Category — Quilts 2007

Just how mischievous can one cat be? Well… Mom had seeds for some Bird of Paradise and Red-tipped Yuccas that she was planting in rows along the fences. Ludo was apparently digging them up as fast as she could plant them which then encouraged the birds to try and make off with the seeds. (Maybe it was his plan all along to entice the birds… LOL) After all that mischief, he decided to nap in the pot of freshly planted day lilies.

After Rachelle snapped the third picture of him, he’d had enough of his sleep being disturbed…

He doesn’t look very happy with Rachelle, does he? LOL

After several attempts, I managed to get a picture of Josh’s quilt. I was having a difficult time getting a picture where the quilt looked straight. I had Tyler and Rachelle hold the corners and Tyler’s about a foot taller than Rachelle so the quilt kept looking a little lopsided. I should have checked this picture closer before I packed up the quilt and mailed it. For some reason the top right corner is fuzzy. Maybe the lens needs to be cleaned…

and the detail shot…

I like the method Evelyn Sloppy gives for making flying geese for this quilt, but I’m not happy with the way too many of the flying geese points got clipped. I’m assuming it has to do with the ruler I used to square up the flying geese. Here’s a tutorial showing how the flying geese were made and I used the ruler like the one pictured in the tutorial. I have Eleanor Burns small flying geese ruler and have used it successfully to make flying geese without the corners getting clipped but it was too small for these units. I think if I’d had her bigger ruler and used it to square up these units, they would have come out okay. That’s my plan for next time. Live and learn everyday, right?

In a week oldest DS, Nathan, and his girlfriend, Koren, will be here for a visit and in ten days oldest DD, Jessica,will be home from Montana. This happy momma hen will have all her little chicks at home for a short time.

It’s been a while since I’ve posted because I’ve been having trouble with our ISP. So instead of wrestling with “server timed-out” messages and having to hit the “refresh” button multiple times, I’ve just been quilting. Yesterday, mom finished sewing the binding down on her quilt for me… I’m not sure if she volunteered because I’ve got a stack of them to do or she just wanted to be sure to get her (overdue) birthday present some time this year. I need to sew down the binding on the one just like it for resale.

I ended up doing an E2E allover loose feather design. The flange was not a good mix with an edge-to-edge design as it kept getting caught up in the presser foot and folded over the wrong way in spots. I ended up having to fix nine such spots. [sigh]

I finished up a baby quilt that the director of our local crisis pregnancy center asked me to quilt for a woman who decided to keep her baby after coming into the center. (Both my daughters volunteer there.) It’s nothing special, just two pieces of fabric sandwiched together–otherwise I’d post a picture. I quilted it allover with little hearts and hands. I’m still working on Josh’s quilt. I have all the log cabin squares finished and am working on the flying geese units. I bought the border material and backing today. Tomorrow I’m going to concentrate on getting Josh’s quilt done so I can get that sent to him.

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 soluable 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 perservere 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.)