It's been a while since my last post...and I feel like I spend every post's beginning saying that. But oh well! I have lots of confessions and lots of exciting things and lots of pictures to show you all! So that being said...

Baby C's Quilt


I have a friend, whom we'll call K (yes, I use a lot of initials, but I don't want people to be angry about their identities appearing online...I'm a big fan of privacy) who has now just had a baby. She has an 18 month old son, E, and a newborn son, C. I've known K as long as I've known A and M from the previous post. I found out this winter that she was pregnant and I obviously was going to make her a quilt. She's dabbled in quilting and has made a top but never quilted it. She does do rag quilts and such though. So anyways, I was going to make her a quilt. The baby room was going to be done up in Mickey Sports stuff but she wanted a "bright quilt like you [I] make" so I had to oblige her. I went with a simplified bento box design that I had played around with in my spare time. I went bright and colorful and somewhat gender neutral with the colors and loved the result.

I just quilted in the ditch on this one. I thought about filling in the parts of the boxes with quilting but decided I wanted to leave the design to shine through without the quilting hiding it. I love quilting but sometimes you just don't want it to outshine the quilt itself.

Front of the quilt:

Back of the quilt:

Front and back folded together:

Binding:

All folded up and ready to give to mommy!

Baby S's Quilt


This quilt has been almost a year in the making. It was 7 months late, but his mom didn't seem to care. Her inspiration for the baby's room was this bedding set. I did log cabin blocks last June and got the top made up right before I started my international move. I took the top with me on my traveling before leaving the country and bought backing and hand-quilting supplies (mine had long been packed up at this point) to hand-quilt on the driving and flying to get to Germany. JoAnn Fabrics had the PERFECT backing fabric - a striped fabric with all of the colors (green, orange, brown, and blue also with a bit of white and yellow mixed in) which I used. I hand-quilted it with white thread in a combination of loops and stippling. It started out as stippling but I like it crossing over itself every so often...I like the circle-type shapes it creates. Because this quilt was hand-quilted, it got put on the back burner a lot, but it got pulled out more than a few times for driving. My husband usually drives when we're going on a trip, so I sit in the passenger seat and sew or read. This quilt finally got finished when I was back in the states at the beginning of June. I hand-sewed the binding, got pictures of it, and sent it off to the family who emailed me about a week later thanking me profusely.

Front of quilt:

Back of quilt:

Front and back:

Baby SM's Quilt


Baby SM's father is a coworker of mine. She (initials are of her first and middle name, to distinguish her from baby S) is the fifth baby and the first girl. So her quilt had to be girly, that's for sure! She's due August 1 and I've completed the top. I used Bonnie Hunter's Random Ohio Stars pattern and scaled it back from 12" and 6" stars to 9" and 4.5" stars. I tried to arrange the colors a bit like a rainbow, so the mostly red ones are at the top and the mostly blue ones are at the bottom. It isn't a perfect gradient but it's close.

My problem with this quilt is that I have NO IDEA how to quilt it. How do you quilt something like this? I can't just quilt in the ditch without spending a significant amount of time turning the quilt around to go around the sides of the triangle pieces. I can't do straight line stitching based off of the edges of the blocks since they overlap and don't go straight from one side to the other. I've only done one quilt (the doll quilt I entered in the Blogger's Quilt Festival) with free-motion quilting so I'm hardly an expert on that, but I'm thinking I need to figure something out to FMQ on it. But what? Will I have to do separate designs in the stars vs. in the background? I'm stuck. I don't even know if I'm going to do one of what my husband calls my "traditional" backings where I slice it up and put mini versions of the same thing as on the front in a row across it. This quilt just has me stymied! Also, I just used the word stymied. Any ideas ya'll have would be greatly appreciated! Oh, and I just noticed (it's hard to see in the picture but it's there) that one star has one set of points turned 90 degrees the wrong way. It's not in an easy-to-fix place so I'll just leave it as it is. My husband convinced me not to tear the whole top apart to fix one piece on a small star, somehow. Oh well, I guess it's got character like a lot of the old antique quilts you see.

The Wanna-Be Farmer's Wife Quiltalong


If you haven't been hiding under a rock or in a cave for the past two weeks, you've probably seen that there is a rather large group of quilters doing the Farmer's Wife Quiltalong right now. I really wanted to do it but don't have the book. Rather than buy the book and do it, I decided to instead do the Civil War Love Letters Sampler Quilt. My now Mother-in-Law (I think this was over the Christmas break where my husband proposed to me, but it might have been the year before, I'm not sure ) bought it for me as a Christmas present. My book, however, didn't come with a CD so I've been tracing the pictures in the book and teaching myself to paper piece with them. It's been a little rough but things are turning out okay. Some of the ones with more pieces are turning out slightly smaller than they should be, but they're generally working out okay. It's definitely fixable with some creative fudging on my sashing (whatever I choose for it). The best part is that I'm using all scraps (I've had to pull the bigger piece of one of the fabrics out when my scrap wasn't big enough one time so far, but other than that my usage is all scraps) from my brown, green, blue, and orange bags. My husband really liked the colors from baby S's quilt, so he requested that I do this quilt in those colors. This quilt will be for out bed so I'm going to do enough for two extra rows to make it rectangular. I have NO IDEA how I'm going to quilt this since I only have a tiny machine - maybe I'll find someone around me with a long arm that they can teach me how to use so I can use it? This quilt will most likely end up sized for a California King sized bed (our future bed when we get back to the states) so it's not going to fit in my little Jenny the Janome. *sigh* Maybe I should save up for a longarm? I can't imagine that I'll be able to save up enough for it to make it happen now or anytime relatively soon but I can always hope, can't I? My husband thinks it's cheating if someone else quilts my quilts, so getting it longarmed by someone else probably isn't an option. I don't know...maybe the size of this one will change that. We'll see.

The blocks I've finished so far:

Block 1: Enthusiasm

Block 2: A Secession Ball

Block 3: Healthful Region

Block 4: March in the Mountains (this one won't lay flat...it's not as funny-shaped as it looks like it is)

Block 5: Sorrows of War

Block 6: Liberal with Furlough (newest one finished and it really won't lay flat yet

Stash report number whatever it is...

Used this week: 2.5 yards
Used year to date: 13.0 yards
Added this week: 52 yards
Added year to date: 60.8 yards
Net usage for 2011: (47.8 yards)

Fabric Used:

.75 yard - binding for baby C's quilt
.75 yard - binding for baby S's quilt
1 yard - top for baby SM's quilt

Fabric Added:

50 yards of FQs (200 FQs from 2x100 FQ sets from Keepsake Quilting...some of it is visible in the picture above...some of my husband's present is also visible on the left)
2 yards of Fox print fabric also from Keepsake Quilting (I love foxes)

Back in the negatives again, sadly. And I have a TON to use up here before I am back in the positive. So help me use it. Give me ideas for quilting the Random Ohio Stars quilt for baby SM so I can pull a backing and quilt it. Help me come up with ways to use more fabric, because the year is half over and 47.8 yards of fabric is a lot to use up. I will get back in the positive...somehow...

Is it already Sunday?

Have you ever had too much week and not enough weekend? Yeah, me too. This week was no exception...I think I need a weekend for my weekend! But I do have a lot to look forward to this coming weekend! My parents are coming to visit...I haven't seen them in person since June, although we do Skype regularly! They'll only be here for a few days on the tail end of a business trip for my dad, but I'm so excited to be able to show them around Germany! My mom's never been outside of the US and Canada that I know of, so this is her chance to try out her new passport! She was going to go to Germany last year but the Icelandic Volcano (I'm not even going to try to spell its name) cancelled that trip.

I'm turning to you, bloggy friends (I know you're out there, even if you are quiet!) to help me through this week. My husband's company is going for a trip to Normandy this weekend and so he left tonight. Yes, it's Mother's Day, but we don't have any kids so it doesn't really count for us. After all, you kind of need to be a mother to celebrate Mother's Day, right? Well, not at church today. To try to be sensitive to women who may be trying to conceive but not having luck, flowers and muffins (96 of which were baked in my kitchen by my husband and two friends on Saturday afternoon and night) were given out to every adult woman. I don't know...it seems like it might be a little overkill to me. And then there was the debate with my husband afterwards. So tell me this - the pastor at the beginning of the service asked any woman who hadn't gotten a flower to raise her hand, but none of the women did and their husbands either had to point to them or raise their hands for them. Do you think that the women were being selfish and wanted their husbands to do a little more work to get them a flower? Or do you think that the women just didn't want to make a fuss about it then and that they would get their flower after service? My husband thinks the former and I think the latter. Anyways...I seem to be going off on rabbit trail tangents a lot right now...I hope you can follow the popcorn popper that is my train of thought!

While the guys were making a mess of my kitchen (you should have seen the state of my stand mixer this morning! Dried blueberry muffin batter in the part where the bowl hooks in! Seriously?), I was cutting and sewing. I pieced the back for the newest quilt I've been working on. It's for my friend Kate, who is due June 1 (so it's not late yet!). The front is a simplified Bento Box Quilt that is just a square in a square (not wonky), not a multi-leveled square. It's for a little boy so it's all bright reds, oranges, yellow, blue, and green on the front and the back is another of the sheets that I used to back the Brown Bag Quilt. I cut this one horizontally and put in small pieced square-in-square blocks in a double row close to the bottom. It helps to tie the back (orange and khaki flowers) to the front (bright Bento). I could have bought another back for it but it would not have gotten here in time for be to be quilting it by now! I am proud, though, because all of the squares on the back are 100% out of my strips and crumbs and scraps. That makes me happy, although I don't think it's made a dent in the least! Every little bit helps, though. So here's the quilt all scrunched up in my Jenny Janome!

And here's the back - the quilt is not straight, which is why the stripe of little blocks looks diagonal...it's definitely straight across (or close to it!):

I spent yesterday sewing with some dear old friends: Evelyn, Ninny, Ruth, and Idgie, Lizzie, Jane, Mr. Darcy, and Mr. Bingley, and Christine, Raoul, Meg, and the Phantom. So did you guess which movies I was watching correctly? I love those movies...I've watched all of them probably dozens of times in my life so far, much to the annoyance of my husband. I love watching my favorite movies over and over and over again (I've watched Fried Green Tomatoes probably 5 times in the last month alone) whereas he watches them, appreciates them, and puts them away. I can't just put them away, though! They're like old friends! And every time you see them you catch something new...like realizing that Raoul knew that it was the Phantom with Christine on stage during the showing of Don Juan Triumphant based off of his facial expression, or noticing the exact moment when Mr. Darcy falls in love with Lizzie. Yes, they're old friends, and the more you spend time with them, the better you know them.

And then the last bit of fun stuff for this post - the stash report! Did I make it back into the positives yet? Let's go see! (I'm such a cheeseball!)

Stash Report:

Used this week: 2.4 yards
Used year to date: 10.5 yards
Added this week: 0 yards
Added year to date: 8.8 yards
Net usage for 2011: 1.7 yards


Woo-hoo! I'm back in the black! It took me long enough, and I think I'll be negative again here before too long, but I've officially used more this year than I've added. It feels great.

This reports includes the pieced backing on Kate's quilt. I haven't done anything beyond that. And I won't be doing any major sewing next weekend so hopefully I can stay in the black, but my anniversary (the big 2 year mark!) is the 23rd, so my report may sink back into the negative again...

Celebration

The weather this week has been absolutely amazing. It's been so warm that almost all of the snow has melted! Needless to say, my husband and I have been loving life. We spent almost two hours wandering around the pedestrian district of the city, and then had dinner with friends at their house. I got to play with the baby and the new puppy, both of whom were really cute and really fun. :)

Then, this morning at church I met a woman (through my real-life quilting friend) who's another quilter! She's a "hardcore" quilter, apparently - has a big sewing room, belongs to two guilds, including the one that Bonnie Hunter is coming to visit next month! She's going to get me in touch with that guild so that real-life quilting friend and I can go watch the trunk show! RLQF (it's easier to type instead of real-life quilting friend) said that her husband owes her a night without kids, so our husbands will hang out and watch the boys while she and I go to meet Bonnie Hunter! I'm excited. :)

This week's stash report:

Used this week: 0 yards
Used year to date: 0 yards
Added this week: 2.5 yards
Added year to date: 2.5 yards
Net used for 2011: (2.5 yards)

I've added more than I've used so far, but in my defense, it was bought for a specific project - it's going to be a backing for a quilt. So it's not that bad. Check in at Judy's to see how everyone else did this week!

Oh, and even this picture doesn't show a quilt, I couldn't not post this:

I hope you're having a great day!

Thank you, Shelly!

In case you don't know, Shelly of Prairie Moon Quilts is doing a series of challenges to start the new year off right sewing-wise. The first one was easy - locate your oldest UFO and do something (anything!) about it. That was easy for me because my oldest UFO is the biggest UFO/WIP I have. It's lowest on the totem pole, but I took it out, looked at it, and put it back into the corner of my sewing room where it will live until I finish the quilts with due dates attached. But Shelly counted that as doing something - after all, unlike her (until she did her challenge) I know where it is!

Second challenge was a bit harder - clean off a flat surface in my sewing area. My sewing table was covered in stuff as I've been doing hand-sewing lately, not touching my machine. All of the stuff you see here in this picture (except for the suitcase that's holding my thread) was on my sewing table surrounding my machine:

My sewing table is really small - it's a little card table, so it was rather covered. You can't quite tell, but most of the stuff was scattered - pins, bags with holes in them, three pairs of scissors, my thimbles, my thimble with a hole in it (someday, it will be a necklace - after all, how many of you have used a metal thimble so much that it developed a hole in the tip?), etc. - all over the table until you couldn't work there if you wanted to. Now, it's organized on the windowsill (after all, I can't use the windowsill for much else!) and my sewing table looks like this:

Hooray cleanliness! I also cleaned up the floor in the room. You can see in the bottom right corner my fabric basket, my tote bag of scraps, and my tote bag of batting scraps. My poor curvy cutting mat is on the table, and my wonderful red Ikea lamp (doesn't it look like the one from the beginning of the Pixar movies?) shining on Jenny the Janome. 

In case you were wondering, the quilt on the left and the one on the right were made by my Grandmother. The one on the left was my garden - at night as I was in bed I'd imagine wandering through the garden, thinking about what beautiful flowers I'd see. On the right is my little bunny - he was my pet until my parents actually let me get my own pet (an adorable little white mouse named Treasure who was tame as can be and that I loved beyond imagining). In the middle is my first quilt - aptly named "Primus" ("First" in Latin). It was made from designer fabric swatches (not even kidding!) that we got from a friend of the family that was an interior designer. It was completely hand-sewn and is totally falling apart, but it's my inspiration because of how far I've come.

So thank you, Shelly, for getting me to clean my room. My husband thanks you too! This year I'm going to try to finish all of the projects that were started last year. So there's one baby quilt, a Quilts for Kids quilt, and my bed quilt. Plus I have to finish my brown bag quilt challenge, one and probably a second baby quilt, and hopefully my sister's quilt. Hers is simple - it's a wholecloth front, but there is going to be a TON of quilting. I can't wait to start it, and I promise to post progress pictures as it'll be awesome.

Happy New Year, and I wish you all happy sewing in this coming year!

Sorry, guys

I realize I've been silent for over a week now...sorry about that. I'm sewing like a madwoman to get these quilts done in time to ship to their recipients by Christmas! I have a picture of Pop-Pop's finished quilt, I'm in the middle (well, towards the end) of quilting Mom's Fall Leaf Quilt, and TX Mom's quilt top is pieced and ready for basting. I promise I'm working!

Oh, and I'm learning how to Free-Motion Quilt! Kind of by accident...I wanted to give the leaves on Mom's Quilt veins, which meant that I had to free-hand draw them. I've only done a bit of curves with the leaves (which are completely quilted now!) and drawing out blades of grass (some are more straight up-and-down zig-zags, but some look like grass! I only had one time where I had a tension issue, too...I switched thread from one brand to another and had to raise my top-thread tension about 1/4 of a value on my machine (2.5 to 2.75-ish). So hooray for that. I haven't ventured into stippling (it just looks like way too much turning the whole quilt sandwich for me...my machine has a really little throat and you get a workout every time you turn the quilt at all!) but hey - gotta start somewhere, right?

It's been great to have my husband home. Unfortunately, he woke up several times last night sick and hasn't been feeling well all day so boo on that. We did do some shopping and small travels earlier this Thanksgiving weekend - Christmas Markets opened this weekend and we hit up two, plus found me my dress for the ball in two weeks. Nothing like waiting until the last minute, eh? The dress fits pretty well (the arm-hole...yes, it's asymmetrical so there's only one...is a little tight but definitely looks great) and while the color is a bit out of my comfort zone (lavender) it goes great with a silver pair of heels I had left over from my sister's wedding a few years back. Add in a pair of silver long gloves we found at the same store, some jewelry I already had, and a touch of makeup - voila! I'm ready for my carriage to take me to the ball!

My hope (which seems fairly doable) is to have Mom's quilt to the point that it needs only hand-stitching (binding) by this weekend because I think we're going to be doing a bit of traveling. We'll see.

In other news, if you remember how I talked about my Grandfather being moved from Florida to Ohio to go into an assisted living facility...well, the lease on his old place was paid for a year after he left to give my dad time to go get it cleaned out. Apparently Pop-Pop didn't throw ANYTHING away. At all. My dad found 20 boxes full of pictures of my Grandfather from WWII, his wedding, etc. He also found more of my Grandmother's jewelry. I already have quite a few pieces of her jewelry from when she died while I was in high school. I love her jewelry and wear it a lot even if some of it is only costume jewelry. He also found some of her old quilting fabric, which my mom is going to send to me with her jewelry and some other things.

Now, I never really knew my Grandmother as an adult - I was in high school when she passed away, but she had Alzheimer's pretty badly before that. I knew her as a child, because she and Pop-Pop visited a few times and I stayed at their place in Florida for a few weeks one summer, but I didn't know her as an adult. It wasn't until very recently that I realized that she had quilted. I have two small quilts she had given me when I was a kid and when looking at them I realized she had hand-quilted them. They're hanging on the wall in my sewing room. I take after her (and her side of the family) more than any other of my family members physically - she was over 6' tall and had feet so big she had two pairs of custom-made dress shoes and wore men's shoes the rest of the time. I'm not that bad (5'10" and my feet are a mere size 11 womens) but even my face structure looks like her side of the family. I was born six days after her birthday too - another way I feel connected to her. I'm excited too because one of the pieces of jewelry I'm getting is an opal ring...we share that birthstone and the ring is real opals - a larger center one with smaller ones around it. My mom showed me on Skype and it's gorgeous!

Is it silly to feel so connected to someone I barely knew as an adult? And yet I do, because in a way I feel like I'm following in her footsteps. I'm a lot like her in a lot of ways...and I hope I become more like her because from what I can remember, she was an amazing woman. I can only hope to be more like my Grandma. And that's about the hokiest thing I've said all day. Oh well - such is life. Have you ever felt this way towards someone you only barely knew or who you didn't know at all?

Hooray!

I will be unplugged for a few days as my husband returns from his business trip in the middle of the night tonight. He's been gone since August. He won't have internet access until he gets home, so I can say this and surprise him - I love you so much, honey! I'm so excited for you to come home! I can't wait to see you! I've missed you...but my love has only grown while you've been gone!

Hopefully when I start blogging again it'll be on my computer, not my phone!

Also, this made me laugh...because for me, at least some of the time, it's true.

So let's get that adrenaline going!