Two Less Quilts

We had a very nice and very busy weekend. Yesterday we got together again with the out of town visitors and my grandsons fiance and her mother were subjected to a showing of most of the quilts living in my cedar chest, closet and storage cabinet. I'm pretty sure they didn't have an idea of how much time this was going to take. Last summer Jenna said she asked my grandson what she had to do to get one of my quilts and he said she would have to marry him; I told her that was right. So........ yesterday I got them all out and told her almost all of them were up for adoption.

She chose two.
She asked to borrow this one, to use on a table at their wedding. I told her she could keep it instead.

It was a Block of the Month quilt from a local fabric shop and the only time I ever made a quilt from fabric kits that were chosen by someone else. I chose the border fabric and designed the layout in EQ. The sashing and cornerstones were left over fabrics from the kits and they form a secondary pattern of stars. It has been one of my favorite quilts and I am happy that it will no longer be residing in the cedar chest.

This is the second quilt she chose after wavering back and forth between this and one or two others. She made this choice because she wanted something different in character from the other quilt. These Anvil blocks were made by the Friendship group when it was my month to request. I requested the centers to be made of  "made fabric" and the backgrounds be yellow or soft orange. I set them block to block. You can read more about it here.

Last evening I refolded all of the quilts that go in the cedar chest and put them away. I put the wall hangings and table toppers back on hangers and refolded the quilts that go back in the cabinet in the sewing room; then I ran out of steam.

Here is the table with those quilts still waiting to be put away. It is good to have a little more space in which to put them.

The pile on the left are the ones on hangers and they will be squeezed into this closet. The seasonal wall hangings and table toppers reside here and take up almost half of the closet. Some of these will soon be finding new homes.

No Sewing Today

Today was a no sewing day and I even missed the Basement Diva gathering. My youngest grandson and fiance were here from Missouri along with her parents from Colorado. There was a party for friends and family to meet Jenna and her parents not everyone will  be going to the wedding in Missouri.

This is Jenna and John taken last year.

I didn't take any photos myself today but there were a lot being taken by other people.

I do hope to see more but this is the only one given to me today. Here I am with the two brothers, my grandson (on the left) who was married last June, me in the middle (looking like a stereotypical little old lady with Q tip hair) and the grandson (wearing the vest) who is getting married in September.

It was a nice party and it was nice to spend time getting to know Jenna's parents. Jack didn't come today, he was home being uncomfortable with a case of Shingles. We saw everyone last night and they are going to church with us in the morning and then coming back here again afterward. It should be another fun visit.

A Finish

I finished the binding today on a set of placemats.  Although I don't usually sew down the binding on the back of anything by hand anymore, I sewed these by hand. It has become increasingly difficult to do any hand sewing but I took my Advil  and bit the bullet and did it.  I wanted them to look good on both sides as they are to be a gift.
It took an hour for each one and I did not do them all in one sitting.

I also made some Log Cabin Hexie hot pads or pot holders or what ever the recipient wants to use them for.
You can find the tutorial  here at Sewshecan blog. the 2 center ones here are finish and will go with the place mats. I used 2 fabrics for the logs and  I like the swirl effect.The other 2 on either end are not finished yet; the one in yellow and green  has 3 fabrics for the logs and the one on the right has six fabrics that set will go with the table runner that I showed in this post.

I will finish the other 2 sets soon but first I  am going  to clean up my sewing space and get ready for company and a trunk show for family.  I am hoping to give away some of my quilts. Once again,there are too  many living in closets and chests and cabinets. I gave away about 20 quilts and wall hangings to my daughter and daughter in law 3 or 4 years ago and now it is time again.

Spring blooms and a bit of sewing

The flowers are coming along and all the trees in the yard are blooming.

 I took this shot from the kitchen door, looking north. The crab apple tree is right in front of the dining area window and the far tree is a maple.

This is a closeup of the blossoms that are right outside the window.

Keeping it real .... this shot, right below the tree, is the mess from replacing the leach lines to the septic tank.  That was done right before our first big snow and it has involved a lot of work cleaning up where the ivy vines were dug up and the rock wall and brick steps from the lower part of the yard were "disturbed". It is a work in progress.

This is the tree round the corner on the east side of the house. I took these photos from inside the house looking out my bedroom window. While the crab apple tree buds took almost a week to all open; the buds this tree seemed open all at once overnight.

Two close up shots of the tree 

I have no idea what this tree is; it has small red berries in the fall and the birds love both trees. 

The dog wood trees are also blooming but no photos today.

 This is a bush on the west  side of the house and below that the photo shows the giant Lily of the Valley plants that are blooming next to the bush. This bush was more orange when the leaves first opened and now it is gold but starting to turn green. It will be green all summer and turn orange again in the fall. Of course, we don't know what it is.

This is the Hosta border around the flower bed where the Lily of the Valley is planted. The hostas all need to be divided. We could probably plant them around the whole yard and have some left over.

The sedum is doing well too in several locations.                                                                                      There are grape hyacinths and Brunnera and creeping phlox and some other things coming up too. Violets are everywhere and the vinca ground cover is growing in the wooded area. 

                                                                     

 I have been pulling weeds and raking up debris around the yard but I have had sometime for sewing.

I made some spring place mats. They have a light sea foam green border and will have a yellow binding. I pinned it around one place mat to make sure I like it and to make sure I would have enough fabric for all 4. I would have had enough but I cut one strip wrong and I am an inch short of cutting another strip. So now I have 3 fabrics of which  I have "almost enough". Unfortunately, they are from 3 different quilt shops. One is for a backing so I will replace it with something I can get when I go back for more yellow binding fabric. I am sure I can get another piece of the same yellow but just in case I can't it will be OK because it has not been sewed on to any of the place mats yet. As for the other fabric I need, I might get more of it and I might not and that will be OK too.

I also made some log cabin hexie hot pads and I will save those for another day when I finish them.

Table Runner

I am taking a break before moving along with my diamond nine patch Autumn Leaves quilt. I am not sure how I want to proceed.
The ladies I have been sewing with decided on another table runner. I took the pattern sheet home and put the basic block in EQ7 and started to play with the way I might color it.Then, I missed the next sewing day because I somehow did not load the information into my memory that the day was changed. After I bought the fabric for it, I couldn't find the pattern. So I played with the pattern in EQ.

This is the 6 inch block and below it is the pattern we were  everyone else was using. It is 2 blocks wide and a border of 3 inch squares on 2 sides that complete the pattern

This is my EQ version with the print fabric that I scanned into the program. I just used the solid looking fabrics in the EQ library that were similar to the fabrics I was using; no need to scan everything just to work out the design.

And this is the one that I made. It worked up really fast. I worked on it Friday when the ladies got together but I got hardly anything done because I wasted a lot of time getting my machine working right. I am unfamiliar with my traveling machine and I had a tension problem; it took me forever to figure out that I had something threaded wrong. I worked on it on Saturday for a couple of hours and  finished quilting it today after church. It is quiletd in the ditch with off white thread and across the squares with primary colored variagated thread using the #4 Bernina stitch.


 Anyone who knows me knows I am not fast; when I say something is fast, it is. It is 42 x 17, so maybe the reason it was fast is because it isn't very big and it was pretty simple and straight forward. A nice change from putting the diamond 9 patch rows together, which really caused a lot of frustration. There was one group of blocks that were similar and in every row, I sewed I had to keep putting them back up on the design board after I sewed the blocks in pairs to get the order right. I had to take a lot of breaks to prevent myself from tearing out my hair.

You might think that I would worry 

about getting the sewing day mixed up

 and losing the pattern

 and getting my diamond  9 patch blocks mixed up

 with each row that I sewed.

 I would worry if this was something new,

 I have been like this all my life.

We are always searching for something I have misplaced. 

Our most used expression around here is.

OH HERE IT IS!!