Gratuitous Kid Picture

Okay... .neither of the individuals in the photo are real "kids" anymore...  

My grandson George is sitting in the helicopter that my niece Jenny flew from her Coast Guard station at Elizabeth City NC to Oak Island, NC (near Wilmington) for the USCG's 7th annual Expo and Safety Day, highlighting partnerships with local emergency responders.

Jenny flies helicopters for the "take sick passengers off cruise ships" type missions, among other search and rescue missions. 

Both Jenny and George have quilts made by yours truly!

Another Finish!

Thanks to the kindness of Chipper and Scotty's mom, I was able to complete the Lilac Hill quilt with a non-pieced binding as I had planned...

PhotoBucket has a new photo editor.... a much more complicated photo editor.   

It's going to take me a while to figure out how to use it.  

 In the meantime, photos will be less than stellar.... not that any of my photos were too great...

I'm not sure why this old song popped into my head but I got a quilt name out of it!






The kindness and generosity of my blogging friends never ceases to amaze me. 

Assembling QAYG Blocks

I'm still working on assembling the Bottled Rainbows blocks...  I'll get done some day I suppose.  I had a question about how I sew these together so I thought I'd do a little photo spread on the process.

The ticker tape blocks of the Bottled Rainbows QAL were perfect to QAYG (quilt as you go)...  so, before sewing the little pieces of fabric to the ivory/bone section of the block, I layered the batting and backing under the top of the block.

Once the selected fabric pieces were sewn to the ivory/bone section, you then have a quilted block!

The next step is to sew the two blocks together.  I pinned the batting and backing away from the raw edges of the two blocks, matched seams, and sewed them together.

Next, I trimmed the batting edges so they would butt together easily and then whipped stitched the batting together.

I then brought the edges of the backing together, turned under the edge of one of the backings and stitched down.... thus finishing the back of two blocks.

After you have two sets of two blocks together, you connect those two sets to make a panel...

Then, when you have two panels, you connect those the same way you connected the blocks: sew the top blocks together, baste together the batting, then sew together the backing.    Not very exciting but getting the blocks together is exciting!

Bottled Rainbows: Slow Going

With work interfering with sewing time, connecting the quilted-as-I-went blocks isn't progressing as fast as I would like...

...but I'll get there eventually!

A Cutie...

...that has made me smile for the past couple of days.... I just had to share!

2 1/4" x 3 1/4" magnet

by MincingMockingbird @ Etsy.com

Not only cool magnets but also bird prints, greeting cards, and prints of original art, MincingMockingbird is pretty funny....  just read some of the item descriptions!

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

This post is brought to you by me... and was not solicited or paid for by the artist.

Next UFO to be Tackled!

It's been a while the Bottled Rainbows quilt blocks have seen the light of day....

....but they're up now!

Roses Quilt: Finished

...and another UFO is crossed of my list!

I think that labels are the hardest part of the quilt-making because I have a terrible time coming up with names...

...this one means something to me!

Also Back from the LAQ

Yes... I'll be doing binding for a while...

...only "issue" is that I don't have quite enough of the border fabric to do the binding.  I do have a similar amount of the purple inner border... so I may have to have a pieced binding.

I like this "fan" pantograph a lot.

Yup, a lot of binding will be happening this weekend... but I hope to cross both quilts off my UFO list!

 

Back from the LAQ

...I will be working on the binding for the FNSI this evening!

Once the binding is done, I'll be down to 4 (out of 9) UFOs!

This quilt will be living at my house!

Pillowcases for FNSI

As part of the April Friday Night Sew In with Heidi and Bobbi, participants will be making pillowcases to donate to ConKerr Cancer through the Arrow Cabinet folks, who are generously providing this month's door prizes!   

Because I'm organized that way, I have my pillowcases already made...

and will be shipping them today...

...along with a note identifying the pillowcases as part of April's FNSI!

If you're interested in participating in this great project, read all about it at Handmade by Heidi....   we'd love to have you join us!

Making It Mine: Part Four

I dithered over the fourth border cornerstone and ended up selecting:  Grandmother's Pride (pg 130 of 501 Rotary Cut Quilts).   If you've been a reader for a while, you'll have seen lots of grandbaby photos.  Since all the squares are tiny (1 7/8"), I had fun going thru the scrap basket of the Civil War prints I'd been saving.

You've probably seen scrappy versions of this block in Blog Land, going by the name Granny Squares.   I can see why it's so popular... it's an easy and rewarding block.

Making It Mine: Part Three

With Pine Tree and The North Carolina Beauty completed, options were less simple.  I decided on Sister's Choice from Jennifer Chiaverini's Sylvia's Bridal Sampler.... until I realized the instructions were for paper-piecing!  

Back to Judy Hopkins' 501 Rotary-cut Quilt Blocks I went and found the very similar New England block (page 181), which I changed a bit to make a Sister's Choice block.

This block reminds me of my sisters... who are very dear to me!

Note:  Like applique, paper piecing is being left for future endeavors.

Making It Mine: Part Two

With a Pine Tree quilt block for a border cornerstone, next up was The North Carolina Beauty (page 183 of Judy Hopkins' 501 Rotary-cut Quilt Blocks).  I did resist this choice at first because of all the flying geese.... the itty-bitty flying geese... this block finishes at six inches.   But, I persevered!

The second cornerstone represents the beauty of my home state... from the mountains...

...to the sea!

Making It Mine: Part One

For the border design on her CW quilt, Bettina Meier made four different Ohio Star blocks as cornerstones.   I wanted to do something a little different and chose four blocks that had meaning to me.

Pat of 501 Quilt Blocks is using Judy Hopkins' book 501 Rotary-cut Quilt Blocks as a challenge and is making each and every one of the 501 blocks in the book!  Go, Pat!   

Pat's blocks looked interesting and, my interest in piecing traditional blocks sparked by the Civil War BOW project, I ordered the book.  Wow!  What a great resource book...  not only are there 501 different traditional quilt blocks, the book provides measurements for 6 different sizes of each block!  The blocks range from 4" to 14" and are clearly laid out to make things easy, with options for fabric selection. 

I decided that one of the corner blocks had to be Black Spruce (page 49)... except that I am going to call it Pine Tree....

....because North Carolina is "The Land of the Long-leaf Pine"... and the State toast is:

Here's to the Land of the Long-leaf Pine!

Here's to the Land where the sun doth shine!

Where the weak grow strong and the strong grow great,

Here's to Down Home, the Old North State!

The long-leaf pines out front of my house, 

the corner of which you can see in the lower right corner of the photo.

Civil War Quilt Top: Finished!

I so enjoyed the friendships I made in the Flickr group:  Civil War Quilts 2011.  One of the best things was seeing how others... much ahead of me in the BOW assembly... finished their quilts.  I particularly liked the border design on Bettina Meier's CW quilt.  

So, I copied it!

Nothing like late afternoon sun to bleach out the colors, huh?

Civil War Quilt: Border

Almost done...

...should finish this flimsy today!

Spring Break Kitchen Adventure

Old double wall ovens seen in background from dining room on Easter...

Double ovens removed...

New door in old double oven space...

New door open....

...drawer fully extend!

What?  No oven???   Nope... just moved to new location...

Drawers removed...

New oven...

Now, just waiting The Return of the Ice Maker Repairman to fix what he didn't fix on Tuesday....  *grrr*

Back to sewing....  prep work on new wood work will begin tomorrow.  Hopefully, I'll have everything painted by Sunday afternoon.

 

Civil War Quilt Top Progress

While various worker bees did stuff in the kitchen yesterday, I stayed out of their way and sewed.

Half of the columns are sewn together.  The remaining columns have the vertical sashing sewn on...  almost done with the block assembly!

Today, a friend and I are taking a road trip...  fabric will be involved....

CW Progress

There weren't too many worker bees here yesterday but  a friend stopped by for lunch and a visit... and another stopped by with her 5 month old daughter.  I was able to get horizontal sashing units on the Civil War blocks...

...and altered a bridesmaid's dress for Renee while Deborah entertained her baby.

The dress looks much better on Renee than lying on the bed!

 

Not sure what worker bees will show up this morning... but I have plenty of sewing to do!