No Coat Days

Today I took Alfred, Ilse's husband over to a Dr.'s appointment due to the fact that her car is still in the shop. I told Ilse that I would also take him out to lunch at the Alton Senior Center. Alfred is 87 and I am 63, so we both qualify for the over 60 price of $2.00 for a hot meal. The menu was a stuffed pepper, carrots, garden salad, a roll, fruit salad and two shortbread cookies. Quite fine!

We played a bit of jigsaw puzzle before lunch with the free decaf coffee. A great puzzler named Paulette came and joined us.

I confess to being a bit antsy to leave after lunch, but there was a poetry reading as the speaker. I knew that my precious box of new fabric from the post office was sitting in my car and I was dying to open it and revel in my Kansas Troubles treasures!

I'm definitely gonna do some more moody log cabins with these! I stole an Ebay auction for one dollar and am very pleased!

I just realized after I wrote that just how misleading it was! There were 74 FQ's and the opening bid was $99.99 and I bid 100.99 and it was just as the auction closed, so I won it! It was $1.00 over the other gal's bid. The shipping was $15.30 so my total was 116.29 divided by 74 FQ's =$1.57 each. I had been nervously watching it all week.

They are mostly moody greens, browns, reds, and neutrals. I think I only counted two that were deep blue. I love them!

The churn dash swap left me just shy of the few more that I needed to make 63 blocks for a generous twin. Here are a few of what I pieced to make up the deficit.

The light fabric of the above is technically not a Civil War like the rest, but it was the very last fat eighth from a bundle that I had won in a doorprize at my guild for wearing my name badge.

If you click on the above picture to enlarge it, you'll see the tawny dragonflies in the light background. Here is another set that was far less successful when it comes to contrasting fabrics.

The fabrics are pretty but it all sort of gets lost in a grey-blue mush.

Well, too bad, because IN IT GOES!!! LOL! Maybe I'll name this quilt, "The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly!"

Can you believe that I still need two more blocks? Ugh. So near and yet so far. Taking a nap sounds better to me right now.

I celebrated the sun with Raven out in front of the garage, too! The basket is another Trudy's Thrift Shop find for a buck!

The Blessed Sun!

Yesterday and today the sunlight came back to New England after a long and dreary absence. It reminded me of the old Judy Collins' song Chelsea Morning that says,

"And the sun poured in like butterscotch and stuck to all my senses..."

I threw off my procrastinating ways and began sorting, ironing, and trimming some ugly green fat quarters. The skimpiest one was 18x20 inches, so I made that the common size. What I was working on was the backing for the "Go For The Green" community quilt for the guild's silent auction. It is a scrappy green fence rail that is 66"x 84".

It doesn't look like much here, but it took me some time and effort to sew the 25 panels together. Horsing big rows like that through the sewing machine always makes my shoulders tired, so maybe that's why I avoided the task for so long.

The breeze was up, so I needed to snap the photo quickly!

Another thing that I've been working on is a few "Herringbone", or "H" blocks for short.

These were first seen on Michele Foster's Quilting Gallery (see my button on the right), but they have been picked up by my swappers group.

They are 4" X 9" on paper foundations with a measured 45 degree angle drawn onto the paper to start the first pair of strings. If it sounds like fun and you'd like to join, the link is here.

A set of these for the swap constitutes an opposing pair, with one right and one left facing angles like these below:

So far, I have 7 sets made or 14 total. They aren't due until May 15th, so I have time to make a bunch more. They are a little tricky to do with that angle because you need a longer overhang than you think!
As I worked on clearing off a trashed section of my cutting table, I discovered a whole bunch of extra 3 1/2" Civil War green squares that I had cut for Easy Street. Geez, there must be a bazillion of them here!

There had been some confusion about the number of these to cut for Step Four, and I apparently did my Step Four twice! Now I'm singing the Scarecrow's song from The Wizard Of Oz,

..."If I only had a brain!"

Most of these are in groups of 4 to a set of different fabrics. I'm not sure if I shall make a baby quilt out of them or maybe a border design for Easy Street. "We'll see, and that's final!", as my Dad used to say whenever I was yammering for something that I wanted.

Lastly, I leave you with another cute Raven-on-the-futon picture. I dare show it now that I took the big red quilt to the laundromat where they have the big front loader machines and I washed it! LOL!
It looks so bright again now. Boy, had it gotten grimy.

Ups and Downs

One whole quilty day was lost this week due to our quick response to the news that a downstate animal shelter had just gotten some new arrivals of adoptable dogs. Felix and I have been casually looking for an acceptable stray to join our home in our capacity as Animal Control Officers for the towns of Gilmanton and Belmont here in New Hampshire. We have not seen any dog that would work in our home with Raven for the two years since Luau died. The shelters are filled with Pit Bulls and Staffordshire Terriers, which is the correct name for a pit bull. We cannot accept that breed for our insurance liability. Additionally, we are prejudiced against the look of the bull dog type face. They are UGLY! If you own one and love her/him, then GOD BLESS you!

So we drove over 2 hours one way to get to meet this 4-month old spayed female puppy at the Stratham chapter of the SPCA. We had only seen one picture but she was listed as a lab mix. When we got there, she was all pit bull in the face and when she had been given her rabies vaccine, the veterinarian had listed her breed as Pit Bull! She was so hyper that her face doesn't show as she moved out of the picture here.

We tried one other dog, too, but that one was so aggressive that she actually nipped at poor Raven, who had been brought along on the trip to interview prospective adoptees. We left with only our treasured Raven and felt very blessed by her good nature!!! I confess that I was disappointed to still not find a new companion dog for Raven.
On a quiltier note, I did get over to The Golden Gese quilt shop in Concord, New Hampshire to do a layout for a quilt for my "kid" sister (she's 53!), Lucinda, in Connecticut. I bought most of these 2 1/2" strips as a sale-priced Cappuchino & Creams collection from Keepsake Quilting. I just wanted to do a simple, dumb log cabin with them, no frills! I shared the space with some wonderful Concord guild gals who were rescuing an old Victorian crazy quilt with a basting party.

The Fields & Furrows, or Streak of Lightening arrangement pleased me! I picked up all the blocks in order of the rows from left to right after I had pinned the row label numbers on, and put them in a basket. I brought them home and SEWED THE ROWS together! Usually this is the step where I goof off and procrastinate, so I'm pleased.

LOL! You can still see my pinned-on row label markers! I am going to try quilting this one myself by taking a longarm lesson. I'm just as anxious as I am excited. So far, I haven't yet booked my appointment for it.
Happy Sewing, everybody!

Twice As Nice!

My very dear sister, Suzanne, was home this afternoon to receive the second edition of my Sister's Choice quilt. She agreed to hold it up beside the doorway where she had hung up the first one to keep the drafts at bay from her unheated front hall. The Sister's Choice Part I is on the left, and the Sister's Choice Part II is on the right.

Part II has that brilliant chromium yellow which was the only one of it's kind in the swaps that I did to get all the variety in those Civil War 9-patches. We decided that was a good way to tell them apart.

The borders, inner and outer, and the binding fabrics are all identical, but the centers of the two quilts are completely scrappy. The green scrappy wings are all regular quilting fabrics (not Civil War) as are the backgrounds, too. With all those differences, the two quilts still "read" as a matched set!

Both are set 6 blocks by 8 for a total of 48 per quilt, and 96 in all. I thought that I would never be done with putting wings on the 9-patches! February 21st of 2011 was the first picture that I posted of the blocks going together, so it has been just two years in the making of them. It was hard to release them, but my sister did say thank you.

In the morning, I worked some more on those cute little 2" strip-pieced 4-patches for the Churn Dash Cheer quilt. For some reason, I decided to make them all match! Maybe I just have had a bellyfull of scrappiness, LOL!

Grace, from Maine, do you recognize this toasty brown fabric with the red flowers from The Lowell Collection adapted from The New England Quilt Museum by RJR Fashion Fabrics? You should! I believe you sent it in your Christmas package to me?

It just glows against the cream fusions by Robert Hoffman. I had wanted something that would play nicely with a warm red, which will be the sashing for which these are the cornerstones. This is perfect. Thank you again, Grace!

"B" Blocks Completed!

If it's Wednesday, it must be snowing! Yes, another all day snow that is still giving us more than 5 inches of wet sticky snow. Many warnings were on the local news to shovel roofs to prevent collapses. We are blessed with a very steeply pitched and strong roof. Here is the plow's curl that reaches so high that now the squirrels can walk onto my front yard birdfeeder. So much for squirrel-proof feeders! LOL!

I stayed in and worked on the mountain of laundry that Matthew had brought home from the dorm. His dorm does have a few machines downstairs, but they are pricey and you must wait for others to finish their loads. Much better for him to bring it here. But I don't trust him yet to properly load my machine and run it!
Best of all, I got back in the saddle on finishing up the piecing of the "B" blocks for Easy Street!

The photo above is definitely a visual oxymoron. But here are the B blocks!

And another one:

This is the very last one! I snapped the picture of it all laid out next to the sewing machine but after I sewed the whole thing together, I was too pooped to iron it with starch for a photo-opportunity. Trust me, it is really sewn!

Swapper's Fever

For the past three days, I've spent a lot of time on my feet opening packages and swapping out both positive and negative sets of Civil War Churn Dashes. I did them as if they were two completely different swaps, just one at a time, first all the positives, then all the negatives.

My cutting table, which is already almost completely buried in stacks of Civil War fabrics, was now spread out with all the stacks of blocks. I would deal them out like cards, placing one of each selection on a new pile. Thank goodness that almost everybody put an address label on each individual block! I tried really hard to not return any block to their original maker, and I was obsessive about my counting to avoid errors.

The blocks are just beautiful! There is so much variety in all the Civil War fabrics from all around the country. Here is the group on yahoo if you are interested in joining and possibly hostessing a swap or just swapping.

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/block_swappers/

I learned from Linda, my also-a-quilter postmistress, that priority flat rate envelopes now DO include a tracking number at no additional charge since the rates went up. When I thought about how many collective hours went into making all those beautiful blocks, I refused to lose any! So for the four swappers who were sending a pre-paid parcel post, I chose to pay the $0.90 cents each to have a tracking number put on them.

We had 9 swappers plus I made ten. Most of the gals made 6 sets of six blocks each set. I tallied it up as 84 sets for a total of 324 total blocks swapped! Wheww! Boy, I'm glad to have this responsibility off my plate! I was worried that I'd goof it all up, but it seemed okay in the end. I just needed to take my time and not rush anything.

Before I could even get to the post office, I needed to give my hero, Felix, a chance to plow us out again after it snowed all day Sunday. It dropped another 12 inches on us!

Poor Matthew had to sweep the heavy snow off the cars so that I could take him in to his afternoon classes at New Hampshire Technical Institute.

Thank you so much, Matthew, and I'm sorry that I cut your head off in the next picture.

Since I needed to run Matthew in to Concord,New Hampshire to NHTI, and since the sun disappeared and left us with another grim grey day,

I decided to stop at The Golden Gese quilt shop in Concord. I didn't want to spend a lot of money, but for $28.00 I found some sale fabrics, four fat eighths, and a lonely Moda 5" charm pack.

The brown print shown above was Jo Morton for $4.50/ yard so I bought one yard of that and a yard of the pale yellowish tan Renee Nanneman for Andover. The red and the blue were Kim Diel and I just got a half yard of each of those.

Those blue scraps were $0.25 cents each and there were 8 of them that I liked.
The Moda charm pack was $9.50, and since I was there in Concord anyway, I consider that free shipping!

As luck would have it, Nancy Gesen, the owner walked in just before I left. I was able to get her to agree to advertise in the Belknap Mill Quilter's Guild program booklet for the September 28th & 29th quilt show. I was so happy because I'm in charge of the advertising for the booklet!

Here is Raven flopping around in the fresh snow.

 She just loves the snow! She'll get her wish for more on Wednesday, wheeeee!

The Two-Year Project

Two years ago, to the day, I took this photograph of my first Sister's Choice blocks. These were made using Bonnie K. Hunter's free pattern from here.
Thank you, Bonnie, for your wonderful pattern instructions on traditional designs!

I told my sister, Suzanne,

that I was making her a quilt called Sister's Choice and that she would have no choice in the matter! LOL! She pleaded with me to make two smaller ones for twin beds rather than one queen-sized. I told her that I would do that, but that it would take two years to make them.

Now I'm pleased to report that I have finished the binding on Sister's Choice Part II.

It doesn't have a label yet but I'll work on that tomorrow.

What I learned is that a 5 X 6 block-set of 30 blocks just wasn't big enough.

 
I kept working and made more blocks to do a 6 X 8 block set and with the borders, it came out to about 74" by 92". That made them into generous twins that looked nicely proportioned.

Above is Sister's Choice Part II finished. I had wanted to photograph it in the winter sunlight out on the clothesline. Alas, it is still snowbound with over a foot of treacherous ice-coated snow that I felt was sure to twist my bad ankles if I tried to carry a big heavy quilt over there. So this is on the driveway. I flipped it over to show the pieced flannel backing.

I hadn't really planned nor intended that the back would evoke such strong Christian imagery, but it happened and I like it. I was just trying to piece symmetrically. The golden brown color is actually a pea soup green in a printed sort of paisley design and the grass green was an almost-new Goodwill queen sized flat flannel sheet for $2.00.
Here is a photo I took of it on my bed but the western window flooded sunlight in pools that washed out the foreground.

Linda Monasky of The Bear Paw Gallery did the quilting on her longarm and it looks wonderful! She made free swirls in the center over the blocks and an ivy vine with loops on the borders. Visit her website here.

Most of the fabrics in the 9-patch blocks are from a Civil War swap, so there is great variety.

I'm very pleased to have brought this very long-term project to completion. WHEEEEEEEE, I get to start something new!!!!!