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Saturday, March 27, 2010

What I've Been Up To





Late week, I was at a quilt show at Bullock Hall in Roswell. My favorite area of the mansion was the attic.

Sweetie and I have made several trips the past week to Lowe's and Home Depot for building supplies for the game room.

The Apple Country Guild is working on a raffle quilt. Thirteen of us meet at the Mountain Town Fire Station, where I had my first experience in setting up a quilt frame, loading a quilt on a frame, and hand quilting sideways. Normally, I don't use a frame at all and I quilt towards myself (like The Thimble Lady does). We meet there again next week for another sew-in (longer than normal quild meetings).

Our community handcraft group meet again, but I didn't make it into town to buy needles and yarn to try my hand at knitting. I will do that before the next meeting. It was so nice outside on the day we met, we sat outside and crafted.




After I had finished the table topper/giant placemat, I couldn't decide for a while what to use for a backing. When my scrap order arrived, I decided to piece the back. Now I have to decide if I will quilt each piece separately and bind, or quilt once and bind.

I think I need an even bigger design wall!

Thursday, March 18, 2010

Sad Times In Quilt City

We have all been very sad here since Tuesday. Sweetie had to have his dog Newt put down because the pain from her arthritis just got to be too much for her. Sweetie would breakdown the first two days at the least little remembrance of her and Reggie seems bewildered by her absence. Newt has gone swimming in that big pond in the sky.



Update on wonky charm square project:



After taking a couple of sections apart and cutting some charm squares, its ready to be made into a quilt sandwich. Yesterday, I started brushing up on free motion quilting. I cut up an old sheet and used that fusible batting that I didn't like to make a sandwich. Now, I really don't like the fusible batting, it make such a stiff sandwich.

A while back I bought a stencil for meandering to use to try and get muscle memory for meandering and finally got my chalk pouncer thing to work right. I will have to say it lets you do very evenly spaced meandering. I made the practice sandwich big enough to make into a bed cover for Reggie.

Saturday, March 13, 2010

Wonky Die Cut? Charm Squares





These are from a couple of purchased(I assume die cut) charm square packs that I had purchased some time ago from a well known on-line fabric company. They were purchased when I was really new to quilting and where actually my first on-line fabric buy. IMHO, they were over priced, of questionable quality (very ravelly) and poorly cut. With rare exception, I would not have been interested in buying yardage of the charms in the packs and set them aside to use as practice stash stuff.

I was inspired to make a table runner after I received an email from Fat Quarter Shop (didn't buy Charms from them) with a red, white, and blue runner pictured. So I took out my charms and played around with them on the design wall and started sewing sub sections together. Some of them just didn't lay right. I checked my seam allowances, took some apart and re-sewed...but still off. Then I decided to check some of the left over charms and discovered the wonkiness. The two charms shown came out of the worst 4 pc subset.

Since there was a limited amount of reds in the charm packs, I've dipped in to my limited stash of red. For varieties sake, I have to break into a flag kit for some more reds. All the usable lights are sewn, so I'll have to work with my extremely limited light blue and white stash. I hate the thought of cutting into that beautiful sky fabric. Maybe it's really due to the fact that I really don't enjoy cutting fabric!!!!! Maybe I don't enjoy it because I have accuracy issues and tend to cut too small!!!

OK, I'm off to help Sweetie put insulation in the game room walls.

Friday, March 5, 2010

Ooopps Here's The Picture



What the heck...

New On The Design Wall

The top two blocks are my first experiment with QAYG strips and I really like it. I may try a larger block, say 12.5 or 16.5 inches to do a king size. As much as I love bright colors, I'll probably use reds, greens, browns, and blue in a controlled scrap design.



The bottom two blocks are an experiment with QAYG and a block from Oh,Fransson! To be honest the block on the left didn't start out as wonky, it just ended up that way. It was so darn cute that I had to make one trying to be wonky. Being wonky requires you to pay more attention to your strip size to accomodate your wonkiness. Also, the back of the first block wasn't so cute, so for the second block I sewed the strips to the batting and will attach the backing with some ditch stitches.

Another note, I used some fusable polyester batting that I had picked up some time ago and I'm not a big fan of it!

Tuesday, March 2, 2010

Winter Wonderland Again



Sure glad I don't have to go out in this, but it sure is beautiful

Of course, Quilt Guild is cancelled again. Whenever Gilmer County schools are cancelled, so is guild.



Snow Clumps! You'll have to click on the picture to get the full effect.

Think I'll do some more sewing, made a couple of really cute scrap QAYG squares yesterday afternoon. I'll take some pictures when I have better light.