May is Coming to an End

This has been a very busy month. I have been busy in the quilting room, in the house and in the yard. I guess that is the way it is for everyone.

I actually have seeds sprouting in the garden and I am very happy with that.

These are the string beans. They  look great.

This is a lemon cucumber. I planted three different places and this is the only one coming up so far.

 I think this one is another cucumber plant and it is looking pretty good.

This is a zucchini hiding behind the daffodil stocks. Last year my veggies were a bust. It is looking much better this year. YEAH!
I also have been able to weed and I am trying to keep up  them. This is a major thing to accomplish because we have been having allot of rain lately.

I have made some progress with the old sewing room. I have one of the three doors painted and I am half done with the trim. I am excited about this, the room looks so fresh and clean. Spring like.

The door in the closet is all painted and just needs the hinges, door knob and door stop put back on. YEAH!

I have completed 30 of the plaid/strip blocks and I have decided on the layout. I will set them 5 X 6.

I have cut the sashing and collected the corner stones from my 2" drawer. The neutral sashing will finish at 1 1/2" as well as the corner stones. Now I just need to start webbing the top.

Over all, I have had a very productive month of May. I hope you have also.

See you next week!

What I have been up to this week

I have not been able to do allot of sewing this week. I have three interviews this week, Monday, Wednesday and one tomorrow.

Most of my time has been spent working in the yard or cleaning house. 

The little bit I have been doing in the quilt studio has been because I am still cleaning up from the move. I think it has been very helpful to move all my stash down and re-organize things. I have found that I have way too many 2 1/2" squares that really need to be put into quilts.

I have been working on the plaid blocks that I wrote about last week. Here are few more, I think I have six lined up on the long arm.

I plan to continue until I use up these squares. I also found a bunch of 4 patches made up, left over three strips, and some two's sewn together that are left overs from other quilts. I have started to make 9 patches out of these scrappy orphans but I am not sure what I will do with them. I will just keep making them until I get a bunch made and then decide.

For Mother's Day my hubby gave me the expandable table that will adjust to any sewing machine.  I forget the name of it. I read about them from Bonnie Hunter. I set it up with my feather weight first and then decided to try it on my Janome embroidery machine because I didn't think it would fit it.

This is an odd shaped machine but it fits. I will have to take it off when I use the embroidery part but for now I am piecing and doing very well. This is going to be a dandy new tool for me in my piecing and when I bind the quilts. Yeah!

I have all my red and white blocks up on my design wall trying to find some inspiration on how to go about making this into a queen size quilt. If you have any ideas please let me know. I have some very disconnected thoughts about how I want this to turn out so I am hoping that by putting them on the design wall that inspiration will hit.

Kinda weird looking at them just thrown up there, huh?!

I have more half squares and 4 patches on the table here. I figure they will be fill ins.

Well, this all for this week. Take care and I will be back next week.

Spring is Here

We had our yearly Garden Party on the 11th and I forgot all about taking pictures. Several years ago I had some shoulder problems and was feeling down in the dumps about not being able to hardly do any yard work to prepare for the summer. I told my husband we should just sell the house and move into a condo where we wouldn't have any yard work to do. His answer was a Garden Party.

Of course our kids saw right through that Garden Party stuff and they know that it is really a Labor Party. They come any way and help us get a big jump start for our 4th of July flag raising.

They plant flowers, vegetables and even do some weeding. Some years they have taken out dead shrubs or trees. Our grand children look forward to this day. The older ones are pros now at planting the flowers.

I have swiss chard that came back up on its own. 

I planted broccoli this year (lower left hand corner of pic. I will see how that goes. The bush beans are also along the back of the house in this picture.

I have two kinds of onions this year, along with 3 tomato plants. I have also planted cucumbers and squash. 

Another new for me is okra. Not sure how that will do but we will see. They are planted on the south side of the house just around the corner of this picture.

On the quilting front I have a couple of items I can't show right now because they are for gifts but I have finished the 3rd patch quilt top as well as working on a leader enders as I sewed the rows together on this top.

This is the third and final patch quilt that is now a top. This one has allot of yellow but it is so nice to use up all of this old fabric. The left overs are going to be cut up into bins.

I am not sure what I am going to do with these but I have a bin full of plaids, strips, and checks left over from another quilt and these need to be used up. Most of these are shirts from my husband. They are 2 1/2 inch squares.

These are not all I have in 2 1/2 inch squares. I have two drawers of dark and one of light that need to be stitched up. I also have red, white and blue 2 1/2 inch squares that need to be made into a Quilt of Valor.

I have also been busy sewing together bits and pieces of batting. I hope to have at least one to fit the patch tops I have ready now. I am sewing these on my old Kenmore.

My last picture for today is about my Kenmore/Janome embroidery machine. I had it at Sears for a repair since April 5th. I finally got it back on Monday, the 13th of May. I was not very happy about how long it took them. I had called and called. It had been repaired for almost 2 weeks and it still had not been delivered to the store I had dropped it off at. Not good!

But she is home now and I am happy! Well enough for today, see you next week.

Good Progress

This has been another busy week and I am happy to say that quilting played a big part of the busyness. I have finally finished the dotted quilt. I have wrote a couple posts where this quilt is being seen as it progressed. Now I can look back and see the whole progress of this quilt. I kinda like this. Since this blog is to show my progress I think I have finally shown that with this quilt.

My husband and I went a couple of weeks ago to buy the border fabric for this quilt. He picked out a beautiful blue fabric. As you can see we didn't use it. After we got home I remembered I had couple pieces of black and white fabric. When I showed them to him he changed his mind and decided to go with the black and white shown here and not the blue. I am not worried about the blue not being used because I am a scrap quilter and I also love red, white and blue quilts.

I really like how this quilt turned out.

I have also finished the pink 9-patch quilt that I have shown as it has progressed. Chelsi came over on Saturday to make final decisions. She decided not to make a border for it and she picked out and made the binding for it. She also picked out Spiral Squares pantogram and a very bright pink thread.

The full picture is a little washed out but it shows the complete quilt. This quilt is for a specific little girl with very serious medical problems.

I have also finished putting together the second patch quilt. The one with all white neutrals.

I have also started a third patch quilt. I am using up everything in this last quilt. If I have more 3 1/2 inch squares they will be cut up into small squares and put in the bins.

I have one more thing to show. It is not quilt related except for the fact that it was my old sewing rooms upstairs. I have chosen a light green to make it bright and cheerful as three little girls will be in this room at the end of summer. I am painting the ceiling too, this was a big debate in my mind. I finally decided that I wanted to totally get rid of the estate grey in this room. I am so tired of this grey color in my house. I am also painting all the trims and the window sill white. I think this will really make this room great to look at. I will also be putting a coat of white on the closet doors and the entrance door.

I will be putting up draw curtains. I want the whole window to be shown when the curtains are drawn open. I will have half lace curtains at the bottom for privacy. The big decision will be the color and type of curtains to put up. I still have time to work on that problem. The kids will not be here until August.

Well, I do not have anything else to show for this week. See you next week.

Getting Back On Track

This week has been great. It has been great because I didn't have any interviews, no UI workshops and I have not cut anything on my hands. YEAH!

I have been able to catch up on my house work and also spend some time in the quilt studio.

I have almost finished the quilting on the dotted sampler quilt with 'Square Spiral' by Keryn Emmerson. I must really like this pantogram because the last two quilts I have quilted I have used this pantogram. Actually Eli and Chelsi helped me decide on thread color and the pantogram.

The thread color is white. I really wanted to use some variegated black and white thread I have but I didn't think I had enough of it left.

I have finished putting together the top with the 3 1/2" squares that I had Tanner working on during the retreat. I had a ton of left over 3 1/2" squares that I had been saving for several years and I have not used them for anything. So I decided that I would just 'web the top' and I used light and dark for a guide. This quilt is just over a twin size. I used mostly tan and cream for the neutrals in  this one.

I have started another one with white as the neutrals. I will have plenty of squares for this one and could probably start another one at the rate I am going with this little project.

Webbing the top is from Bonnie Hunter's website 'Quiltville'. These two quilts are for charity.

I have also made some progress on my little flower embroideries.

This one is done.

This one is almost done.

All in all......good progress this week on a number of things.
See you next week!