Springtime



Dwarf Iris March 11

I know spring does not arrive officially till tomorrow but the flowers around here have a head start. Yesterday after church we went to the Holden arboretum and the Daffodils and Forsythias  were blooming everywhere.

Last week we stopped and were surprised to see the little Dwarf Iris about 5-6 inches tall near the parking lot.

This next photo is the same spot yesterday with the miniature Daffodils and the little white flowers. you can see the remains of the dwarf Iris.

March 18 miniature Daffodils and remains of Dwarf Iris

The photo below is the pond where we go 2 or 3  times a week after dinner all summer. It is a riot of color and something new every time we go. I like  to take photos that show the progression through the year.

March 18 Pond at the Butterfly Garden

Lenten rose

In another area we came across a large planing of Lenten roses which are about 12 or so inches tall. the flower heads hang down so you don't see their faces unless you bend down to  the ground. I held my camera at just below knee level to shoot this pic.  A little beyond the Lenten Roses there was  a huge planting of Forsythia and of course the Daffodils  were everywhere and of every variety. 

There was no sewing here yesterday.

Almost ready to quilt etc

I am at a place in my quilting where I can't move on until I shop for some backing, which I intend to do today and take advantage of some sales. I haven't really had a chance to get out and look around, by myself that is. I wasn't driving for a couple of weeks and though Jack is patient I don't feel free to keep him waiting while I shop for something that  "I'll know what I want when I see it".

I have been entangled  in zentangle. While I have been cleaning and cooking and doing laundry, I have been taking short breaks and when I am resting I have been working on a doodle bird. I have been kicking this one around for a long time and finally, I am ready to draw it on fabric. I want it a little bit larger than my drawing and I want it on colored fabric. It will change a little bit in the transition to cloth as it always does. Will it change for the better or worse?

We'll  see!

Back to normal

I have been feeling "back to normal" for over a week and I am counting my blessings. We even got back to the Y for some exercise. I am doing with out my high test coffee and making do with Decaf and it is not so bad. It is much better than herbal tea; I like herbal tea but not for breakfast. The low sodium diet is tolerable and I am experimenting with spices.

I did get something done last week after I got my new printer I was able to work on one of the little zentangle inspired quilts I was making. I wanted to make a turtle and I needed to trace around an oval for the shell and I didn't have anything here I could use . I went to My EQ7 program and drew turtle block on the applique block worktable . I drew the ovals first and centered them and then realized I might just as well add the head and legs.There were many steps along the way where I was tweaking the size and shape and fitting the patches around the shell. The picture on the left shows what it looked like as I was working  on the drawing.

The picture below is the block after I set the block on the EQ quilt worktable and removed the outlines around the patches . When I was satisfied with the drawing and the colors this is the way I printed it on EQ Printable Fabric . 

 

This last picture is the final quilt with all the final details draw in with a black Pigma pen and all of the lines quilted. It is small, a bit less than the size of a sheet of printer paper. I had to trim it down because in the end I decided not to add something I had planned for the left side. I thought it needed to stand alone.

About 7 1/2  x 10 inches.

Not much going on

Not too much going on here. I have done a little sewing on and off this week but today is the first day I have felt "back to normal". I would sew a little and rest a little and maybe take a nap. I have been really sleepy this week.

I am going to put this one on hold for a while and maybe only make a table topper or wall hanging. I can't seem to get organized to work in any kind of efficient way to do this one. Because every strip might be a different width I have been making the strips I add as I go along and that is slow and messy, for me anyway. I usually find the best way for me to work efficiently after I have make a few  blocks but I think all the stops and starts has kept me from doing that. This is as far as I got all week and that partial block was squared up crooked after the 2 1/2 inch strips and it bothers me enough that I am putting it aside for now. I have some other things  I need to get done first.

One thing I didn't need this week was for both of my printers to quit working.
I had an old black and white laser printer that was a real workhorse but lately I had paper jams every other sheet that printed if I was printing something that had more than one page. Wednesday morning it just quilt working. Wednesday morning my all in one color printer jammed and the ink cartridges just clunkety clunk in place and won't move. Jack spent 2 1/2 days researching printers and we got a new wireless all in one color printer. Jack spent 3 hours getting the wireless connection but all is well now and I am happy to get rid of some of the wires and to free up some shelf space over my desk where I had the second printer.

I need to clean up my space again before I do anything because I shoved everything from my desk on my cutting table. There was a lot of stuff on my desk from trying to troubleshoot my printers and researching low sodium cooking and some of my quilting stuff I am working on. I am not neat and orderly.

Not sewing today.

Yesterday I fixed the other corner block on the last round in the other block. For the rest of the blocks I will pay attention to using all different fabrics in the two corners. I don't think I will fix these any further unless they really look bad after I get the other blocks done and lay out the quilt. The color in yesterday's photos is more true as I took it when the light was coming in the window.

I didn't do any sewing at all today. I doodled a bit in the morning and experimented with scanning it and importing the scan as an image in EQ so I use it for a tracing image, so I could color it, so I could print it on fabric and then complete the drawing. Does that confuse you? Hmmm could this be contributing to my vertigo problems? (that is a joke) (the vertigo is no joke)
I had a doctors appointment today with a vertigo specialist and had a hearing test. I have to go back Wednesday for another test that couldn't be done today because I had to take my "dizzy pill". I was told I have Meniers Disease and I guess it is good to know what it is. I have done a lot of reading about it and I can see that my eating habits of late have contributed to to the frequency of the episodes. Starting NOW I plan to follow a low sodium diet and cut out the caffeine. It is a good thing it is time to grocery shop in a day or so.

Another start



First block



I started a new quilt; I saw the Converging Corners quilt here at Film in the Fridge. It looks like too much fun to pass up so I am giving it a try. It is one of those quilts that you kind of have to figure out the sizes to cut for each block as you go along. I paid so much attention to the sizes to  cut that I was almost done with the second block before I realized that I made both corners the same and I want to make them different. I unsewed the last set of logs on one corner for the second block and added one different fabric I might do the same for the first block too.



second block





 I am making 12 inch blocks and I am using Kona Bone for the background. Most of the center blocks are from 2 Moda charm packs, Central Park and Fresh Squeezed. I have a few other squares cut from my stash that are a  good fit color wise. I was gong to stick with the  Citrus colors but decided to go with more variety as in my bathroom quilt but a bit heavier on the orange yellow and green.  I cut some strips and squares yesterday and I will have to take out  all  of my bright scraps from their zip lock bags and put them in the shoe boxes so I can maintain some sort of order. they are easier to stash away in the zip locks but  I found that the  shoe boxes work well when I am working with the strips. It is easier to control the disorder and it helps maintain my sanity.

This ought to satisfy my need to work with color for a while after all the black and white doodling.

On a more  personal note, today was our 60th anniversary. Sixty years is a long time but it doesn't really seem  that long. It makes me wonder how we got here so fast. I guess it's true that time flies when you are having fun. Yeah, we still have fun.



We went out to breakfast this morning because Jack said he wasn't going to cook on our anniversary. This evening our kids took us out to dinner. We had a very nice time; it is nice to spend time with just the adult children once in a while. I love seeing the great grand kids and am always up for a visit, anytime, but afterward you realize that no matter how many adults were there you never really had any adult conversation.

T shirt quilt ready to layer

The T shirt quilt is ready to layer when I get the backing fabric. I am going to look for food themed fabric.

It is in 4 long vertical sections right now and that is how I will quilt it. The two outside vertical T shirt rows have the  borders sewn on and the second row from the left has the sashing sewn to the  left edge and the third row  from the left has sashing on both edges. You can't see the very bottom of the quilt here but that is the bottom row of T shirts. The end pieces of sashing are various widths and everything will be trimmed to match the left hand section which will be the standard for trimming. There will be 3 long vertical  seams and I will be finishing those seams on the back of the quilt by hand. I have enough of the striped fabric to make bias binding which I think always looks good with striped fabric. I have seen some food themed fabric on line but first I am going to check the local quilt shops.

I  was surprised how nicely the T Shirt sections behaved with the interfacing fused to the back.

T shirt quilt

It has probably been at least 2 years since my grandson picked out some of his T shirts to put in a quilt. About a year ago I decided it was time to reduce the bulk so they did not take up so much room in the closet. This past week I bought 10 yards of lightweight interfacing and decided that it was about time to make the quilt. I am thinking it would have been more meaningful to make it right away when I got the T shirts.
 This is my first T shirt quilt and I think I would opt for more uniform sizes if I ever do this again. Of course, that would not always be easy as the person choosing the shirts would most likely want all different sizes of the (artwork?).

Right now I am putting the long vertical rows together and to make them all the same length I will adjust the width of the top and bottom sashing strips to acheive that. The rest of the sashing is 2 1/2 inches. The easiest place I can lay them all out is on my bed and that has disturbed Jack on his computer; I have to squeeze past him to get to the other side of the bed. He really is pretty good natured about it but every time he looks annoyed I get a bit irritated.  Poor Jack, if I perceive that he is annoyed with me I get grumpy.

There will be 4 vertical  rows which I plan to quilt in sections.

I found this  multicolor stripe with a brown background. This quilt needs some color and I almost bought a very colorful splashy print but changed my mind at the last minute and opted for this more conservative stripe. I had originally planned to cut the long vertical sashing strips and the side borders on the lengthwise grain so the stripes would run lengthwise but when I tried it with the stripes the other way I changed my mind.

Some things really do need to be completed in a timely manner; I  am not sure he even cares about this anymore. I will finish it anyway and I know that if he isn't exactly thrilled about it he will  never let me know.

I meant to make some valentines but then I had some problems with vertigo and I never got around to them. I still had some ideas in my head that I wanted to play with and I wanted to do something with some color.

I got out my box of solid fabrics and ironed an 8 inch square onto some freezer paper and started to draw. I never really intended to do anything other than experiment with drawing on colored fabric and I just got carried away and doodled all around the edge and the inside. Hmm... I wonder what it would look like if I layered  it up and quilted it with red thread; just a few of the straighter lines to see how the red  thread looks. Well that didn't tell me much; lets see what a little more stitching looks like.  And here we have it. Now if I had planned ahead I would not have made all  those tiny hearts to stitch around the outside edge in fact, all of those little hearts were a real pain to stitch. But, you know, I like it. Was it fun to do? Actually, it was, kind of.  The red on pink leaves something to be desired, it needs some white and maybe a little sparkle. I should do something with those little unconnected dots and the unstitched hearts on some of the lines. When you work with black and white leaving tiny elements unstitched works better because the ink  is the same color as the thread.  I am not so red hot at french knots, I tried it and took them all out. Maybe a few beads would work although I know from experience that the term "not so red hot" doesn't even begin to apply to my skill at beading. Maybe I will just leave this as it is and move on to the next experiment. Not every experiment has to turn out to be something.

Mug mats

Wednesday is my daughter in law's birthday. I finished up these mug mats to give her. She saw  some that I had given my daughter last  summer and indicated that she would  like some. At Christmas she guessed that one of the gifts was mug mats (it  wasn't); so... I finally got them done.  Last spring I gave her place mats that I made from our block  of the month demos and these match the place mats.
It is good to finish some of the things that have been hanging over my head.
sometimes it is good to be forced to stay home where I have to look at the things that I  need to finish (or start).

Not much sewing going on.

There has not much sewing going on here most of the week. I have been having some more problems with vertigo and it has cramped my style.

Last Sunday I didn't get to church,  Tuesday I didn't get to Friendship group, Wednesday I didn't get to Bible study. Thursday I felt really good and my daughter came over and gave me a perm. About the time we  finished with the perm my friend Sue came for a visit and when we  were  sitting  and talking I turned my head and the room started to spin. Sue got more than she bargained for. Today I stayed home from our quilt group at church because I worried about getting there and having a problem. I have a doctors appointment Monday morning at 8. In between being dizzy and nauseated and sleeping I didn't get a whole lot  done. I was looking forward to some Quilt Along with Melody  I was particularly interested in trying some ferns like on her  Feb 7 post but that didn't happen.

 



back

 I did work  on this  little quilt and I finished it today after my second nap. It is for our supply of baby quilts at church. I really didn't like this very much when I was putting it together. The blue in the blocks is not quite so bright as it looks here and it just looked too bland to me but after I started to quilt it I began to like it. It is not the bright colors that I am usually drawn to but it is kind of sweet and restful. It has a sweet little Pooh Bear print in the bands between the rows of blocks and a different one from the same line on the back.  Sometimes it is a nice change to work with something that someone else picked out. 

So this is another finish for February. 

This week



6 .5 x 6.5

I spent my sewing time this week getting a few small Zentangle inspired pieces quilted and finished. 

 This little circle is the first thing I finished. I had previously quilted the lines in the circle and if you enlarge the photo you can see that sometimes I strayed from the drawn lines.

I finished the 2 hearts that were done using the same basic heart shape but one was filled in with fabric that had a  similarity to Zentangle designs and the other I drew the designs to fill in the heart with a pen right on the fabric.  I did a little better staying on the lines when I quilted this one.

11.5 x 11.5 and 12 x 12



25 x 25

This is the last one I finished. I did a little hand quilting on the circles in motifs that were not connected.

I am not sure why I have chosen to work so much with black at this stage of my life; it certainly makes things a lot more difficult. 

I think I am ready to work with some color.