Bits & Pieces

I've been sewing, just not really making progress on anything substantial.


I finished the first 6 grocery bags and have actually remembered to use them for the last 3 weeks. Despite my plastic bag average of 11 per weekly trip, I don't think I'll need that many cloth ones. Either they hold more or the baggers fill the space more efficiently. I think a little of both. I have fabric out on my cutting table for a few more, but they are boring and that sure saps the motivation.


I got the corner pieces on the Lone Star, going with black, but I still have another couple feet of border to piece and then attach. No pictures of that yet.


My birthday came and I got to open the presents I told my husband to buy.
A Curve Master presser foot... ...which helped me with my first ever Drunkard's Path block.

And this book, inspired by this blog. And that green piece which is pretty typical of everything I've been sewing for the last few weeks.......half a good idea made up of scraps from my overflowing parts bin and destined to return there for the immediate future.

I'm not sure where my motivation has gone, but I hope it comes back soon. I signed up for a class with Jackie Robinson at the Denver National Quilt Festival and have picked & washed my fabrics, but still have a bunch of cutting to do.

I also have most of the parts cut for a quilt to make with my youngest son's Kindergarten class. Just need a few more fat quarters that I'll pick up this weekend.

Goodies

I stood over my husband last night, even lent him my debit card (his got eaten by the ATM last weekend) and he got my birthday presents ordered. Week after next I'll be "surprised" by them and have cool new sewing things to play with and a new CD to listen to while I sew. Even better, got an email from my Mom today that my folks will be HERE for my birthday. Now that's a fantastic present.......except for the cleaning that must be done. My house is always so dusty. I really wish we had grass in the backyard instead of dirt.

Late night at the quilt shop tomorrow and a whole day with no work to prepare for it. I hope I have some progress on quilty things to report after that.

Curtains

No quilting going on this weekend, but I did manage to finally put together something other than raw edged pieces of fabric to cover the front window. We've only lived here 3 years!!!
After much pacing back and forth in the decorator fabric section of Joann's we decided on this stylized floral. Pretty proud of the redneck, he was leaning heavily towards stripes and hates green so this was a big stretch for him.

I've been sewing, but not making real progress on anything that's worth a picture yet.

I finished playing around with the design for the brown & peach quilt in EQ6 and I realized I need more of the solid peach and a couple full yards of one brown for the setting triangles.....but I haven't been able to shop.

The weather in Denver has also been preventing much weekend sewing. If I could have anything I wanted with this house it would be a sewing room that wasn't in the basement. Spring is definitely doing it's best to make an early showing here and I don't want to miss it down in my cave. Nothing in the UFO pile can compete with the pull of the garden in Spring.

I'm also looking for a pattern that makes use of the Tri Recs rulers. I have an unopened set in my drawer that's been down there so long I don't even remember buying them. If you know a good one, let me know. Last year I learned how to use the Easy Angle and now I use it all the time, I can't imagine how it could have sat in a drawer for so long. Now the Tri Recs looks at me accusingly every time I reach in there for the other one.

Two for One

The weekend before last I had 3 days off and managed to get the Valentine Log Cabin top completed. Don hates it. The crooked lines really bother him, but he says I can still put it on our bed when it's quilted. I think he's hoping it will just vanish into the bins of unfinished things, but while I'm not 100% happy with it, I do love the pink & green combination and the way your eye just wanders on it. I had to take a picture draped over the bed because there wasn't anyone home tall enough to hold it.

This weekend was a shopping weekend. First, on Saturday we bought me a new desktop, my old one had a bad power supply and a chip set that would not upgrade to Vista. This is my first brand new PC ever, normally Don builds me something out of spare parts or buys a refurbished box and upgrades what I need. Pretty exciting.

More exciting was that there was budget for fabric this week. I finally got the black for the Lone Star corners and I also got a white for the back of the Valentine quilt. I think I have batting for both already. Then I needed something new to inspire me.

These peach & browns will be trees. I picked out the design already, but was having so much fun playing with them that I haven't cut yet.
This pile doesn't have a plan yet, but I just had to have the heart fabric and was amazed to find that stripe with the same weird yellow green. They really do match in person.

Friday night was another UFO sewing night at the quilt shop and I didn't really accomplish much. Since I was kind of in between projects with the finish on the Valentine top, I messed around with some baggies of things that I found in a bin and also with these heart blocks that are a simplified (fewer fabrics/smaller block) version of the heart pattern I saw here. I'm not super thrilled with the black edged ones. This picture is very tiny here, but you can click for a very large version. I need to re-load my photo editing software on this new PC as I could not figure out how to re-size them in Vista.

Before anything else, some more clean up of the sewing area needs to happen. The only flat surfaces available for picture taking this morning were my ironing board and my chair. Yikes!

Oops!

After messing & fiddling & un-stitching and re-stitching for what seemed like half my life, I finally got two rows of the Valentine blocks together.....only to find that I've sewn the E section on upside down. Doh!! On the plus side, all of the blocks are done even though I ran short of greens and had to leave off the last side of some of the blocks. The size difference is only 1 green strip, so 2" or so. This is making the putting together a little more creative than I'd expected, but it's working out since the blocks I shorted are all set between whole ones and I have plenty of burgundy left to use for filler.
I love the green & pink & burgundy combination and I already see big areas to play with new quilting ideas building themselves in the design. Since this quilt is going to stay here with me, I intend for it to be a machine quilting practice piece and don't expect than any two blocks will be quilted the same. So many good patterns & ideas for quilting float around out there, I need to expand beyond diamonds and stippling. Here's a shot of where I'm leaving it for tonight. Maybe there will be time to pull those 4 blocks out before work tomorrow.

We Interrupt Our Regularly Scheduled Programming...

...for a school project.

Next week is my Kindergartner's 100th day of school and he was tasked with finding 100 of the same item to count and bring to school. I was all for buying him two rolls of pennies at the bank and being done, but my sarcastic husband told him that I had "at least" 100 pieces of fabric downstairs and that's what he should take. And it stuck. So we picked 100 different pieces out of the scrap bin and I spent my Sunday morning making this for him.

Now back to the Valentine quilt and possibly some football or commercial watching.