A Work in Progress

Tonight is my "scrap club" meeting at the LQS and I'm at home.  My friend who attended last month's session (which I missed due to my oral surgery) showed me the project for this month and I wasn't thrilled with it.  It's raining, I worked late and Miami is playing the University of Virginia tonight.  All good reasons to stay in and either work on Grace Mason or the binding of one of the seven quilts I got back from the longarmer at the beginning of October.  Maybe both. I've been absent from blogland for a couple of reasons.  I've been working late a few days a week and our weekends have been taken up with my son's cross country meets.   I love being able to attend his meets, but since they are often held at places two or more hours away I'm not getting much done around the house.  And I'm getting even less quilting and stitching done.  My son's a college senior so our 8-year stint with cross country comes to an end ...

Peace Comfort Quilt I finally finished this quilt a few weeks ago and donated it to my quilt guild to give as a comfort quilt.  I made this quilt "pillow style."  That is, I sewed the front and back right sides together along with the batting and turned it rather than binding it.  That sounds easier than it was for me.  I had all kinds of problems measuring the backing and batting correctly and as a result this quilt sat in my WIP pile for quite a while.  To quilt it, I used one of the decorative stitches on my machine and stitched little half circles along the seams.  It turned out OK, but it's not my best work by any means.  I learned some things about machine quilting and keeping the back smooth.  I think it would have been easier to quilt if I had planned to do a binding on the edge.  Thanks to all of you for your well wishes.  I'm getting better each day and have been assured that I will be happy someday that I had the or...

Grace Mason as of 9-28-11 So I'm a day late posting this according to the title.  I got my quilts back from the longarmer yesterday and sat down to sew some of the binding on one during the Phillies game.  Then I went on to working on Grace Mason and never got this post written.  I had to abandon Grace and all other stitching for a week since I had some oral surgery last Thursday and wasn't supposed to bend my head.  I won't bore you with the details, but the surgery was in preparation for getting braces to correct the effects of dental work done when I was 6 or 7 years old.  The recovery has been a little rocky, all the more so since I couldn't stitch, but I am feeling better each day.  When I left Grace last Wednesday, I was in the process of finding my counting error on the vine band.  Couldn't see it for the life of me, but with a new approach last night I found it and corrected it.  In the process I found one or two ot...

When I went to the quilt show at Oaks, PA in September, I was able to do a tour of the vendors on Saturday and make notes about things I might want to purchase.  One of the things that caught my eye was a cute wall hanging with snowmen.  The same wall hanging had caught my eye at the show last year, except that it was done with pumpkins.  I bought the pattern and the fat quarters then and of course, let it sit in my stash.  The reason was the mitered corner. I just didn't have confidence in my ability to piece it.  I really liked those snowmen but I wasn't going to buy them unless I could make the block.  I had some time on Sunday morning before I went back to the show so I did a mock-up with muslin and the piecing went fairly well.  I learned from my trial that I would have done a better job if I had marked where to stop sewing on the side strips.  I did that with the real block yesterday and got a perfect miter....

As you know, I try to keep this blog stitching related, but once in awhile I feel the need to tell about other parts of my life.  For the past six months, I've had a heavy heart as I learned that my cousin, Linda, was dying of melanoma.  She wasn't a cousin I was particularly close to when we were growing up although she and her family lived just twelve miles from us.  My father came from a family of 11 so I had 20 cousins on that side of the family (and none on my mother's side as neither of her two sisters married).  Because there were so many of us, we tended to break off into age groups and since Linda was five years younger than me, she was with my sisters more often.  But I got to know her better as her illness progressed and she and her wonderful friends posted on her journal at CaringBridge.  It was great to learn about her strong spirit and faith, her love for her favorite sports teams and players and her sense of adventure.  She left out...