Still Quilting!

So much has happened since my last post! I got behind and then it seems like it was easier to let the blog go than catch up. However, I decided to give it a try now.

I threw a ring ceremony and reception for my oldest daughter Amy and her finance Nate August 14th in Orofino. The next morning Lisa and I had to take off at 3:30 AM for the airport to fly to Atlanta. She is at Georgia Tech for a two year Master's program. This photo is at her apartment complex.We went to Orem, Utah, Sept. 3rd for Amy's reception and to meet all of Nate's family. We weren't allowed to participate in the wedding in Salt Lake, so I don't have much to say about that. I took this photo after everyone else left. I did get Lisa's quilt finished in time for her to take it to Georgia with her.I also made Amy and Nate a quilt this summer. I pieced it at the Leavenworth retreat in June and had been working on it off and on all summer. I did finish it before their wedding! Amy had picked the colors and the pattern.That's enough for this post!

Today is my birthday

Now normally I wouldn't make that the title of a blog post, but I just had to share this poem from friend Sue V. in Illinois wrote me, thank you Sue! I think it's fabo in your words!

Happy birthday our Julie H.!

Happy birthday to the gal who always has a smile
A cheerful note, a caring tone....
She makes the day worthwhile

Here's wishing you the best of days
From morning thru the night
A stack of fabric, spools of thread....
Whatever your delight...

May this day be warm and sunny
But never oh too hot!
May you find just what you wish for
And may it hit the spot!

For birthdays come but once a year
From them we can't steer clear
Counting numbers, OY to that!
A sneer, a guffaw, a jeer...

Happy b-day dear Julie
Happy b-day to you
I hope today is sunny
And your b-day skies are blue
I hope you enjoy the memories
Have cake and eat it to
And one more wish from this here state
(This one is just from me)
>From "corn" to "spuds" .....a birthday smile
May your day be all it can be!

Have a great day!!!

Sue V.

New Quilt Top and a Light Experiment

This was a rough day dealing with a leaking hot water tank that ruined a couch the floor below it and all the chaos that comes from working on plumbing. However during all the commotion we managed to finished Lisa's college graduation quilt top! She designed it on EQ5 (even though I have 6 & 7 both here they are not installed!) Now to get it quilted...This is the school guinea pig we are babysitting for the summer.Tonight we went to test the theory that florescent tubes would glow under high voltage power lines. It worked! We leased some farm ground recently that has power lines coming from the dam headed to Montana. One picture is with a flash and one without.

Organized Sewing Room

This was a major undertaking. I was so frustrated by all the "stuff" I have and spent over a week reorganizing and going through everything. We have a big unfinished rec room and my room is in a corner with one small window covered by a deck. I thought I was going to get to move into the rest of the basement but that didn't pan out, so I took a small portion.This is an 8' by 7' design wall, flannel covered Styrofoam. It is movable and is standing in front of my project shelves.
This is my boxes of fabric containing pieces 1/4 yard to 1 yard long along with some projects. I was standing in the doorway of my sewing room looking out.

More stuff outside my sewing room.

Sisters Quilt Show

I haven't had much time to post pictures, but I have been having a stupendously marvelous fabulous time in Sisters, Oregon. We head home in a few minutes but I will post a picture or two. I just randomly picked a few and I will have to edit descriptions later.

Hooray for the Red, White and Blue

In keeping with today being with the 4th of July I am showing some patriotic quilts I have. The first one is the oldest of the group. In the early 90's there was a block contest at a local shop. They sold you a packet of f abric and you made a block (adding one or two fabrics if needed). I was the lucky winner of the blocks and this was my original design for a setting. I purchased additional fabrics to finish it off.This next quilt is from a set of blocks I won. Now I feel bad that I can't quite remember the story, but I think they were from one of the first WASIQ retreats in Leavenworth WA and my friend Deb gave them to me because they were too "white". I know that sounds strange, but she was more into the muddier colors, creams, etc. I love this quilt!This quilt is one of my favorites. It's called Old Glory and I had ordered it as a BOM. Several people I knew bought the book and made their own versions, at least two of them were hand quilted. Mine is hand appliqued, but machine quilted.This mini was from a swap last year on the Quilting Gallery blog. It was a spring swap and my mini came from Holland! It just happened to be our patriotic colors and the windmill is so cute.

Quilt Contest

I entered a quilt contest on Quilting Gallery called Friendships. The voting is open through Sunday. The first quilt I made using this pattern is shown on my webshots. I couldn't find a picture of it here, although I know it's on a CD somewhere so click on the link!

I have shown this before, but we are revisiting it. When my friend Deb saw the above mentioned quilt in 2008 she fell in love with it. That surprised me as she was not a big batik fan. For her birthday in 2009 I made her this version of the quilt. I used a very, very thin batting because with her emphysema she couldn't handle weight on her. Also in 2009 I pieced my own queen size one. I quilted it this year and hadn't shown a picture of it finished yet so I've included it below.This is my queen size version followed by a quilting closeup.

Time Flies!

I'm back! I got really busy with the end of school and lots of things going on. I will start trying to catch up by starting with current stuff and going backwards! Even though I have several quilts to quilt for others, I take time to do charity work as I have shown before. I also went to a quilt retreat father's day weekend and had a great time. I brought home a quilt that was all basted and ready for quilting and did that in two days and mailed it off to the gift recipient, the organizer of the retreat. That is the first quilt I am showing here along with some of the border quilting. I did bunches of cat sayings. The recipient was thrilled along with my cat who thought it was his!!! I told the recipient the cat hair was a bonus!I had ordered another kit from the Downy Quilts for kids project and made the quilt up (it comes precut) this weekend and got it quilted and bound and mailed today. Another organization I support is American Hero Quilts. I won a set of lotto blocks at the retreat I went to in Leavenworth, WA and the layout was provided. I had some 2.5" strips of patriotic fabrics from Connecting Threads and saw a quilt in Quiltmaker and make my own version. I didn't follow their sizing, etc. I love how it turned out!

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.

Quilt a day #45

Today was a surprise when I woke up to snow outside! My pretty tulips were all buried under snow and the roads were a mess. The snow has melted but the winds have been atrocious.

I have had bits and pieces of time and cut up a bunch of scraps and have been making scrappy 9 patches for a swap and some for when the blocks come back and then I further cut up a bunch of scraps into 10", 5", and 2.5" squares. My batiks are being cut into different pieces because I had a quilt in mind but now can't remember what!

When I went to put the 5" squares in the drawer I realized all my 3" finished 4 patches from several months of guild swapping were there. I laid the out and then made some more to fill in to a certain size. I haven't added borders yet, but this is what I have so far. I will donate it to a charity.

Quilt a day #44

I don't have anything exciting to say but decided I should post a photo since I forgot to last night. I was too busy sewing 4 patches trying to finish an old UFO. I knew I couldn't concentrate on machine quilting so I found something tedious to do!

This is a quilt I made for my niece several years ago. Oh my, it's been 10 years now. My SIL bought all the fabric and did a lot of the applique by machine. I finished the blocks, assembled and quilted it.This is a wallhanging I made many years ago as a gift for my friend Lynda. It's a really bad photo. It's probably 12-13 years ago that I made this from a Pat Campbell design.

Quilt a day #43

I went to a quilt show in Clarkston today and put a few pics on my webshots account. I was taking inspirational photos of black and white quilts and 30's quilts. I usually take more photos at a show but I kept running into people I knew and getting distracted. I didn't buy a thing, which is unfortunate for the vendors, but nothing grabbed me and I have a lot of fabric and UFO's!

When I got home from the show I took a photo of my tulips. It was cool and windy so they weren't open. My son had parked his sister's car in front of the house so I had to take a side view! Later on I will plant petunias between the crocuses and tulips. This quilt is a Yellow Brick Road I made for my friend Joann several years ago when she graduated from college.

Quilt a day #42

Amy and Nate left today, Doug took them to the airport while I went to work. It was a great visit and now I have a three day weekend. I had 4-H here this afternoon and will tomorrow as well. I am leading both quilting and sewing for four girls this year so it's a challenge.

These are a couple flannel quilts I made several years ago. One was a Thimblerries design for my friend Deb and the other is a queen size trip around the world quilt that is on my bed in the winter (along with 4 other quilts)!