Quilt a day #49 and misc.

I can't believe I skipped over a whole week of blogging! There has been so much going on it's hard to keep up. I do have a couple finished quilts, I just haven't taken pictures! I haven't dug into my old photos either.

My oldest daughter Amy is a teacher in Utah and just recently got engaged. She is getting married in late summer and mentioned she would like a Double Wedding Ring quilt! I'm still in thinking mode about the technique I want to use for that. Do I use Judy Niemeyer's Wedding Star (I adore paper piecing), do I use the Quiltsmart interfacing or do I use the Marti Michell templates?

My second daughter Lisa graduated from college this past weekend and I helped move her furniture to her little brother's apartment. It's going to be weird not to have Brad here for the summer! He is an Undergraduate Research Assistant in Crop Science. I hope I got that right!

Back to quilts: I am leading 4-H quilting and here is one of the projects that is being worked on. Her father collected law enforcement patches from trainings, etc. and she has them all appliqued (with invisible thread) to the backgrounds. She is putting a 1" finished sashing between them. It will be a large wallhanging.I got out my Hawaiian blocks to stare at and realized I don't have enough of the blue fabric to do the setting triangles. I ordered some and it was too light. I ordered some more from Fabric Depot this weekend and they called today and said it's out of stock! I got the fabric quite some time ago (like five years) so I'm leaning towards some darker blue. We shall see. The other option is to take out one blocks and do a straight setting and that is too boring.

Quilt a Day #48

I keep forgetting to post a picture! I have some down below. You can skip the next couple of paragraphs if you don't want to read about my ongoing medical saga!

Yesterday was a long day, with a 6 hour round trip drive to a new specialist and a long Dr. visit with more tests. The Dr. was great and he has never actually treated someone with my exact diagnosis which is Sarcoidosis with the TINU subgroup. Sarcoidosis is inflammation in the body usually caused by a virus and settling in joints and lungs, hence me going to a rheumatologist. My Sarcoidosis didn't do that, instead it was in my kidneys and eyes which is the TINU portion. Less than 200 people have been diagnosed with this since 1975!

If my SED rate is still headed downwards I will not have any medication, just blood monitoring, if it's gone up they will give me a medicine to take for awhile. I had a chest x-ray to check for glanulomas (I think) on my lungs. After my visit we went across the street to the hospital to visit a 4 yo neighbor boy who got a severe infection from falling off a scooter and had to have surgery. I have his older brother as a student. The boy is doing better and hopefully will be home in a week.

My middle child graduates from college a week from today and my youngest is finishing his first year of college. My oldest is teaching Math in Utah so in honor of them I am posting their graduation quilts all in one group. All three were class valedictorians.

The first quilt is Amy's finished the day of her graduation, May 28, 2005! However, this is just a photo of the top, somewhere I must have the completed quilt, but couldn't find the photo. she is into the country look and we picked up FQ's here and there for about a year before and she picked the pattern.
Next is Lisa's finished a couple weeks before her graduation May 28, 2006, exactly 30 years after her dad and I graduated from the same high school! Lisa loves bright colors and we collected her fabrics and she wanted a star quilt. The cat wouldn't get off the quilt!Last is Brad's quilt. He wanted something simple and outdoorsy. He would have liked a little more blue, but these are the fabrics I accumulated. It has a flannel backing.

Quilt a day #47

I had a busy day with a teacher appreciation lunch and 4-H leaders meeting and sitting in on Doug's search and rescue meeting which lasted an hour longer than mine did. However, I did manage to finish this top I showed in progress a couple days ago. I am debating borders or no border and just quilting and binding. It will take some auditioning to get to that point. I am absolutely thrilled with this quilt. I used the State Flower fabrics from many years ago and all the frame strips were from my scraps. There are 50 big diamonds and then I used some of the fabrics to fill in around the edges. Right now it measure 38 X 55 approx.

Quilt a day #46

I have been distracted and haven't posted for a couple of days. Friday we went to our daughter Lisa's senior Engineering Design Expo at University of Idaho. Here she is at her booth with the clarinet reed maker she and her team made. She is a Bio Engineering major but there weren't any projects in her major and she had played clarinet in school so this is the project she ended up on. It's hard to believe my second child will be a college graduate in two weeks and her sister her graduated from college in 2008.I am working on a bunch of scrap projects and machine quilting. This is the quilt I am machine quilting for my friend Jo. I saw the June/July issue of Quilt magazine on the newstand and the cover quilt grabbed me. It was done in more Kaffe Fassett style fabrics, but I decided to make a smaller version in my state flowers fabrics. I had to improvise on a couple of them since I didn't have the full collection and I had gotten scraps from my friend Tamra. I had little dots on them to make sure I had one for every state. I had thrown them up on the wall but I am not sure why I am keeping up there, because I need to rearrange them anyway after sewing colors around each diamond.Last, here are a couple of "pin holders" a neighbor made me years ago when we still had the weekly hand quilting group here.