Etsy Shop

I've jumped on the bandwagon and added an Etsy shop for my excess craftiness!

Pillows!

I decided to use up some of my scraps and make a few pillows. I am so pleased with how they turned out. Even though they really have no place in my house. I'll have to find a home for them. I really like these, though. I may have to try some other colors.

Square Spirals part two

Its finished!! It turned out cuter than I thought. Now I just have to get it to her.

Square Spirals

I started quilting this little baby quilt today. It turned out alright, I guess. I just need to decide exactly what to do with the border and put on the binding. Enough for one week, right?

Strawbabies!

Is there anything better than Strawberries fresh from the field?! I dragged my poor husband out with me today to pick them. As we walked to the field, he told me that he worked at a strawberry field one summer. I didn't know that. Apparently, he just sat at the booth all day and didn't pick, but I was surprised. I'm the little country girl, and I've never picked. Its somewhat ironic that moving to Pittsburgh would be my first chance to go pick them myself. I suppose I could have done it back home, but that would have required taking a day off of work, which is not something I did very often. But I thought that maybe it would be something fun that we could do together, get me out of the house, and would be cheaper than buying them already picked. So anyway.

We drove out to Reilly's Summer Seat Farm this morning. They told us when we called that the strawberries had been neglected this year because they were building something. I forget what. Maybe another greenhouse? Anyway. They weren't kidding. The berries were small and the plants were covered with weeds. We spent probably an hour and got 3.6 lbs for .99/pound. Not bad, but they're pretty tiny. They taste good anyway. We'll just have to try another farm. They were friendly, though, and the garden center was nice. We'll have to try them for raspberries later.

Thing is, there's a really good farm at home that we always buy our berries from that are just so big and lovely. Oh well. We'll see if we can't find something. A lady in the patch told us that one place she stopped at was selling them already picked for $4.50/quart. Eek. I can't spend that much on berries. I was so hoping to buy around 24 quarts this year!

Pink Log Cabin Blocks

I started this quilt as a baby quilt for a girl I grew up with who is due in August. Eek. I just realized that the shower is 2 weeks away. I'm dumb. I had better get my act together! This should have been done is 12" blocks and made 3 x 3. I'm not sure what to do. It won't take too long if I can just figure out what I'm doing.

Wedding Quilt is Finito!

I've finished Tim & Carol's quilt and its a whole 2 months early!! I'm shocked with myself. Its very simple quilting, but I think its quilted heavily enough to make it wrinkly and quilty. I realized that I didn't prewash and I thought that might cause problems with the chocolate bleeding, but I put some swatches in bowls of water last night and there is not a drop of dye in the bowls. Wahoo! I'm debating about washing the quilt at Mom's house this weekend. I love when it shrinks and starts to get softer, but it looks nice when its stiff. Is anyone else thinking that my use of monograms might be a bit heavy-handed?? Oh well. Carol likes monograms, I think, and no one else will get them anything with monograms on it. And I have to get my money's worth out of this machine, right?

Monogramming Towels

I've monogrammed my first set of towels. Wow. It took forever! All I did was two hand towels and two bath towels and I was working on them from 8:30 PM to 3:00 AM. What in the world?!?

I used chocolate thread on white towels and they had to be done twice to fill in all the gaps. As I've mentioned before, I have a problem with the needle falling out as well and that means that I have to sit there and watch it like a hawk just in case. It did fine on the hand towels, but when I got to the bath towels, half way through on each one, the needle fell out and then the machine seemed to lose its place. I had to start back at the beginning on each. Which was okay, since I had written down the setting for the monogram placement. WRONG. The same setting would not start in the same place. How is that possible?! Anyway. I figured out how to get it to work and then I had to go back and start it in the middle again since the beginning had been done twice and the second half had to be done again. Argh.

They're done, at any rate. They are for my brother and his fiancee and her shower is tomorrow. I am leaving today to go to my parents. I don't have anything to put them in or wrap them with, of course. You'd think I was the most disorganized person on earth. I'm really not, I swear.

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.

The Green Fuzzies

I stopped in at Michaels yesterday and I found several really good deals. Yeah deals!

I bought four bunches of white lilies to put in a sap bucket for $2 each. Not bad. I also found a couple tall pots and painted them white. I wanted them for some amaryllis stems that I bought at Christmas, although they turned out to be too small for those stems. They were cheap anyway. I'll find something else to use those for. I found one of those PVC quilt hoops for $7. They aren't my favorite way to quilt, but you can't beat the price.

My favorite find was this yarn for $2. Cheap cheap! Its Moda Dea Eden in Fig Leaf. I have been really good and haven't bought any yarn this winter. Its not as if I don't have enough scarves already. But you can't pass up yarn at that price. So I started a scarf. Its just so soft and pretty.

Blocks 1 & 2

These are the first two blocks. Can't decide what I think. Part of me is excited, but another part of me just doesn't think they're quite right. They're not laying flat. I'm not sure why that is, but I'll have to work on it. All in all, I think they're interesting. I never really like a top until its a quilt, anyway. We'll just have to keep going. Its ridiculously easy, though. No real thought required.

Blues Baby!

I finally picked out some fabric to start a new quilt. Wahoo!

Its two shades of blue that I'm hoping I will like once I put it together. I also have no particular game plan, although a rough inspiration is this quilt at dsquilts.com, although roughly. I'm not sure how attached I am to that design and how closely it will come out, since I don't really intend for it be exactly like that. We'll see. Its my first time to try anything "odd."

On a side note, I went for my first walk in the park and around the reservoir for the spring and that pleased me very much! I called my Mom and made her accompany while I walked (via cellphone, not in person) and that made in nice enough to walk for at least an hour. Yeah spring! Boo treadmill. The sun makes my apartment too hot in the mornings to get on the treadmill and the air conditioning really hasn't been turned on yet. Walks are looking good to me.

Oh - and I bought my first sandals of the season as well. Yay yay yay! I love sandals.

Another side note - I went to a quilt show and an orchid show this weekend. The quilt show was okay. I'm not too crazy about looking at most other people's quilts, since I'm not often a fan of their color choices, but it was interesting. Too many people have their quilts sent out for quilting by long arms, I think. I suppose it has its place, but why quilt if you don't actually "Quilt" anything? I did, however, briefly catch a shop owner doing a demo on needle punch embroidery. I'm intrigued. It did, however, seem to be another one of those things that I would enjoy doing, but what in the world would I do with it? We're still contemplating that. The orchid show was fun, but it was too crowded. I would have liked to get some different orchids. I have 2 at present and one is relatively new and the flowers have since died on it. The other one just grows. No flowers. Tsk.