A Prairie Home Quilts

Don’t we all have at least one of those? It starts out fun or interesting or whatever and ends up being s-u-c-h -a- c-h-o-r-e that we’d like to hide it in the deepest, darkest closet we can find until 10 years after our death! LOL Okay, so this wasn’t that bad. Let’s just say it was a quilt with issues and I was trying to machine quilt it.

My youngest daughter, Rachelle, made it for her friend. It’s large–110″ x 110″. On my frame, which is set up at 10 feet, I only have 104″ of sewing space. It was really too big for me to machine quilt. But Rachelle couldn’t really afford to pay someone else to machine quilt it, and it *has* been sitting around as a finished top for a long, long time–over a year. Sooo, even though I shouldn’t have, I told Rachelle that I’d finagle the thing and get it machine quilted on my frame one way or another. Afterall, she is my dear daughter–a person whom I love…

Okay, so I find myself basting with water soluble thread, sewing 18 partial rows, reattaching the top, sewing the rest of the partial rows, turning the top, sewing 9 more partial rows, reattaching the top, sewing the last of the 9 rows. Ugh! It was a bear. I think it’s been on the frame for over two weeks… I can’t remember any more. It’s all a haze. LOL I don’t think I’d worked on it in almost a week and I only had the last half of the last nine partial rows left to do. Finally, yesterday I decided I was going to persevere until it was done. Done! I finished it up last night.

Today when Rachelle called from Oregon (she’s visiting friends) and she asked about the quilt, I could say it was done. She’s happy; I’m happy. And I am definitely ready to move on to the next project!

Piecing: 7 days of 8 (No pieceing was accomplished yesterday, but I’m okay with that.)

After fixing dinner, I got on the computer and fixed the mess I created yesterday. (I realize, of course, that today you *cannot* see the mess that it was. LOL) I still haven’t gotten all the links and my “~Some Day~ Quilts” page finished up, but I’ve made good progress on this blog today. :)

As promised I’ve got pictures of three of the blocks I’ve completed for Mom’s wallhanging.

Basically, that’s the first row of three. The border fabric is shown here. It’s the green leafy one. I’m thinking of putting a yellow flange on my Mom’s also. I’m off to do some piecing!

Piecing: 6 days of 6

I managed to make it to the grocery store to get the bulk of the shopping done for this week. I made a detour to the LQS while I was out. I bought this: These are my fabrics for the small Broken Dishes Wallhanging I’m making to hang on the wall in the quilt studio. I also bought this: I needed more of the border material (on the left) to make the second small wallhanging for resale that will match the one I’m making for my Mom. The other fabric is the backing for hers. (The picture is a little grainy.) I’ll just use muslin as the backing on the one for resale.

I was just trying to figure out how to put up the html coding for the quilting webring and messed everything up! I guess I won’t be getting as much piecing done today as I thought. LOL Okay, back to work trying to fix this mess. Maybe a different theme. . .

Update later in the day: I’ve spent the day updating to the latest version of WordPress and trying to get widgets installed so I haven’t done a lot of piecing. I also haven’t gone grocery shopping nor to the LQS–have put that off until tomorrow. I changed the theme and hope to have widgets working soon so I can update the sidebar easier and add the code for the quilting webring among other things. When I reinstalled WordPress, of course, it deleted all the others links and pages I’d created earlier in the week. I’ll have to spend some time tomorrow fixing all that up again. [sigh]

I’m off to do some more piecing before I go to bed.

Piecing: 5 days of 5

I didn’t make it to the LQS on Saturday because of the power outage so I’m hoping to get there tomorrow when I go out to do the grocery shopping. Spent more time today working on Jessica’s quilt and Mom’s wallhanging.

I don’t know why this didn’t hit me when I was using EQ5 to design the blocks for Mom’s wallhanging, but I’m ending up with twice as many half-square triangles and four times as many quarter-square triangles as I need. I just went ahead and cut as many squares as the cutting diagram said. . . [sheepish grin] So I’m making a second wallhanging exactly like Mom’s for resale in the little antique and craft mall where Mom and I have space rented. The quilty things I put in there sell quickly. I’ll still have a bunch of extra quarter-square triangles to figure out what to do with later.

I have all 16 squares with the sashing done on Jessica’s quilt and 6 blocks done for the 2 wallhangings. I’ll take photos tomorrow and post them then.

Piecing: 4 days of 4

DS-T and I were *so* bummed! Because of all the trouble with the power outage yesterday, the Internet has been down and the cable has been off all day today. (If it were up to me, we’d have satellite. We never had as much trouble with reception with satellite as we do with cable. Ugh!) Anyway, I guess we’ll be looking for a copy of the first 4 episodes of season 6 of 24 on DVD so we can keep up with the season.

I did get some major work done on DD-J’s “Montana Hugs & Kisses” quilt and Mom’s wallhanging. I’ll try to get some pictures up in a day or two.

Piecing: 3 days of 3

Wouldn’t you know that when I’m finally ready to spend some more time piecing, the town gets hit with a power outage. LOL Not only that, but it’s been abnormally chilly here! I *did* get some time at the sewing machine. I finished up another block for my Mom’s wallhanging. I spent most of the day sitting under a quilt browsing old quilt magazines trying to keep warm!

Piecing: 2 days of 2