What I am Working On

This is my challenge piece, both for my guild's retreat (leaving on Sunday) and for my October goal for A Lovely Year of Finishes.  I'm about 3/4 finished with the quilting.  The color on the pictures is weird and I'm not sure why - it really is white (third picture shows the true color) but I thought I'd give you a peek of the quilting.

 

With so much negative space, I've been having fun playing with lots of designs.  I did choose a different design for each of the color blocks but kept the design the same in the pinwheels.  Of course, it is always fun to try out designs and styles I have never tried before...like smaller feathers with lots of echoing on them.  Definitely will be a heavily quilted quilt!

Edit:  I am joining Jo and her Pre-Mystery UFO Challenge over at Jo's Country Junction

Holiday Gifts to Make

My friend Jenny from Australia is getting other bloggers to join her in sharing ideas of gifts we can make!  I am always up for making gifts rather than just buying them.  If you are interested in getting some great ideas, come on over and follow Jenny at http://www.elefantz.com and get some new-to-you (or is that me?) ideas from people just like us who want to give a gift from the heart!

My tutorial for this is found here.

A Lovely Year of Finishes - October Goal

This is a challenge quilt!  Last year at the quilting retreat for my guild (read about retreat here) we played a strip game - we didn't strip, we rolled dice to exchange strips with the ladies at our table!  One of the quilters had a great idea to challenge us to create a completed quilt using only the strips we won in the game by retreat this year...which starts on November 1!!  I was lucky that I had been collecting all the white strips during the game (thank you, table mates!) so creating a quilt with only the strips collected during the game was not too difficult.  Now to quilt it with some really cool modern quilting in the negative space!!!  No pattern, just winged it!!

I am linking up Sew BitterSweet Designs again this month!  If you are like me and have a hard time getting projects finished or you need a little extra incentive to get going/finishing a project and would like to have the opportunity to win some prizes, join up with us!  No one nags you, just a lovely carrot of getting projects done AND the possibility of winning a prize...and maybe a little extra blog traffic!!!  A win all the way around!!!  So come and join us in the fun!!!!!

September Finish for A Lovely Year of Finishes

Doing the happy dance here...I met my goal for September!!  This is a "Treasure" quilt challenge for my longarm guild - Inland Northwest Machine Quilters.  We paid $50 to be in this challenge and two ladies went to garage sales, estate sales, and thrift shops to find quilt tops.  All the tops were put in paper bags and numbered...then the fun began!  They pulled names out of a basket and we got to come up and take an envelope that contained the number of the bag containing our "treasure".  Some were in better shape then others and no two were alike!  Mine is a single Irish chain probably hand pieced back in the 60s.  So many of the seams were coming apart that I ended up taking the whole quilt apart and putting it back together.  I did change the layout of the colors a little, just because I wanted to.  I quilted in using traditional patterns that the quilter who started it might have used. 

Original quilt

I really didn't like the random placement of the lavenders.

This is an example of the holes and the 1/16th to 1/8th inch seam allowance

I knew that no matter how much hand sewing I did to repair the holes, the quilt just would not have stood up to being washed and being such a light colored quilt it needs to be able to be washed frequently!!

Now I have a quilt that I really like!!

With feathers in the border and a heart wreath in the centers of the "white" areas, along with some continuous curves in the colored squares, it has great texture and I'm loving it!  I chose the hearts to represent the piece of our heart that quilters put into every quilt they make.

I am linking up with the finish party at Sew BitterSweet Designs.

A Break from Quilting

I won this totally cool wood burning tool set from Cindy at DIY Beautify and it came with this beautiful cutting board!  So I just had to try it out!!!  My step-son is getting married in October and there just happens to be a wedding shower for the beautiful bride tomorrow...so I had to try out the wood burning on the cutting board as a gift for them.  She just happens to love to cook and bake, so giving her gifts is easy.

The wood burning set came with the alphabet so the letters weren't too hard - just hard to figure out how hot the tip was and how long I needed to leave it on the board.  I am definitely better at quilting then wood burning, but this isn't too awful for a first try.  I hope they will use it often during their long and happy marriage!

Thank you so much, Cindy - I love the wood burning set!!!

A Lovely Year of Finishes - September 2015 Goal

I am joining with Sew BitterSweet Designs again this month and declaring my goal of getting this lovely Irish chain quilted and bound!!

So, do I quilt it with white thread or be bold and use pink thread in the white areas???

A Lovely Year of Finishes - August 2015

Whew, I made it!  I am linking up with Sew BitterSweet Designs declaring my finish for August.  I really didn't realize how many little pieces were in this quilt until I took it apart and put it back together!!  The small squares started out at 2", but after I sewed them into 4Ps, it was obvious that I was going to have to trim them - so much fraying had eaten away at the edges that there was no way that I could sew them together and have them be any uniform size, so there were all trimmed down to 3 1/4"...and that meant that all the larger squares had to come down in size as well.  It took me about 6 hours to just trim all the blocks!  But I finished getting it all put back together and now have a quilt that measures 60" square.  It used to be 69" square...amazing what having a 1/4 seam allowance and some trimming down will do for a quilt!

It will make a lovely baby quilt...but one that has to be used a bit more gently since the fabrics are quite thin and may not withstand weekly washings!