"Winds of the Seasons" --Completed!

Here's my first entry for the quilt show, all done including hanging sleeve and label. It's hand-quilted... my stitches aren't terribly small yet, but they are pretty even, and the larger stitches (I think) work well with the folk-y style of the overall project. In the panels, I quilted the house outlines, the hills and the paths. There's a ribbon pattern quilted into the blue sections of the sashing, and then I added the cute little wooden buttons in the center of the pinwheels to make it that much more homespun-feeling. It's not "master quilter" quality, but I think I met the guild challenge of taking pre-printed blocks/panels and making them my own.

Christmas Sewing

This is "Dutch Iris" designed by Eileen B. Sullivan at The Designer's Workshop.

This is the first Christmas project I finished. My mom has a serious "thing" for irises, so when I saw this kit at the quilt festival, I knew I just HAD to make it for her for Christmas. Paper piecing is one of my new favorite types of quilting, since it's so precise and makes such intricate pictures with ease. Due to the way I piece (preferring newsprint to freezer paper) my iris is a mirror image of the original... and the cute little ladybug is graciously hiding a pretty major flaw in my piecing. So it's not perfect, but she loves it and that's all that really matters anyway!


These are based on the Tremendously Tidy Travel Pillow created by Charlotte at Charlotte's Sew Natural. Everyone in our house got one of these (except me... I'll make one for myself later). The baseball one (for Elijah) is actually one of her kits, and I pulled together fabrics for the camo pillow (for Jack) and Dora pillow (for Abigail) on my own. The pillowcase is really cool... the inner liner, shown in the second picture, is attached to the inside of the outer case and serves to keep the 12x16 pillow clean and inside the case... neat, huh? And they go together very quickly-- I can see many more pillows being made from this pattern!

My Surprise Find

Not far from our house is one of those shops where you can rent a booth and sell whatever you want... candles, Avon, homemade crafts, antiques, assorted junk (trust me there's LOTS of that category there) Honestly, I think I've been in there all of 3 times in the nearly 3 years we have lived here. Well, today I just happened to pop in, mostly to get ideas on what I could charge if I started selling miscellaneous craft items. I made my way through the aisles and found a booth way on the back wall with a sign indicating that the items were being sold by the family of a woman who had passed away back in October. What first caught my eye were the four 8 fat quarter bundles marked $2.50 each (usually you would pay $2.50 per FQ, right?), plus I later learned that there was a 20% off sale going on... I decided to poke around a bit further and found a non-descript plastic bag containing the above 38 applique leaf blocks. What a treasure trove! They will make a beautiful quilt top... for a whopping $20 (after the 20% came off). I told the shop owner that I would try to complete the quilt and give her a picture of it to share with the woman's family, which she indicated they would probably like.

Hey I just finished one project today... time to add another one to the pile, right?? (Oh and I can't post a pic of the finished project, since it's going to someone who reads my blog :-) Sorry, you'll just have to wait)