Gifted scrap fabric

A lovely long-time customer of mine brought over a pile of scraps for me today.  See photo.  She has been cleaning out her fabrics and donating the larger pieces to MCC and she gave me these because she knows I love to work on scrap quilts.  What a treasure of fabric.  I am going to have fun sorting through them.  My mind is overflowing with ideas right now.

There are fabrics from every colour of the rainbow.  Lots of narrow strips for strip blocks and tons of charm and 2.5" squares.  I am going to have fun fun fun.

Here is a good picture of our big boy.  Finally one where he is looking at me and not hiding or glaring.  It is hard to believe that he will be eight this summer.

Here is a picture of the 1600 quilt top that I am making for Jeff and Jackie's silent auction.  I still have to buy the border fabric and quilt it.  I am just quilting something simple and allover.

I have used the blue batik as the inner border and am going for something green for the outer border.  I better get to the fabric store soon.  The social is in April and March is tomorrow.

Back to work for me.  I just wanted to post the photo of the fabric before I sort it and put it in their bins.

Happy stitching.

Sit and Stitch with the ladies

Two of my quilting friends came over this afternoon for our monthly sit and stitch.  We had a nice visit and the coffee cake I made turned out good for a change.  I think that between the three of us only three or four stitches were made.  We spent most of the time catching up with chit chat about everything and anything. 

The girls had a tour of my workshop and we had a show and tell of all of my quilt tops waiting to be quilted and most of my UFOs as well.  Darlene is inspired to start using up her scraps now.

After panicking to have my bathroom painted and put back together, no one even went in there.  Oh well, it needed to be done anyway.

Back to work tomorrow.  I have a quilt on the machine that needs to be finished and another one started.  I have a customer dropping off a couple of quilts this week as well so I need to catch up.

Happy stitching.

Long Weekend Stuff

I am hosting a sit and stitch tomorrow with just two other women that I quilt with, therefore, I decided to paint the bathroom as it was past due and I would have been embarrassed to have anyone enter the room if I hadn't painted it.  Three tiles along side the tub broke off last year when we installed the new floor tiles so I finally glued them back on.  I finished the second coat about an hour ago so I am patiently waiting for the paint to dry.  Once the paint dries later today I will caulk along the tub and do a general caulk cleanup as well as elsewhere in the bathroom to make it look cleaner.  Our bathroom takes a beating since it is the only one in the house so that is the reason for the panic. 

I am just having a breather before I tackle anymore projects.  I would love to go downstairs and sit at my machine and sew bits and pieces together but I think that is out of the question for today.  I also need to find something to work on tomorrow when the ladies are here.  Little Brown Bird will most likely come out of hiding again.

Bonnie Hunter is hosting a thimble link up but my dimestore thimbles will not be worth the trouble to show.  I could take a picture of my great grandmother's gold thimble that my mother passed on to me but the batteries are almost toast in the camera and we only have one spare until I get to the store.  I am not sure that I want to share my blog with anyone anyway.

Well I must get back to work at cleaning up and deciding what to bake for our coffee break.

Happy stitching.

"Conway Ladies" meeting now to be called the "Scrap Bags"

     Just got home from our Conway ladies get together.  Sandra was the host this meeting.  She has a lovely condo in the south west of the city.  We had a lovely day sitting and stitching and catching up.  Our group has changed memberwise from the original bunch.  We lost some members to reasons that have not been divulged which always happens and we have picked up a few new women these past two months to fill the gaps.  Everyone has known each other for years and most of them belong to other satellite groups together already.

I worked on a "Little Brown Bird" block, but I was having trouble seeing what I was stitching.  I think new glasses or some magnifiers are in the near future.

When I got home I visited the Quiltville Quips and Snips blogspot and Bonnie Hunter has kindly pointed out a Sew-a-long in another blog to her followers.  I think I will join along.  The blocks are only six inches and machine pieced so I should be able to keep up (I hope).  I just spent the last half hour copying the instructions out.  The blocks are from a book called "Farmers Wife".  I will do it for fun out of scraps and try not to use any of the fabrics too often twice.  By the looks of it I will be able to use up a lot of my 2 1/2 inch strips and squares.  Yeah!  Good leader and ender projects.  I should kit up the blocks and have them next to the machine.  Good idea, she says to herself.

I should get moving and go downstairs and clean up the mess I left last night.  I want to finish quilting the quilt on the machine in the morning then I will need to go out and buy my son a birthday gift.  My baby boy will be 29 on the 17th.  Where does the time go.  I am not old enough to have a 29 year old child.  LOL.

Happy stitching.

What project should I work on today?

This morning the dog and I woke up to a windchill temp of -41 below.  Brrrrrr.  Needless to say the dog and I have not gone for a walk today and he really is restless.  He has asked to go out ten times today just because he is bored.  I am not dressing up to walk ten feet and he turns around and runs home because his feet are freezing.  The temps are going to warm up by Sunday and next week doesn't look that bad so we can get some major walking in.  I hope.

I eventually made my way downstairs and pieced one of the crabapple blocks together.  It looks very dull so I will have to find some nice sashing fabric to bring some life to it.  I wanted to see if two blocks across would be too big for the wallhanging space I have and I think it will if I want to do a checkerboard border.  I am going to play around.  I am not going to buy any fabric for it either.  I must use up the stuff I have and not bring anything else in for a while.  If I get frustrated with this project I will cut the sashings for the hopscotch butterscotch quilt.

I am definitely not in the mood to quilt a customer quilt.  I may start picking out some of the quilting on the RRCB so that I can make the backing bigger.  Yes, I screwed up.  I pieced a backing and did not make it long enough.  What a twit.  I am going to make of strip of the left over blocks and add them to the backing.  I did not know what I was going to do with them anyway and this is a good place to put them.  They are the uglier ones anyway so they won't be seen.  I was not going to make pillows with them or another quilt so this is a great way to use them up.

I did quilt one of my customer's quilts yesterday afternoon and that went quickly because I just did a large meander.  This quilt is going to Africa with an exchange student that has been here for a few years.  It has all Canadiana type images on the fabric pieces such as maple leaves, bears, deer and pine trees.  It is quite a clever idea for something like this.  I have two more batik Magic Tile quilts from the same client to do and they will have simple all over designs quilted on them.  One will be ferns and the other will be swirls.  My legs and back are sore today so I think I will cool it with the standing.

Anyway, enough wasting time and back to work.  My DH will be home from his business trip tonight so I should make an effort to have the place tidy as well.

Happy quilting.

Finally figured out what to quilt on my RRCB

I have started quilting my RRCB but had to quit because of my granddog.  She kept visiting me and pawing at me because I was not paying attention to her.  I was worried I was going to kick or step on her while I was working.  Any how, I am quilting a sort of free hand flower design that starts with a fat question mark and has pointy fat petals all around it.  I think one of the names of the design is flame flower.  It was going very well until I was so rudely interupted.
I was also doing a bit of piecing on the crabapple wallhanging.  That is coming along slowly but surely.

I must go and feed my starving dog and try to keep the visitor away from his food.  What a challenge this has been to my sanity.

Happy quilting to all.

Trying to figure out how to quilt my RRCB quilt top

I took a few minutes off from dog wrangling yesterday and pinned my RRCB mystery quilt top on to the frame.  I had pieced a border sometime last year from chunks of pink fabrics that I did not want to see in another scrap quilt.  I did not leave myself much wiggle room but it is my quilt and I am ok with it.  I have been tossing around ideas for quilting.  It is so busy and there are so many seams that I have decided that something custom will not work because no one will see the work and I have also ruled out a panto because some of those blocks have a lot of bias and I know that I will need to have control over the fabric and the machine at the same time, so front of the machine allover something it is.  I have been playing around with ideas and most likely I will have feathers and curls all over or who knows what the machine will do.  I went down again today to have a look but I am too tired to stand there today.  I don't know if it is from not getting a proper sleep because of the dogs or it could also be the weather.  It is unseasonably mild here today and has been overcast so it makes me sleepy.

I did sit at the regular machine and played around with my 1 1/2 squares and ninepatches to make a scrap crabapple wallhanging from one of Bonnie Hunter's books.  I am only going to make five blocks and just do a wallhanging for the hallway quilt hanger.  I have plenty of greens for the base of the trees.  I think that is how I am going to spend the rest of the afternoon.  I do not know if I am going to do a checker board border or not.  I will see how it goes.  I think my best bet would be a pieced border because it uses up alot of scraps and I do not have much in the way of yardage kicking around.

Back to work and happy quilting.