest, most insane, most stressful and most fun week of teh year for my family: Dance recital week. This is Thing One's 8th year of dance, Hubby is dancing as well, this is his fifth year. Our studio is the biggest in the area, I think, with over 500 studios. This year is pretty awesome because it is the 50th year of the studio (the original owner's daughter now runs it, and the owner's child is in Thing One's classes). We have dress rehersals on Monday, Wednesday and Thursday. The shows are on Friday night and Saturday...on Saturday we have a morning show, a matine and an evening show. It is so much fun but by the end of the week I will be totally wiped out. I'll try to hop online and share a photo or two during the week. Needless to say, no quilting will be accomplished this week.

Carrot Sticks

Thing Two and I took off for a few days, I figured it would be a good chance for me to sew, which I haven't had much time for lately. I took a number of projects with me, and I worked on several, but didn't accomplish as much as I wanted to. The big thing that I did get completed, I am really happy with.

I started hearing about a table runner about two weeks ago while I was reading the emails on Pat Sloan's Yahoo Group. It was a cute carrot shaped table runner. Too cute. So I went over to the All People Quilt website to find the pattern. Somehow I couldn't manage to find my little orange stash that I purchased back in October for a halloween wallhanging, so I bought these



I started cutting and sewing the strips for this, and I realized that I had cut way too many strips. So I just kept sewing and sewing and before long I had three adorable table runners. One for me, one for my Mom and one for my MIL. I think that I actually did the pleats on the tops incorrectly, but I'm happy with them the way they are.



This is the one I'm keeping for myself because it is my favorite combination of the green tops

Almost finished!

With my crochet afghan, that is! I completed the crochet part today. This is a real monster of a blanket...its about 90" wide and 100" long! It really grew out of control. Hree is the story: I had a lot of leftover yarn when I finished my 100 hats, you know, those short pieces that are left over. Well, I decided that I would make myself a little lap blanket in scrappy colors with those leftovers. Of course I haven't crocheted since I was about 10 years old. No matter, its not that hard. I looked at a couple things online to make sure I was doing it right, so I felt okay.

I sat down and started chaining, with the chain laying over my lap so that I could figure the size. After a while it seemed maybe big enough, but maybe I should add a little bit more so that it will cover me a bit more. So finally I decided it was long enough, 200 stitches, and I started single crocheting like a madwoman. About 20 rows later I held it up to look at it, and I was SHOCKED to see how wide it was...like 90 inches. LOL. By that time, I had spent a long time working on it, so I wasn't going to rip it out. Soon I realized that I wasn't going to have nearly enough yarn. Mom and my aunt supplied me with some of their ends and pieces, but still, not enough variety to keep me happy. So Thing One and I went out to Walmart and bought about 20 more skeins of yarns in various colors. So much for busting the yarn stash! This was all 4 weekends ago.

I've been crocheting ever since...it has been a great mindless thing for me to do. Now it is all stitched, the big thing I have to do is weave in all those ends, and there are a ton of them since I changed colors every two rows or so. I'm pretty pleased with it, as long as I don't look at the sides very much...the sides are very very wobbly...I decreased and increased stitches on the sides all over the place. I'm okay with that though, next time I'll work on improving that.

Now both of my kids want me to make a lap size one for them. I have a feeling I'll need to go yarn shopping again.

I'll share a picture after I get all the ends woven in.

Miracle of Miracles!

Not only am I blogging, but I've also been sewing!!

On Thursday, before I left for the shop hop, I decided that I needed to sew, so naturally I started a new project. Bonnie's String X pattern was calling to me. I pieced all the string section for the quilt. Actually I needed 48, but I made 72, so the quilt either will be larger, or I'll make two. The string sections still need to be trimmed to size and have the triangles added, but I was so happy to sit and sew for a few hours. I'll probably use the yellow with white polka dots fabric that is in the picture for the background triangles in the quilt.

The 2007 Vermont Shop Hop

This past weekend was the second weekend of the Vermont Shop Hop. Thing Two and I went to 4 of the shops on the Thursday before St. Patricks day, but had to cut our trip short because of the impending snowstorm, so Friday/Sat/Sun this weekend we finished our trip to the remaining 10 shops on the list. We drove around the state of Vermont to places we had never been before, we spent way too much money, we ate too much junk food and we wasted a bunch of time waiting for AAA and a locksmith to help us with a minor bit of car trouble, but we had a LOT of fun.

At each shop on the Shop Hop, we got a pattern to make the "Seasons of Vermont" quilt, pictured here in the version made by the ladies at The Thread Connection in Middlebury Vermont:


The shops in the hop were a mixed bag: several I had been to before, many I've never even heard of. Some were definitely worth the trip, others not so much so. Of course being the obsessed quilter that I am, anytime I'm in any of these towns, I'd go back to any of the shops!

I was particularly impressed with a couple of them:

The Quilted Lily in Johnson, Vermont is in a really cute little town and has a lot of more modern/contemporary fabrics. Instead of displaying the fat quarters all folded up, the fat quarter displays there had each fat quarter hanging on separate little clip...really great for those BIG prints, you could see the pattern without having to unfold it and mess up the display.

Country Treasures in Chester is a great shop...she has more fabric than most any other shop I've been in in a long time. This shop was not new to me, it has been a favorite of mine for a long time. I'm looking forward to going there in May for a weekend retreat/class with one of my local quiting groups. We'll be sewing at the shop all weekend and staying at the Inn next door. More on that later.

Also, I can't say enough about the fabulous ladies working at Sew Many Treasures in Williston (they don't have a website for me to share with you). We had a little bit of car trouble while we were there...I had to call AAA who couldn't help me because we needed a locksmith (no I didn't lock my keys in the car, the ignition system locked up because of the security system or something). Between when I realized I had a problem and the locksmith finally arrived, Thing Two and I spent 5 hours at this particular quilt shop: in the shop, in the car, in the parking lot, back in the store, etc etc. Thing Two, being 4 years old was a bit hyperactive and unhappy about being in one place. The ladies at this shop made sure we were comfortable, had something to eat and drink, a place to sit etc. And of course because we were there so long, I kept looking around the store and buying more and more things. LOL.

Now if I can just win myself one of the great prizes for completing the journey to all 14 shops I'll be thrilled! The big prizes are: 1. a featherweight 2. a $20 gift certificate to each of the 14 stores, 3. and 4. gift baskets of goodies and fabrics and lastly, 5. a free class, free admission and some goodies from the Vermont Quilt Festival.

Springtime in Vermont

Springtime in Vermont means one thing: maple sugaring. This weekend in Vermont was the weekend where most all of the sugar houses are open to the public...the sap is running, the sugar houses are boiling the sap into syrup and people are welcome to come in and see how the syrup is made and hopefully purchase some at the same time.

Thing Two and I were in Vermont for the weekend doing the Vermont Shop Hop, so of course we stopped at Dakin farms and checked out the sugar house, bought some syrup and cheese and had a few samples.

Lost Sheep

Okay, So I've been like Little Bo Peeps Lost Sheep...I've been really busy with real life, so I haven't been blogging. Hopefully things are calming down here now and I'll be able to post more regularly.

I just lost a post...I was trying to add the pictures to my pillowcase tutorial and the whole post disappeared. How Bizarre. Well, I'll try to add it again, but not today.

Last weekend I was supposed to participate in the Vermont Shop Hop, 14 shops in Vermont. I did manage to get to 4 of them, but the weather was bad, and I had to come back to Connecticut about 3 days early. I'm leaving tonight for Vermont again, and hope to visit the other 10 shops over the next 4 days. Hopefully I'll have a report about it next week when I get back home.

Since my last post, I've done absolutely no quilting at all. However, I have managed to do some knitting (I finished my 100 hats on the knifty knitter), and some crocheting. I've been using all my leftover yard stash (and some newly purchased) to make the afghan you see pictured here...I'm about 3/4 of the way done...it is pretty much queen sized I think. When you look at the picture, ignore all the yarn ends that need to be woven into the stitches.

Pillowcase Tutorial

Tonight I am presenting a pillowcase making demo at one of my quilting groups. I am going to post step by step instructions and photos:





For each pillowcase:
¾ yard (27”X WOF) theme fabric for pillowcase body
11”X WOF for cuff edge
2”X WOF for trim (thin accent band)

1. Place cuff fabric right side up with raw edges at top and bottom and selvages at sides
2. Fold and press trim fabric in half, wrong sides together to form a strip 1”X WOF
3. Place raw edges of trim along the top edge of the cuff




4. Place theme fabric right side down against the cuff and trim, lining up all the raw edges at the top edge. The selvages should be at the side edges of all pieces. Temporarily pin to hold in place. You can trim the selvage edges if the fabrics are not the same width.




5. Roll up the theme fabric toward the pins until you can grab the bottom edge of the cuff. Pick up the bottom edge of the cuff and bring it up to the raw edges that are pinned together. Undo the pins and re-pin connecting everything together - forming a tube. The pins should be holding together the top of the cuff, both edges of the trim, top of the theme fabric and bottom of the cuff with the theme fabric rolled up inside the tube.



6. Sew along the pinned edge. Reach into the tube and turn right sides out. If you have a hemostat it works quicker. All of your seam allowances will be hidden inside the cuff!
7. Press flat. Fold right sides together so you can sew or serge the bottom edge and side edge, completing the pillowcase.

Snow!

Well it is FINALLY looking like winter here in CT! And of course, it had to happen on a night when I was going out somewhere...Thing One and I went to the variety show at one of the local elementary schools. Not the one she attends, but that of several of her friends. We went to get an idea of what to expect when her school holds theirs next month. When we came out of the show, it was snowing! Okay, so it was sleeting, but it had been snowing, so everything looked nice.

I meant to post a picture of my double four patch in the last post, but I couldn't get the picture to upload. Unfortunately, the cd and the camera are not here now, they got left somewhere else in my travels. Sigh. I'll have to get them tomorrow.

In the meantime, I finished the bindings on the heartstrings quilt and the citrus fizz. I sewed the front of the bindings on two more quilts, which hopefully will get hand sews in the next few days. I also made 5 more hats. I need to get out my big bag of hats to get an accurate count, I lost count somewhere along the way about a week ago.

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.