Time flies

My mind is filled with quotes like "The road to hell is paved with good intentions" and something about best-laid plans.
There's no way around the fact that June kicked my butt.
Over the past few years, I have dedicated my summer vacation to quilting. This year, I got a wild hair and volunteered to teach summer school. We are running a three-week math class, from 7:30 am til 12:30 pm. A little extra money, and afternoons free for quilting.
HA - another quote: Man plans, God laughs.
Mondays filled up with swim lessons. There were a few year-end parties, and a weekend church retreat. Then I got sick, and laid on the couch for a few days.
So, I have accepted the fact that the quilt I have been working on, which was planned as a gift for a wedding on June 25th, will not get done since I only have about 8 free hours between now and the time we leave. (heavy sigh) I was so optimistic when I started this project back in January! I still had hope when I was taking the paper foundations off in April! But darn this June - the fates conspired against me. Emily Post says we have four months to deliver gifts, right? (Or is that the rule for writing thank yous...I can never keep them straight.)

Quilting Time!

I've started the quilting phase of my paper-pieced gift. Nothing too complicated, although I am in the process of ripping out a row since the backing puckered...what a bummer!
To reward myself after an hour with the seam ripper, I have started a mystery quilt-along with the Quilts of Valor group. This one is designed by LeAnn at Persimmon Quilts. She uses a great method for the flying geese! (Look for clue #2 on quilt 12)

I thought I'd share a tip I learned from the Yarn Harlot - a counting thread.
That is the sleeve for a raglan sweater, and I need to decrease every 4th row. So, I grabbed some contrasting yarn, and laid it between stitches in the middle of the first decrease row. It's very easy to count those four rows, then bring the red yarn forward. You can use this method to keep track of how many times you've decreased along with counting the individual stitches.

And a tip for the quilters...I was getting stuck with the corners of some blocks on the mystery quilt. My machine was eating the tips and creating a tangled mess of thread.
So, I flipped the fabric so I could start sewing on a wider edge rather than the tip.
Happy Stitching!

New Projects

Thursday afternoon I had some time to kill, so I decided to go to the quilt store. I planned to get fabric for a mystery quilt that Judy is hosting. Of course, I browsed the sale rack while waiting for inspiration to strike. Great sales technique - 20% off when you take the rest of the bolt! That explains about half of those fabrics. Hey, I don't shop very often, so when I do, it's definitely a SPREE.
Then I picked out some fat quarters and fat eighths, whatever struck my fancy.

The greens here are my accent fabrics with the marbled tan/cream background for the mystery quilt. I am hoping it has somewhat of a manly look so I can put it in the QOV pile.
Then, I joined the Block Lotto group. You can find a link in my sidebar --->
Each month there is a different pattern, and when the winners are announced, you send your blocks to that person. It's a fun way to try some new patterns, and maybe I'll get lucky sometimes and win enough blocks to make a quilt.

Have you figured out that I am *not* a monogamous quilter? LOL. Time to go cut more squares for my centennial project!

No patience

This is the cutting table in my sewing room. I had some very nice internet buddies who sent fabric for the Centennial Project, and I have been cutting my little pieces out. I wanted to see how the scrappy fabrics would look in the stark solid design of the Arizona flag, so I concentrated on the center star - re-drafted, counted each color...
and just couldn't wait to start sewing! Even with the darker pieces thrown in, I think I have a decent golden star for the center. My red and yellow rays start as nine-patches.At this point I am about 5% done with the cutting! I worried a bit that I should finish collecting the fabric first - if you remember from the first post, I wanted to use each fabric only twice, but in my rush to start the golden star, I included some fabric about 10 times. Of course this project should wait - I have a quilt that needs to be loaded on the longarm, but I was too excited about my postage stamps!

Centennial Project

Arizona's 100th birthday will arrive in 2012. That's a nice round number, so I set myself a challenge - quilt the state flag (pictured on the left) as a postage stamp quilt. "Postage Stamp" refers to the individual pieces...I'm aiming for 1" finished. For the centennial part of the project, I decided to use 2000 pieces. I'll make up the other 12 in the border!

Kendra wanted to make a similar design, so I sketched the starburst, and she filled in the details:I've started to collect fabric, since I want a very scrappy quilt. By scrappy, I mean 1,000 different fabrics! I'd like to have pieces duplicate only once :-) If you have blue, red or yellow/gold scraps, please email me for a mailing address. It will take a major effort to collect the fabric and get this pieced and quilted in about two years!
I'll close with a random shot of fabric, ready for the washing machine and destined for quilt backs.

4 years and counting

Tomorrow is my blog-iversary! WOW. Can't believe it's been that long, time flies, my baby is growing up, you know all the cliches.My other works-in-progress...

The test swatch for a lace shawl. In my dreams, I hope to have it finished to wear at a wedding in June. LOL - don't hold your breath! Counting yarn overs, k2tog and ssk takes concentration which is difficult to find when a pre-schooler is in the room.
Most of my time has been spent on this paper pieced quilt. 42 blocks, 40 pieces per block. Yeah, it took a while! Now I can have fun quilting it. And you'll have to wait for the final reveal since it's a gift and I don't want to ruin the surprise :-)
Finally, what every girl needs in Phoenix, a wool sweater. At least it's short sleeved! The pattern, Bob, comes from Knitty.com. This is much easier to work on while Kendra plays, so there is hope of seeing a finished product in a few weeks. Of course, then it will sit in the closet until the temperature drops back down to 60 degrees...perhaps this will debut for Thanksgiving dinner!

National Quilting Day

I am going to miss my guild meeting because Kendra has strep throat. That kind of put a damper on my Spring Break plans to quilt while she was at daycare...and I am officially sick of all the cartoons on Disney Channel and Nickelodeon. Thank goodness there is basketball this time of year!

I am working on the last six blocks of my paper pieced quilt, so that huge project is on track for its June deadline. I had most of the thread I need for the quilting stage, and managed to pick up the last two colors at the annual show last weekend.

Kendra is a budding artist herself - she is in a rainbow phase, and must cover every square inch of paper in her drawings. I've learned not to pick her up during art time at daycare, because I have to wait for her to finish. This week she colored what looked like a log cabin quilt block, so I had her dig through my scraps to find fabric pieces - TA DA!

Sunday Sewing

I am working on the last dozen blocks for the secret project. What should I do with these oddball scraps that are left over? I'm thinking about a log cabin...Although this picture was taken in January, we have had a repeat of torrential rain this morning.
Perfect day to curl up on the couch!
It's not all doom and gloom, we have some lovely rose blossoms!

Knitting Update

I do have to mention my blog-iversary during this Winter Olympic season. I joined the first Knitting Olympics, the brain-child of Stephanie McPhee Pearl, the Yarn Harlot. She will be knitting a gorgeous Dale of Norway fair isle sweater. Yes, from cast on to finished sweater in 17 days. She is a knitting legend. I will be plodding along on my socks:I finished the front of a sweater vest. The yellow marks show where I have to cut the steeks to make the V-neck. I'm a little nervous at the prospect of attacking my knitting with scissors, but my mom says it helps to think of it as fabric :-)
Here is a tempting little quilt project that I may use as a reward for passing the halfway mark on my paper-piecing stars. A Valentine Sudoku!

Quilt Designs

I had planned a beautiful, photo-heavy post of the quilts I am working on. Tragically, I cannot find the usb cord that goes with the digital camera, so that will have to wait. Luckily, I took a picture months ago of the quilt that is currently on the longarm:It is the Boxy Stars pattern from Bonnie's Quiltville. Here is a rough idea of the quilting:
meandering around the stars, sun rays in the stars, and a wavy filler in the border.

Sunday Sewing

Well, I had hoped to be a better blogger in 2010. It was a busy week back at school, and all my projects are at that middle plateau which isn't very interesting to photograph.

During vacation, I got the first phase of seaming done on my mitered square blanket:All the colors are sewn together in groups of three. Now, I need a lesson on mattress stitch along a cast-on edge, then I can get the blocks together and start the border. I wanted ALL the squares to intersect, but my layout didn't work with the number of blocks I made...you can see the pairs on the left are different than the design on the right.
I only had time to get one top quilted on the longarm during the holidays:
I used Judy's Freeze Frame pattern for the center, and added my own piano-key borders to make this Quilt of Valor. It just needs a label and then it's ready to go in the mail.
I am steadily knitting my Noro Striped Vest during TV time. Kendra is fanatical about Disney princesses, so we have the videos of Sleeping Beauty, Beauty and the Beast and Cinderella on constant rotation. She's napping right now and I'm enjoying the AZ Cardinals domination of Green Bay this afternoon! I'm trying to get a couple blocks done each week on my paper piecing quilt but it's a gift, so no pictures to spoil the surprise.

Standing on the edge

In review, here are the first sentences from the 2009 entries of this blog:

Jan = We visited the new aquarium at the Wildlife World Zoo on New Year’s Day.

Feb = I'm keeping track as Baby K grows by taking pictures with a stuffed bunny.

Mar = Phew...I finished the hanging sleeve on my show entries last night at 9:30pm.

April = Hey Blogger, why is uploading photos hit-or-miss these days?!?

May = Here is my progress on the QOV Mystery (#7 from Persimmon Quilts).

June = I spent most of Monday at my longarm.

July = It officially HOT here in the Valley of the Sun...105 and above every day for the next two weeks at least.

Aug = It's time to start on the vintage quilt.

Sep = Work is kicking my butt this year.

Oct = I finished knitting the last of the mitered squares - Hallelujah!

Nov = ...no writing!

Dec = We bought a new Christmas tree, and I'm looking forward to decorating it tonight.

I did a lot of quilting, which was fun, most of the time. (We shall not speak of the purple beast, LOL) My knitting focus was, and continues to be, my mitered square afghan. Although I vowed not to cast on any socks until it was done, I faltered on Christmas Day at my mom's house. Santa brought sock yarn, what's a girl to do???

We've looked back over the year, and it is also the close of a decade. What were the highlights of the last ten years for you? I have to say I much preferred the 00s to the 90s...thanks to my wonderful family! After a lifetime in the Air Force, as a brat and a service member, it is amazing to think I have been in the same city this whole decade, and seven years in the same house.

HAPPY NEW YEAR -- MAY ALL YOUR DREAMS COME TRUE!

New Quilt Designs

I finished Judy's "Freeze Frame" pattern...I'll post a full picture after I get the binding on. Here is the design I used in the big squares. I'm calling it "Shark Tooth." Just a few spiky arches in one direction then switch towards the other corner of the block.Here's how it looks on fabric:
I used green, gold and brown fabrics, hoping for a manly look since I will send this off to a soldier as part of the Quilts of Valor project. I wanted a simple, quick quilting design to complement the blocks. I really like how it turned out!

In the smaller squares, I used a design I learned from Linda Matteoti. She was having us practice with rulers, stitching from the midpoint to the corner of a square. I thought it made a cool star:So, I call this the half corner star, since you travel from the halfway point to the corner :-)
Here's a diagram to help you visualize the stitching line.Five days left of vacation...it always goes by much too fast. I did NOT get enough quilting time!! I have lots of things mentally lined up to work on in the New Year, but I have a project with a deadline that must take priority. It's a gift, so no pictures. If you need inspiration, visit Leah and her free motion design project.

Tis the Season

For Christmas pageants, where at least we *look* like an angel...
Baking cookies with Grandma...Santa came through with a pink Barbie bike and pink Barbie helmet...
And Grandma's driveway is the perfect place to play!All the fun sure tires a girl out!
Enjoy your holidays!

New Project!

We bought a new Christmas tree, and I'm looking forward to decorating it tonight. Bentley says we'll have some popcorn, too, and I always watch "The Sound of Music" when I put up my tree. Not really a classic Christmas tale, but it was always on TV during the holidays when I was little, so there's the "tradition."

I cast on for a sweater vest. It uses two colors of Noro variegated yarn. I love watching the new colors emerge! This is a testament to my increasing skill as a knitter...it is working up very quickly.
The mitered blanket is about halfway done. Yes, I *have* been working on it for years! I finished the individual blocks a few months ago, and I started the seaming process. Note my two different techniques. The right side is done with crochet, and the left is mattress stitch. I'm kicking myself because I tried to figure out mattress stitch from a book, decided it didn't look good, and went with crochet. The crochet doesn't look very good either, but it was faster than my interpretation of mattress stitch! Over Thanksgiving, my mom taught me the right way to do mattress stitch, which doesn't take very long, and makes an invisible seam. You guessed it, I will be taking out all the crochet seams. This project has taken so long that it is worth doing the best I can.

The purple beast left my house a couple weeks ago, hooray! I am taking a break from quilting for other people so I can work on a few of my own projects. I dove right into this beauty.

Paper pieced, 40 pieces per block, and I need 42 blocks. Oh, and to make things exciting, it needs to be done (pieced, quilted and bound) by mid-June. (No, I can't quit my day job)
1680 pieces to sew, plus picking off all the paper...I'll play Scarlett O'Hara and think about that tomorrow!

All Talk...

...no writing! NaNoWriMo fell by the wayside very quickly. I got about 2500 words into my novel, realized it was really hard work, and promptly rationalized that I have other, more important things to do in my life. Any time I flirt with another hobby it fans the flames of my quilting desires, so that's what I've been focusing on.

Which brings us to the topic of the purple beast. Quilt from HE&L! I started out with beautiful feathery pinwheels in the background areas. Quilted down to the last row, and the bottom border had huge ripples. GRRR. Thought I could pick out a few blocks and ease in the fullness (this was back in August...school started, life got hectic, ripping was easy to ignore.) October rolled around and I started to get nervous messages from the customer, so I finished ripping and put the quilt back on the longarm. Darn, re-sewed that side and still had extra fabric in the border. Decided the only fix was to rip out everything and start over. Bentley helped, we worked every spare minute ripping stitches out for a whole week, and finally I was ready to sew again. I rotated the quilt 90 degrees, measured carefully, and started quilting with a pantograph. Yesterday, I got to the bottom edge and about lost my mind. STILL HUGE RIPPLES. The customer will just have to put up with a few puckers, because I have quilted the thing twice and can't make it flat. I have one spot left to quilt where my tension was off, and then it's done. I can't wait...better go check to see if there is any champagne in the pantry, LOL!

Sorry, no photos. Kendra is in a non-smiling mood these days when the camera comes out. Quite the little princess! She delights us everyday with snippets of songs from her music class and church choir. Just adorable.

It's a Conspiracy

The universe (or my internal editor, or fear of failure, or...) is throwing obstacles in the path of my novel-writing escapade. I have a quilt that I need to finish for a friend/customer. I've had this quilt (hereafter known as the purple beast) since June - it's a Christmas present. Other projects with more immediate deadlines kept cropping up, then school started, then I noticed a big mistake and had to rip out my quilting. I thought I had fixed the problem so that I could quilt like crazy this weekend and start my novel on November 1st with the other insane NaNoWriMo folks around the world. NOPE. The purple beast reared it's ugly head, and the only solution I could see was to rip out every stitch and start over. Ripping out quilting is a huge job. Which means the few hours of free time that I had intended to use for writing over the next month, are now usurped by the purple beast. But I refuse to give in without a fight, so I will give up some precious sleep, and write anyway. Take that Universe and purple beast - I'm not quitting!

How do you eat an elephant?

One bite at a time.

NaNoWriMo is code for National Novel Writing Month. I "win" if I write 50,000 words that somehow resemble a coherent story.

Yes, I know this is just more evidence that I am certifiably crazy. But, I need to stop dreaming and start doing. I was about 8 years old when I first got the idea to write a book. Then, in 6th grade, in a class for advanced students doing independent projects, I wrote a story and bound it between cardboard covers. My bookshelves are full of writers-how-to titles. Now it's time to get back in touch with my younger self who was able to put pencil to paper and end up with a finished story. That is my goal in November.

Phase 1 complete

I finished knitting the last of the mitered squares - Hallelujah! Phase 2 is the seaming. After I get the squares sewn in groups of three, I will lay them out to check on color placement and size (remember, the crazy plan is to have this fit my queen size bed). Then comes the border.

It's probably insane to think I could have this done by Christmas, but with cooler evening temperatures there is an incentive! And it was so fun to cast on a pair of socks after almost six months of stockinette stitch.

Here is Kendra, all ready for a sleepover at Grandma's. Everything is packed in her Disney princess backpack.
My latest quilt project was a log cabin charity quilt. I did some meandering leaves on the dark half of the log cabin, and a spiky ferny thing on the light side.Happy Stitching!

I quilted today!

Yay for me! I had a doctor's appointment this morning, so I burned a whole sick day and enjoyed some quiet time in my sewing room. Judy has started another Quilt for an Hour project. I was able to finish the first two steps...instructions are only posted on weekdays so I will definitely us the weekend for catching up!Does it count as stash-busting if you use someone else's stash??? I raided my mom's fabric collection for green and browns. I'm thinking masculine colors for a potential Quilt of Valor donation. I'd better get busy at the longarm so all the QOVs I've done this summer can be put to good use!! FYI - visit qovf.org for details about a Vermont effort to collect 200+ quilts for service members.

Of course, since I did NOT buy season tickets this year, the Phoenix Mercury have advanced to the second round of the WNBA playoffs! I keep meaning to go to a game, but when it comes right down to it, I'm usually too tired, don't want to drive downtown and pay for parking, food, etc. I've been able to watch most of the games through a live feed on my computer. Some of the playoff games are on ESPN2, which makes for good knitting time.
I'm almost done with my mitered square blanket!I need to block the blue-yellow-green squares, then the blue-pink-purple will be my last color combination, for a total of 81 individual blocks. I've seamed about a third of them, so I need to finish that and then knit the border. Maybe it will be done by Christmas?!?

Of course, I need a few days for this...
I got an email coupon from Barnes&Noble, so I stopped by after my appointment today. I didn't realize it was new on the shelf today! This is #7 in the Outlander series, so you really need to start from the beginning to get the full effect of Claire traveling through time via stone circles and falling in love with Highlander Janie Fraser. I've heard rumors of a movie version, but this is definitely a case where no mere human actor will be able to live up to the millions of reader fantasies!