Amy's Birthday Quilt

My daughter Amy's birthday is not until September, but she wanted a lightweight quilt with navy blue on one side.  The quilt needed to be HUGE to be a spread for her king bed.  The intent was it could be a light quilt for the summer and an underlay for her queen size quilt I made for her wedding in 2010 in cooler weather.   

I didn't measure it after it was finished, but it was something like 116 X 126.  When Amy was here in April she picked a top out of my stash.  I had to make it larger and she also picked out some navy fabric at a stop at a fabric store.  It is a modern style print.  My late friend Debi had provided some of the fabrics and pattern for the 30's quilt called Gentle Moments from McCall's magazine MANY years ago.

It was a tough project to quilt under my machine, but I got it done.  I had to do a two color binding to make it work.  I had never done that before and I like the results.

Gentle Moments 

Backing - I extended the fabric by adding a panel I had on hand.

Two Color Binding

Closeup detail of the front

My birthday is coming up soon and I am part of a forum on Connecting Threads and I'm in a birthday swap.  My gift arrived early!  I love it!  I love the purple and the embroidery design.

This past weekend I was a volunteer at Camp Erin, sponsored by the Willow Center.  There are many locations around the country, and there is one about 2 1/2 hours away at Camp Wooten.  Having suffered a personal, tragic loss, I knew I could empathize with these kids who had lost love ones.  I worked in arts and crafts and had an amazing experience.  The whole camp is a huge undertaking and this year there was 52 campers and 60 adults.  There were lots of donations of supplies.  The kitchen crew has a tough job and they did great at providing healthy meals and snacks.  Everyone was so kind and helpful and the Cabin Big Buddies worked with the kids tirelessly.  Overall it was tough being away from the land of internet and phones, but I was so busy I didn't have time anyway!  I was exhausted last night and I'm moving sluggishly today but I did get out for my 3 mile walk.  I highly recommend this experience to anyone.

Check out what others are up to at Patchwork Times.

Happy 4th and LOTS of Quilting!

Happy 4th of July!  Happy Independence Day!  This is a picture of our flag flying proudly, hard to see the waves of grain in the background, bt that is a spring wheat field.

I have gotten a lot accomplished in the last week!  I have pretty much ignored yard work, but I will have to tackle that this week.  I wish I had taken pictures at the wedding we went to Saturday evening but did not take my phone or camera.  The location was beautiful in a wheat field overlooking a lot of fields including some of ours.  The reception was at the former Grange Hall, now Community Hall next to our rural volunteer fire station.  The log building was built in the 30's.  I'm mentioning this because last week I showed the quilt I was giving as a gift and here it is all finished!  There is one closeup block and one scenic quilt picture.  I just did an allover free motion stars and loops in brown variegated thread.

center block - quilting closeup

Lewis and Clark Bicentennial quilt - gifted July 2, 2016

Next quilt up was Lisa's quilt I have shown parts of.  I am not going to show the completed quilt until she receives it.  She should receive it tomorrow on her birthday!  I was going to wait until my sisters were here next weekend to send it down with them, but mailed it instead.

After that quilt was quilted and bound I tackled Amy's quilt.  Again, I am not going to show it until Amy receives it. I am mailing it tomorrow if I get the binding done today.  Since we are going to a celebration later today I hope I can get it finished!

Since my granddaughter is only 2 and can't read yet I will show the progress I made on her quilt! I had gotten this far in May.  Her birthday was May 7th, but since she is still in a crib there was not a huge rush to finish her big girl quilt.  This is the Farm Girl Vintage quilt, perfect for the granddaughter of farmers and it has lots of pink!

After staring at the top as it was below, I knew I had to enlongate it before adding borders.  I made a row of block using leftover pieces I had in a baggie.  I had drastically overcut 2" squares so several of the blocks used those.

Farm Girl Vintage

Here is the finished quilt top, twin size.  The border looks wrinkled as it is sticking to my flannel design wall.  I have horse fabric for the backing since Nicole loves horses.  It's next up for quilting!

 Linking up with Patchwork Times.

Progress on Quilt Tops

I have made some progress this week.  I am making both my daughters big quilts at their request.  I showed LIsa's last week, it is a queen size.  I couldn't get a great picture without things in the way but this is a sort of layout on the leaves.  There will be three vines randomly coming down and leaves will be on either side.  I wanted to see if I had enough.  They have fusible web on the back with the paper still attached currently.  The quilt will be bound in red.

Gentle Moments partially finished

I have this top in my collection for awhile.  The pattern was in McCall's quilting in 2001 and my friend Debi wanted to make it and bought the pink. She gave it to me along with all her 30's. Amy wants a quilt roughly 126 X 108 with a very thin batting and navy blue on one side so it can play double duty.  When she was here she saw this in my stash and said it would work.  I had set it aside because there was a booboo.  I had somehow mismeasured on the pink border and the quilt was not laying flat.  After taking the outer borders off and removing 2" off each side I got it back to this point.  Then I had to make two more white boders and then the piano key and finished it off with the only piece of 30's I had that had enough yardage.  It's so big I didn't have a place to lay or hang it.  It's in my lumpy yard so it doesn't look even and it's wrinkled so ignore that!  It was sunny so the color is a bit washed.

Gentle Moments 109 X 125

strange mushroom



Linking up with Patchwork Times.

We have woods behind our house and I have been going out and laying out trails for our dog to follow.  She is 15 months old and is doing very well at her search and rescue training.  I loved this mushroom, not sure what it is, and I love the purple flowers on the skunk cabbage.  

skunk cabbage flowers

Road Trip and Quilting Progress

Yesterday I needed to go on a road trip to Sandpoint, ID, 7 hours of round trip driving, but it was a beautiful day, with beautiful scenery. As a reward I stopped at Bear Paw Quilting in Coeur d'Alene.  It is a gorgeous shop with so much variety!  From 30's to wool to Kaffe to modern to batiks and everything in between.  I have no business EVER buying more fabric, but I get bored sometimes.  I have so many projects to work on.  Both daughters want certain quilts, my granddaughter a needs a big girl quilt (she will be 2 in May) neighbor "kid" needs a wedding quilt July 2nd, and lets not mention those 40ish quilts that need quilted.

Don't laugh (I have one friend that will laugh!) but this is SOME of my fabric storage.  Yes, it is exploding!

We won't mention strings and strips.  I did make two cute blocks as leader enders when I was piecing the backing for Fire Island Hosta.  I will continue with this project but if Judy D. thought she had a lot of strings, she hasn't seen mine yet.  I'm afraid to put them all in one place because they will NOT fit in one big bin.

So back to my trip, I have been wanting to find fabric to make Tula Pink's City Sampler, 100 Modern Quilt Blocks.

I am not a green fan, never have been, BUT I was drawn to black, gray and lime green.  I bought the bottom 8 fabrics at Bear Paw and then stopped at Stitches and Petals in Moscow.  I bought the two fabrics on the top row left side.  Amazingly I found the next four from the left already in my stash in a FQ grouping from the Wild Hare in Orofino.  I then picked the final 4 fabrics on the top row right from my stash.  The most amazing find was 5 yards of this Kona gray for background already in my stash!

Now back to fun things, like defrosting my freezer and cleaning house! I did make a bit of machine quilting progress on Fire Island Hosta.

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!

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 #40

Amy and Nate are here and we went to my mom's for "snacks" tonight. We are stuffed to the brim and brought home a box of food, a big box! My mom loves to cook.

I didn't have time to peruse my photos much, but here is a quilt I bought as a precut John Flynn kit and I disliked it. I donated it as a baby quilt with a cute flannel backing.

Quitl a day #23

I had to run to Lewiston today for more blood work and misc. stuff. I have spent the evening cleaning my sewing room in preparation for the start of 4-H sewing and quilting starting up. I have 4 sewers that I know of, three of them first year.

These photos are old small but they are Sunbonnet Sue quilts I made my girls in the very early 90's. They are hand appliqued and hand quilted. Amy liked pink (still does) and Lisa liked purple.

Tops from Retreat

My daughter Amy has been here this week and along with self-imposed stress to finish a quilt to enter in the Palouse Patchers show this weekend and doing things with her, I finally got Brad and Amy to hold up some of the quilt tops I finished. The one that is in the show I didn't get a photo of, but I will tomorrow. It is the Prickly Pear from the post here. I had all the blocks done and set it together last weekend and quilted and bound it this week. I tacked down the sleeve on the way to Moscow early Friday morning as Amy drove!
I had Brad's graduation quilt precut and got it all pieced the first evening. It is a bit blurry, but it's a log cabin and you can see the fabrics here. The next quilt was the Canyon Dance quilt that I showed the fabrics on a couple posts ago. This is a large queen size quilt and I got it together on Friday. That's what sewing for 13 or 14 hours will do. These quilts are super easy to piece. I used templates to cut them out and they just sew together quickly and I didn't even pin.
I have another quilt top I pieced Saturday but it's not quite finished yet, it needs borders. Yes, I did get told more than once I was an over achiever!