My Quilt Shop Sound System

This is my compact little sound system that I use to play all those audio books that I have been listening too while I keep my nose to grind stone to get the shower gifts done. Superman and binding clips work wonders to keep cords under control.

I have several more audio books to post about...just finished one today and have another ready to download tomorrow.

All three quilts are quilted and I will start to work on the binding tomorrow. I have to play around with the width of the binding (flanged) because the widths given in the tutorial that I had pinned was just too wide. I'm going to start by cutting each piece by a quarter of an inch and of course sew it to one of the mini practice pieces.

As I said, I finished the quilting on the one that I frogged on the way across Alabama going to Texas. It turned out that I over estimated how much I had pick out, but that was OK because I needed something to do during the drive across eastern Louisiana, coastal Mississippi, and southwestern Alabama. Honestly, there isn't any reason to look out the window...my apologies if I have offended any quilters from the above mentioned states...but it's the truth.

Frogging Across Alabama

This week I was quilting on this and not without some difficulties. Yesterday I finally took care of some of the issues I was having...mainly by skipping the upper tensioner and finished quilting this.

Needless to say, I wasn't happy with half of the quilting...Ssooo...as we travelled across Alabama I ripped out the offensive  quilting.

It's almost all out but I've had enough for one day and we will have about five hours of driving tomorrow .

Long Hours In The Quilt Shop

I've been spending long hours down in my quilt shop FM quilting gifts for my daughter's daughter. Spending enough time each day to almost finish a book each day!

 

 

The scene is the 2012 Olympics in London with a whack job causing mayhem. I do enjoy it when they have multiple readers.

 

 

Again multiple readers were used for this book who's characters included teenagers both male and female as well as adults of both genders. Set at an exclusive boarding school in Rhode Island.



This book is part of a series (book 2) and I have a hold in for book 3. The locale has changed with each book and has a very good reader.

I almost finished another book again today...to busy to take pictures.  I spent some time on the phone today with Sew and Vac Direct because of some thread shredding issues that I was having. They are so nice and helpful...was on with Steve today...so nice and patient.

Start Of A Baby Quilt

This is the very beginning of a quilt for my granddaughter that will be born in May. It was photographed under florescent lighting and it turned the deep purple rather blueish. Awards for photograph are not in my future.

I wasn't sure about the layout...I tried some of the different zigzag layouts that I've seen on line. They were just to busy for my taste so I went back to this layout. I'll post a picture of one layout tomorrow. In hind site, I wish I had used 4 1/2" HSTs instead of 3 1/2" ones.

The pressure is on...we've scheduled a road trip to Texas and we're leaving next Thursday. We'll be gone about a week and will be visiting just east of San Antonio. I'm so excited about seeing the river walk!!!!

Fortunately, I have more accomplished than the photos indicate...the quilt top is together, so is the changing mat, and this morning I finished a smaller (24 x 30) quilt in the fabric family. It will be good while the baby is still tiny and will make a great doll quilt for her. There are enough scraps left to do a runner for a dresser, but that will have to come later.

Quilting will begin tomorrow.

Meet My New Oakey Doakey Quilting Buddy

Meet Oakey...the people that surrendered her called her Oakley, but she responds to Oakey. She is only 6 but looks a little older due to the natural white speckling on her face and paws. Oakey is a Lab/Pit/Hound? mix that ended up on the losing side of a bitter divorce. The husband brought her and a male Black Lab into a shelter, chained in the back of a pickup. When the truck stopped Oakey jumped out and nearly choked to death on the chain. Fortunately an Animal Control Officer saw it happen, saved Oakey and slapped the former owner with an animal cruelty fine. The Black Lab was so aggressive that it was put down. Oakey won the hearts of the people at the shelter and they contacted The Atlanta Dog Squad and was put in foster care. We went down to Alpharetta a couple of weeks ago to meet her and decided to bring her home that day.

Oakey loves her beds and will snooze for hours with me down in the shop. She's an Oakey Doakey Dog!

Please excuse the poor iPhone photo taken her first night home.

Audio Books and Quilty Baby Gifts

This is my first book by this author and one of my favorite readers. The book was OK...just enough to finish it. I kept saying to myself "how could someone so smart be so stupid" and talk about shallow. I'm happy to report that it was not autobiographical...the author made a point of pointing that out at the end of the book.

 

You can't go wrong with a Michael Connelly book...even if the reader is gravel voiced.

My daughter is having her first child and I'm spending a lot of time in the quilt shop making quilty items for her shower. The shower was pulled up much earlier that I had been planning on, so now the push is on. This will be a changing mat and I had to take a strip of the blue out of a pineapple block to be able to do one more of these blocks. The down side of being a scrap quilter.

 

This was not done with the Twister template but from a method posted about on betukbanki.wordpress.com. Unfortunately, if can find the post on her blog to publish a link. This method doesn't waste a lot of fabric like the Twister method does.