Housewarming Gift

My daughter and her family moved last Monday and I am driving up to spend the day with them.  My SIL accepted a student pastor position while he finishes divinity school and they will be living here for the next three years.

My granddaughters are on the front porch and my grandpuppy is looking out thru the storm door.

Monday afternoon, the house looked like this...

...but my super-organized daughter had almost everything unpacked in put away within days!  She's amazing... I wonder where she got that from?

I wanted to make her a little something for her new home and yesterday, I pulled out some fabric to make a pillow cover, selecting Grandmother's Pride from 501 Rotary-cut Quilt Blocks.

This is a popular block recently.  It is called Granny Square online and 

a larger version is called Great Granny Square.

I used my large mini design board to arrange the pieces as I cut them, making it easy to move everything to the sewing machine.

After sewing the block together, I layered batting underneath and did a little straight-line quilting before assembling the pillow cover.

I'm also taking a batch of ginger cookies, too.... because that's what grandmamas are for!

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

For someone who questioned what my cookies looked like...

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.