The WEEK END!!!! YEA!!

Well I was off on Friday and I wanted to get some sewing done, but with the hundred and one other things that were on the agenda I didn't get a lot of sewing completed.  What I did get done was some work on my block of the month that has been kind of laying around waiting for me to complete the blocks.  Well it is almost the end of the year and the last of the blocks so I figured I better get busy.  The fact of the matter is, I have more than one BOM that I have started and completed 2 or 3 of the blocks and while I continued to go and pick up the patterns and I picked up sashing and borders and binding and even backing and they are all waiting for me to retire and get busy!  Now I have to say that I did complete one of my BOM that was from several years ago when I was traveling to Knoxville every month and doing a lot of quilting up there.  I did finish that quilt and my DIL has that one on her bed at home.  It was Thimbleberries and was a wonderful quilt.  I have to say that some of the blocks I really didn't like the fabric so I sort of substituted some of the fabric and some of the blocks just did not do anything for me so I sort of did my own thing a time or two.  There were also a couple of blocks that I didn't sew exactly like they said because I made mistakes but they were very interesting so I just went ahead and put the stuff I wanted in the quilt and I'm not alone in thinking it was a good quilt.  The problem is.........that is the only BOM I have ever completed.  I guess you could say I'm a starter but not necessarily a finisher.  Oh well, that's me!  But I am determined that this quilt will be finished!  So on to the blocks.

I've completed 6 of the blocks.  It seems I have misplaced one of my patterns so I will have to check with my bud, Peggy, to see if she still has her copy of that particular block.  Then I will pick up the November and December blocks and will be ready to go to finish the quilt.  I think I will go ahead and try to do some of the putting the blocks together since I do have the finishing pattern so I will have that done also.  The more I get done the more likely I am to be able to just pick it up one weekend and finish it.  I love it when I can go through and pick up several different items and sew them together and put the borders on and just finish several quickly.  Do you like to do that also?

How funny that these two pictures go together and almost look like one picture.  This is four of the blocks.  The peach with gray stripe is not part of the quilt blocks just in case you were wondering.  Each block is pinned to it's patter and the plastic bag the pattern and fabric was packaged in.

 

 

Okay here are the other two blocks I have completed. 

 

 

I am really very happy with the way the blocks are turning out.  Maybe this is something else that will inspire me to finish this BOM. 

 

I have been saving up things for several years and saying this is for when I retire.  Well now that I am almost to retirement I keep digging through my things and finding things that I actually forgot that I even had!  I found another BOM that came totally packaged and I really don't remember if I got it in Knoxville or if I got it from the Gypsy Quilter when she came to visit and teach at our guild.  She stayed here at my house and we talked quiting 24-7!  It was so much fun.  Poor Kenneth got to cook for her the entire time because we were so busy doing things that I just didn't even have time to cook! lol.  My friends that would come by the house and I benefited greatly from her staying here because she was a wealth of information!

 

At any rate I have either 3 or 4 or 5 more BOM that I can think of right now that have not been sarted or not been completed.  One of my quilt shop owner friends used to get all the stuff together for the entire BOM for me and just let me buy everything at one time and that was wonderful so that is one of the reasons I have so many.  I think it would be awesome for quilt shop owners to make up a few kits to have for sale as a whole and people not need to come every month for their block and sales pitch.  They could increase the price accordingly and I bet they would have a lot of people that would want to do those things.  One shop owner in Missouri let me take pictures of the BOM they were working on that was in 30's fabric so I could have the pattern since she had not completed the entire pattern when I was there.  She did not purchase a BOM by the manufacturer, but made up her own and wrote her own patterns.  It was a wonderful shop!  Gosh I miss that one!

 

I have also been over to FrogPond to see what Sandi is working on and I'm jealous.  I want to do a quilt like her's.  And I love Quiltworks and their site on FaceBook.   There are so many things I just keep putting pictures in and printing off patterns.  I told Kenneth today that I needed to pick up a couple of binders to put stuff in so I don't lose it or let it get messed up!  I really don't think I will ever run out of projects.

 

Well this is a short post but this is what I have been working on as well as working some more on the T-shirt quilt that I don't have the borders on yet.  I hope to do that this weekend also and I have the blocks from the guild that need to be put together and the tops for the Quilts for Kids that I need to quilt and get the binding sewed on before the next guild meeting which will be next week!  "Yikes, time flies when you're having fun!"  I hope you all have a lovely week of quilting.  Let me see what you are working on this week!

It's catch up time!

Well the last time I posted I was telling you all about a beautiful quilt that I had quilted for my friend Pat.  Well here are the pictures I promised!

 

This is a picture of the quilt after I had quilted it.  Beautiful and when I saw it I thought that must be a Fonz and Porter pattern.  So I just had to ask and believe it or not I was right.  Here are some of the pictures of individual blocks also.

 

I love this star block.  Really simple but so awesome looking!

 

Pat did a great job on this Eagle block.

The colors of the fabric is one of the things that makes this quilt so very beautiful.

Great job Pat!

Now this is a small item and I didn't ask if she was going to use this for a pillow top or what exactly she had planned.  Maybe a small table topper? 

In addition to working on Pat's quilt last week I spent a lot of time working on this memory quilt for Savannah.  These shirts belonged to her Dad who was a avid hunter and fisherman.  Some of the shirts were so worn they had holes in them and I had to put a piece of fabric behind the print and then put the non-woven interfacing on that.  This picture shows the pieces of the shirts just cut out and laid out on the bed to see how the pattern was working.  Actually took me and Peggy the better part of a morning just to cut the logos from the shirts.

This patch is from a gimme cap and I just cut out the Logo and then I zigzag it down on the top of the quilt top before quilting.

This is one of the cap patchs after being sewn down to the top of the quilt.  The stripp8ng between the blocks, in case you were wondering is some of his cotton shirts that she brought.

 

 

So this is part of my catching up and showing you some pictures of a couple of the things I have been working on.  I hope you all enjoy the pictures!  Have a great quilty day!

Just a little heads up

I'm sure that all of my quilting friends that are following my blog know that not everything you find on the internet is accurate.  I was on facebook and found a site Beautiful Quilt Fabric and I thought it was a decent site and then today I was looking at some of their stuff and there is a tutorial on that page that gives directions for making a square in a square block.  Looks really fine on the surface, but the blocks were 8" blocks and she cut the corner squares 4 inches instead of 4 3/8" which means that at each side there is no 1/4" seam allowance.    Therefore all the points are cut off of her blocks when they are sewn together.  When you really look at the picture of the quilt then you can see that the points are gone, but anyone who didn't really look would likely wind up cutting all their fabric and then they would have a mess or else they would have to go back and recut all the 8" blocks which would be a pain.  So a word of advice here, if you decide to do a quilt from an online tutorial, please be sure to do a mock block with some scrap fabric before you go out and buy all of your fabric and cut it all up. 

I have also tried doing some of the online mystery quilts and found that the directions were wrong and I found that out over half way through the project and then the author goes back and says, oh by the way there was a miss print and it should have been but the blocks at 2 1/2" not 2".  Darn I hate when stuff like that happens!  There is no way that I know of to keep this from happening.

Sad to say I have even bought books and when I started making one of the quilts found an error.  Now here is the bad part...............Maybe I did not buy the book locally but bought it when I was out of town somewhere.  Maybe I purchased it at Hobby Lobby or online from Amazon.  When I send an e-mail to the author (and I have) with the correction I have received an email back from the author saying they have already been advised of that and they sent out a correction for shops to put with their books that have not yet been sold.  Well guess what, I didn't get it and nobody keeps a record of who bought which book so even when the shop gets the corrections how many people who purchased the book really get the message?  My guess is not many.  One thing that you can do when you purchase a book is to look up the author online and look at the book and see if there is any notation that there are corrections for misprints.  Most of them will have a contact and you can even send an email to ask them if there are any corrections before you start the quilt.  You can even ask them if there are different directions for different sizes of that quilt as many books will only give you one size and not tell you how much extra fabric you need for a larger size quilt.

Well, now I will try to get off my soapbox and just let you know that I have been on vacation this past week and I have been busy as a bee trying to get some things done.  One of the things I have completed this week is a quilt for my friend Pat.  This gal is an awesome topper!!  She is so very precise with her sewing that her quilts are a true joy to quilt.  Don't have to worry about wonkie corner and borders at all!  When I looked at the quilt I thought, hum that looks like a Fons and Porter design and after I had finished I asked her about the pattern and believe it or not I was right!  That doesn't happen all that often really so it made me feel really good.  I'm not going to post the pictures of Pat's quilt today because I know she wants to bring it to guild and have a show and tell presentation so I will not step ahead of her.

Also this week I have been working on a quilt for the guild to donate to the local crisis shelter.  I've got the top together now and just have to get it on the machine and get it quilted.  Got to figure out what I need to do about backing first and I already have the batting so that should work well.

I'm also working on a t-shirt quilt for Savannah.  This is a memory quilt made from her dad's t-shirts and other shirts.  I will post pictures of that quilt also next week and maybe next week will just be all pictures.  I'm sure you would all like that! 

If you get a chance go by frogpond studio and look at Sandi's quilts.  Another of my friends who does so really awesome quilting.  She has a wonderful eye for color and does a great job with piecing her tops.  Of course Sandi was a teacher so the math does not throw her for a loop!  I love visiting other peoples sites as they give me some wonderful ideals.  Like I need something else to do. lol.

I hope you all have a wonderful quilty week!  Keep safe, warm and dry!!

Circles Yeah!

Well I finished the top today!  Big sigh of relief.  I know I am getting old because I forget so many things.  I think "I've forgot more, than I'll ever know."  I know that I have a creative mind because I am forever thinking, "oh, I can do this, or this, or this"  and the more I look at something the more ideals I will come up with about things to change and make it better or different.  I love it when I'm on a role.

Well recently a friend of mine had a new baby and I wanted to make something for the baby.  Hum, so here I go on the internet looking for something that would be quick and easy.  I'm not in real close touch with her and I just found out two weeks before that she was expecting and then wham the baby was here.  I was still thinking about colors and patterns for a quilt and the baby was born!  Well that sort of moved it up on the old time table so I was hunting quick and easy.

Let me tell you if you have never visited Missouri Star Quilter Company you have been missing out.  They have wonderful tutorials that are so easy to follow.  I love listening to Jenny as she explains the easy way to do things!  I've already made more than one quilt from that site and they are always exactly what she bills them to be!  Well Jenny has a tutorial for a self binding receiving blanket that is so awesome.  Just 2 pieces of fabric, one 30" square and the other 40" square and you just sew them together and fold and sew the mitered corners, turn and then use a decorative stitch to sew the border/binding down and you are finished.  These are made with flannel fabric and they are soft and cuddlesome!  Easy to wash too for the new mom.  I went to the fabric store and picked up the fabric for one of the receiving blankets and I had also found a changing/play pad at another site, tipjunkie.com that was another quick and easy thing to make so I made both and I guess I spent about an hour total on making both items, and they were inexpensive.  The changing/play pad just took 3 pieces of flannel 1 yard each and turned out very well.  Gosh now I had scrapes of flannel fabric that was just too pretty to stick in the scrap basket.  Hummmm

The changing pad was made as a circle and I had cut the circle from the middle of the fabric so I had 3 pieces of fabric that had a big hole out of the center.  I also had the trimmings from the receiving blanket the 30" square and the 40" square.  (Now about this time I am really wishing I had taken some pictures of the receiving blanket and the scraps I had left so you could see.)  Well this old brain did start to churn and I decided that I would make another flannel quilt and I would take my scraps that I had cut off and sew them into a pattern and put that in the center hole of one of the fabric pieces from the changing pad and make a nice little quilt out of my scraps.  I have other things that I have made that I put circles in and it was really quick and easy but apparently I forgot how that works and cut the thing wrong to begin with and lucky for me I cut it too big and not too small so I had to take the circle out and trim it down and then put it back in and it turned out right.  You do have to be careful when sewing the flannel as it has a tendency to stretch...(read understatement here).... and you have to make allowances for the stretch.

Finally I remembered to take a few pictures.

This is a picture of how the edge of the quilt looks with the circle in the square.

 

Some day I may learn to take good pictures, but that time has not come yet.  Sorry about that but this is just a picture of what the pieced center of the quilt looks like.  Just a 9-patch and then one of the other colors where I had a width of material 1 1/2" wide to use for sashing and I used most of the colors in some of the sashing so it is very scrappy looking.

Another picture of the edge of the quilt.

 

What can I say, now I am anxious to put a batting and backing with it and get it finished!  I think I am going to have a take a tip from my friend Sandy over at FrogPond and get all of my unfinished projects together and just determine that I am going to finish one a month or something until I am caught up!

 

I have a quilt on my machine from Pat that is just wonderful.  She does such precise piecing and it is  always a joy to work on her quilts.  They all look like they were made for competition!  I have some from Peggy and several from Kay and another lady brought me 3 this week that are going to be so much fun.  One is a feedsack quilt.  I can hardly wait but got a few others I have to get finished before I can put the feedsack on the machine.  In addition to that I have another lady that has asked me to make her a quilt that I have to get started on quickly but it is make the entire quilt from start to finish.  I'm anxious to do that one too because we picked out an awesome pattern and she wants it to have some bling so I found some fairy frost fabric in the colors she is using to go with the other colors to give it some Beee---Ling.  This should be fun.

 

Life is just so much fun when you're quilting!  I get to retire in a few more days so I will have even more time to have fun!  I hope everyone has a safe and wonderful week of quilting!