A Prairie Home Quilts

I think Northcott should just send me a big ole box of Stonehenge fabrics so I can make up the 5 or 6 projects I have planned in this fabric.

[A girl can dream, right?]

I was too lazy to finish the vines and leaves on the other three blocks for this next one so you’ll have to dream that they’re there…

The color scheme is a little wild on this last one but I like it. Imagine, once again, vines & leaves in the borders of this one.

EDITED Later in the day…  I had the wrong sunflower blocks in the border and I added the stems so I uploaded a new image.  Imagine the leaves are larger because I would make them larger.  The colors remind me of Fiestaware.

My fabric is stored 100 miles away…  I’m still playing in EQ.

For months now I haven’t been able to play with fabric as it’s all packed up because the house is on the market, and I haven’t been able to blog because I couldn’t get into the admin panel. Soooo, I’ve been playing with EQ to keep from slowing going insane…

So, where have you been, I hear you all asking?  [Imagining to myself there’s at least one someone out there still listening after all this time… ] Welp, doing some house sitting, of course, and on a spiritual journey of sorts.  Yes, again.  Involving dragons again, too.  But, you know, I came away with a deeper understanding of the Hymn of the Soul and the meaning of the pearl.  Oh and the great Hydra was involved.  It was worth every minute of the journey.  Hehehe.  I will spare you the details of my spiritual epiphanies, though.  Really.  I’m sure you are more interested in the quilting I’ve been doing.  Wait, how could I forget?  There was a magical wedding and children visiting from far away lands happening in the middle of all this, too!

And I should probably fess up that I’ve been doing some writing also.  November is National Novel Writing Month, did you know that?  According to the Office of Light and Letters it is.  [Love their slogan:  We believe in ambitious acts of the imagination.]  The challenge is to write 50K words in 30 days.  I spent part of October preparing to write and I’ve written every day in November [obviously nothing for the blog!].  I’m at just under 39K as of this morning and hoping to hit 40K by tonight.  No one but me will ever read the thing, but it’s been another fun part of the journey to slay the great Hydra and let my imagination soar.

Okay, okay, on with the quilting…

I’ve been working on my .75″ hexagon project, Field of Flowers.  It was stalled.  I didn’t have all the flowers prepped.  I decided to go ahead and do that with Inklingo.  I can’t remember now how many flowers I needed but I printed and cut enough sets of flowers and centers to have 512 flowers when they’re all stitched. [I need 502.]  Then I went ahead and printed the corners and edges in the green fabric I’d purchased eons ago.

I started this project working from the middle out and then decided it would be so much easier to start from a corner as I was always getting the middle portion twisted around.  I have more than half the flowers done.  I feel like I’m making a huge dent in this project.

New starting point — bottom, left corner

Some finished flowers.

The box with the remaining flower sets.

And more of the wedding, just because…

Oldest daughter, Jessica with groom’s younger brother

Youngest daughter, Rachelle with groom’s older brother

Michelle and Jared McCarty

Daughters again…

Oldest son, Nathan and his lovely wife, Koren.

Apparently not a lot has changed in my life in a year’s time.  One year ago I was house sitting and finishing this top…

Scrappy 9 Patch – 11 August 2009

Today I’m house sitting and finished this top…

Plaid 9 Patch

I like the plaid one more.

A Tale of Love…

One hundred Dresden Plates. It started with one and then I added ninety-nine more.  Because I couldn’t resist. A quilt top and five sets of placemats in progress.

Is it possible that the Floral Winding Ways quilt top snuck off with the Plaid Streak of Lightning quilt top when my back was turned and reproduced?  How else could 2 projects become 7? It defies logic and probably most known laws of the universe.  At least this is the way it happens at my house…

I’m asked to teach a class at the LQS.  I decide to kill two birds with one stone (probably should have left the bird killing out of the equation) and make a class sample that I can give to my mom as a birthday present.  I decide to use floral fabrics.  Florals are nice but not really my thing so I have to buy fabric.  I create this…

Then I have leftover floral scraps to deal with.

I think back to this project and I remember the boo boo I made with the setting triangles for this Plaid Streak of Lightning and think, “Hmm, these floral scraps would look good with the brown setting triangles I cut wrong.  Perhaps with a nice antique-y pink tone-on-tone for the other half of the HST blocks.” Since I have to buy that pink tone-on-tone, I add a few (cough) more floral fabrics to the cart.  [Side note:  If you followed the link to the post about the boo boo, did you notice that I mention that the Plaid Streak of Lightning also morphed into Bold Streak? Yeah.  Projects. Multiplying.  Exponentially.]

The lovely floral scraps and the antique-y pink tone-on-tone became these.   Oh, how hard I have fallen for these floral HST blocks!  I thought I was in love with the Plaid Streak of Lightning. Oh, no.  That was just a passing fancy. It’s a good thing I cut enough floral HST for 2 quilt tops.  Yet I still have enough floral fabric to get a head start on another project. Hmm.

I dream up this in EQ7…

Sixty pretty floral Dresden plates swirling across a 5-step gradient gray background. Lovely. Sixty different floral fabrics ought to be enough variation, right?  Let’s go with 80 just to be sure.  I can always use the extra petals in another project…  Oh, and the scraps! Enough to make at least 2 more Floral Streak of Lightning quilt tops, I’m sure.

I’m not even going to bother explaining what happened with the plaids.  All I did was buy a few plaid shirts at the thrift store.  Really.  It’s worse than the floral fabrics.  I need an intervention.