Lovely, lovely Tracey Porter

I ran into JoAnns the other day to pick up some fabric for a baby quilt for a girl I grew up with who is expecting her first baby, a girl, in August. I just want to make something little and small and fun that you can't get elsewhere and most people making you quilts won't make. The Tracy Porter fabric was all on sale, and this pink fabric caught my eye. I like it. I was thinking about making myself a pair of pyjama pants with it. I love pyjama pants. So I had to buy several yards of it.

Tea and Quilts

I just got some pictures developed (I know, I'm one of the few still using film, right?) and I finally got a good picture of my Amadeus quilt, so I thought I'd share, even though they didn't display the full quilt. You can't get a good picture of a quilt without hanging it, I think. My Mom was one of the organizers of a Ladie's Tea and they had a quilt show as their theme this year, so she asked if I wanted to display one of my quilts. Thus the hanging quilt.

Bags

I almost hate to post because I love that orchid up at the top so much. But life goes on. This is another project that I have been working on. Just haven't finished it till now. I had a hard time finding clips & rings that weren't ridiculously expensive to finish it up. My inspiration for this was at the Ballard Designs website. This bag I like, although I like my monograms better, so I thought I'd try to make something similar myself.


I have enough green fabric to make a smaller bag as well, and I think that this time I will make one that doesn't have separate sides. I also think that I'll do a chocolate colored monogram on the next one. I really liked how that color looked on the quilt monogram. I also bought fabric to make a robin's egg blue one. Yeah!

Lava Orchid

I got a lovely new orchid this past weekend at Meijers. We were out in Ohio for my brother's college graduation and we stopped in at Meijers, cause I love to look around there when I have a chance. Just something different.

My husband and I consider ourselves to be orchid collectors of a sort, although this is only our 3rd. Well, we did have another one, but we killed it. We like somewhat unusual ones. We can keep them alive, but we don't seem to be able to get them to flower again. We'll have to work on that. In the meantime, I like to take pictures of the flowers of each of them so that we won't forget what they look like!

Monogram version 2

I revised the monogram this time around as well. I think maybe I like this one better. Ignore the spots where it looks dirty. My flash must have reflected on something there.

Quilt Top Finished Part Deux

I finished Tim & Carol's quilt top version 2. I kinda like it. Now I need to put the monogram on the corner and fold it up to wait until I can go to Mom & Dad's and baste it. I'm going to use the khaki fabric for the back and the chocolate fabric for the binding. I'll keep the quilting really simple, since its all squares. I sorta want to make a black and white one for myself.

Pretty Things

Lately turkey feather's been posting some really cute stuff! Check out the fun apron! I'm also drooling over her gorgeous peony.

I have a tree peony planted at my mom's house that looks similar. I bought it several years ago from WalMart and it took 3 years to bloom one single huge spectacular bloom. Last year was the second year - there were 2 pretty spectacular flowers! This past fall, though, my Mom accidently cut it down when she was cutting down her regular peonies. We were afraid that might have done it in, but it appears to be recovering much better than you'd expect. I see at least one bud and possible 2 or 3 more. There was a sucker of a herbaceous peony in the middle of it last year, so I'm really hoping that it is all really the tree peony that is coming back up.

This is it from last year.

Starting Over

I've given up on the blue and green quilt for my brother's wedding gift. I like it, but I've discovered that his fiancee is apparently going to have nothing but brown in the house. I believe their couch is tan, and every thing I've seen on her registry is taupe. SOOO. I'm rethinking this.

I ordered a TON of the brown and khaki fabric from fabric.com from the Kona cotton solids. I got a good price and free shipping for approximately 15 yards of fabric! Yeah! Enough for the khaki fabric to be used as the back as well, since I couldn't think of a thing that would look nice instead. So I had to shrink each square down half an inch. It makes it a queen size quilt, I believe. I cut out all of the brown fabric and started on the khaki and I had to stop and make a sample block, since I'm just that impatient and I have to be able to see the end result.

Crazy little me

So I haven't had much to post lately. I've been busy. I promised my mother that I would make these coasters for her for a tea that she is helping to host. Its a decent size event that the old ladies love and this year's theme was quilting. The different ladies host a table and set it with their own china, etc. My mom was doing one, so I made her these coasters in lieu of saucers for her tea cups.

Wow. What a dummy I am!

I hand appliqued the center circles on and then I hand sewed the edges together. They are pieced on both the front and the back. It took forever! They did turn out rather cute, though. The sad thing was that I was up till 1:00 AM on the day of the tea finishing them up, wearing my mother's glasses to see. Sheesh.