Wednesday, February 25, 2009

Webshots Update

I updated my webshots account, will be tweaking it as time goes by, but I put a lot of pictures up there for the last two years of quilting projects!

Giveaway!

Pieceful Afternoon: Drawing Soon - and one more great prize
My friend Jo is having a givewaway on her blog. I am trying to link to it! I just love her hand painted fabrics!

Sunday, February 22, 2009

Thread Struggles

I have spent a few days trying to quilt this wallhanging size quilt, or small throw. I was really not thinking and decided to use Superior's Poly Quilter because it had a thickness I wanted to use. However, I didn't have a Topstitch size 16 needle, only a 14 or a denim 16 and really struggled with thread breakage. I think it also had to do with drag on the thread, two layers of batik (and seams also), dense cotton batting and spray basting. I went through all the troublesheeting stuff on the Superior site also.

My kindergarten unit right now is "Stick to It" aka persaverance so did persavere and and finally got the right combination of needles, speed, tension, etc. and finished! I bound it and now have another finished project.

The top is from a "Bag Lady" swap. You send a gallon size bag of fabric/blocks, etc. and get back a finished top. This one was made by Sharon in WA and I love it! I had those two oddball blocks and sent them with a bunch of fabric and I'm thrilled with the results!

I thought this was going to be a quick project in between some commission projects. I have several of those lined up and told myself that I would quilt one of my things in between in each of them.

Saturday, February 14, 2009

Happy Valentine's Day

I am actually taking time to post today! It's been a rat race lately it seems with work, meetings, etc. My appointment with the tax man is behind me for the farm and our stuff, I have one out of three kids taxes done. I haven't gotten much in the line of quilting done, but here is what I have accomplished recently.This is a quilt I recently machine quilted for my friend Jo. Most of the quilting is straight lines except for around the motifs in the seed packet blocks. There were some areas left for tying also, which Jo had requested.
Last year my small design group had a UFO auction to raise funds to buy some instructional and technique videos for our group. One member had this walhanging made and even had a piece of batting with it but didn't quilt it. I bought it for $5 and decided to finish it up last week. I added some beads for eyes and lots of fun background quilting and even some metallic thread.
This project has a story. I think I may have posted about it last year, but to save you (and me) the time of digging in my archives I will repeat it! This was a round robin in about 2001. It went missing, supposedly mailed, although the person hadn't done it herself. Early last year the woman who was the last person to see it was home when someone knocked at her door. A woman had been cleaning out her son's bedroom to make a sewing room coincidentally and he was in prison. He had been in a lot of trouble over the years and she found this package in the back of his closet! It had Sue's name on it, so she showed up with it, taking a chance. It wasn't in it's original envelope with my name on it. It turns out the package was in a vehicle and the son had stolen the package looking for something to cell for drug money they assume.

I quilted it several months ago but wanted to add beading and finally finished that up this past week.