(not so) Big Quilting Weekend

This was supposed to be a big quilting weekend. I have a quilt on the frame that needs to be quilted before I can continue piecing on two baby quilts for October. It's after lunch on Sunday and my sewing machine hasn't even been turned on yet. I'm carefully ignoring...not printing & trying very hard to not even look at Quiltville's new Labor Day Weekend mystery because I'm not done with my Orange Crush and I fully intended to have it quilted by today so I could bind it during NASCAR tonight. I might still get there, but no one here is holding their breath.
My Orange Crush bears only a faint resemblance to Bonnie's pattern, but that's not her fault. It did start out as the mystery and I tried hard to embrace the busy, scrappy design and my orange fabric, but I couldn't do it. I ended up using the star blocks in this large sofa sized quilt. I added sashing & scrappy cornerstones and used up my spare 4 patch blocks in the border.

Things I learned from this quilt:

1. I hate orange, or maybe I just chose unwisely and hate MY orange. Either way, there is no orange in this Orange Crush derivative.


2. Scrappy is neat and not exclusive to sampler quilts which is the only place I've used it before. There is fabric in this quilt from my 3rd quilt, and I cut into pieces that I've been "saving" for 15 years that wouldn't have gone with anything else and it felt good to use them instead of flipping past them in the bin.


3. I learned to use my Easy Angle ruler...still in it's original packaging from who knows when. And I used it again on a baby quilt that's in progress, so not only did I learn how to use it, I successfully applied that to blocks that didn't say "use the Easy Angle here" in the directions.

What about the other half of the Orange Crush blocks?
Well, I did make 3 of them exactly as instructed. Yuck. My orange was WAY too orange and I'm not fond of the Album block pattern. It felt kind of clunky after piecing all the smaller scrappy parts and oh my eyes! That orange was way too much for my other colors in that big of a piece.

I haven't pieced them yet, but I think these other blocks are headed toward a Churn Dash/Shoe Fly arrangement with the big triangle turned in instead of out, possibly with a red center (since they are already cut) and maybe a sashing with red cornerstone to tie that together.

Thanks go to Bonnie Hunter at Quiltville.com for the inspirational design. Mystery quilts and scrap quilts probably won't become a regular thing for me, but I didn't fall over dead because everything didn't match perfectly or because I didn't know what the final product would look like.

The First Day of School

The first day of school was actually Monday, but Kindergarten didn't start until today. I like to embarrass my older son by walking him to his door and taking his picture on the first day. This clearly labels him a geek and then none of the bad kids will want to hang out with him. Are there bad kids in 5th grade these days? We had one when I was in elementary school, always sitting out recess in detention from Mr. Decker.
This one wouldn't let me in the door with him. He kept asking me if I was going to work yet. No, little boy, I didn't go to work. I went to Starbucks and sniffled in my mocha and then I got tires on my car because we have 2 insane road trips this fall/winter and I'll be right here at home waiting for you to walk home from your first day of school.

They are supposed to walk home together. I hope Zack remembers to pick up his brother. I wrote a C on his hand with permanent marker this morning to help him remember and told both teachers about 46 times each how this is supposed to work. Is it 2:30 yet?

Let Me Introduce Myself

My name is Jill and I live in Aurora, Colorado with my husband, two sons and a dog. I've been quilting off and on for 15 years, mostly self and book taught. I'm currently learning to machine quilt on a frame.

Earlier this year I pulled a wet bar out of my basement and replaced it with an area to store my quilting and craft stuff. This left room for a new Grace quilting frame at the other end of my half of the basement. Construction & organization is not quite complete in the pictures, but it looks about the same now...only messier.

No, I have no idea why the builder put a fireplace in the basement.

I also upgraded to a shiny new sewing machine. I love my new Juki 98% of the time...that other 2% being the trek from basement to car & car to shop for classes as it weighs in at about 30 pounds.

You can see the the now mostly retired "Little Brother" in the background.

I'll leave you with a full picture of the quilt I Photoshopped into my header. This was based on a pattern that I have since lost, so I can't give credit. It's hard to tell from the photo, but it's intentionally narrower at the bottom as it was designed to fit into the bow of a sail boat. The cabanas and the palm trees are my favorite parts.

Take 1

When I recently turned to the internet for tools and ideas to expand my quilting, I discovered (like Columbus...discovering a continent that thousands of people already knew about) an incredible resource in the blogs of other quilters and then I discovered that I might have something to say too. Let's see how this goes.