A Work in Progress

It's been a few weeks since I've posted and there is absolutely no reason for that except that I am having the laziest summer on record. As you know, I was thrown for a loop with my change in job assignment in the past year. My husband and I took full advantage of being empty nesters and filled our weekends with activities and short trips. It was a busy year. So I've been happy to stay close to home this summer and recover. I've been reading a lot, doing some heavy cleaning and ruthless decluttering along with some stitching and lots of quilting. I've taken the time to do some experimenting with a ruler to make flying geese (Deb Tucker's Wing Clipper--no affiliation, just the ruler I chose to buy at a quilt show). These geese finished at 1x1.5" and were made from scraps from a project that is nearly pieced. I'll be taking a class in the fall that has flying geese in the pattern so I wanted to be sure I remembered how to use the ruler. These small square...

Last week, the friend who got me started on quilting suggested that we get together. Usually, we meet for breakfast or go on a shopping expedition. This time she came over to my house and we spent the day sewing. I worked on blocks for my Shoo Fly quilt and have them all completed. Just have to work on the layout and sew them together. My friend and I set up our machines at my kitchen table, but I didn't want to move my ironing board up from my laundry room/sewing area. A glance at the sewing area was enough to make me do a clean-up! While I was at it, I decided to finish off two quilt tops. This one was made from an All About Color jelly roll. As I mentioned in another post, I'm trying to learn something from each quilt. From this one, I learned to read the directions and then read them again. A local quilt shop had made this quilt and I was so excited to get their last jelly roll so I could make it also. I sewed combinations of three strips and then started cutting. Except...

Here are some of the fabrics I won in a giveaway from Nancy at Patchwork Penguin . Since I rarely win anything, it was a very pleasant surprise to find this box on my doorstep yesterday. I'll be using the fabrics to make some charity quilts and including some of them in scrappy projects. Thanks, Nancy, for being so generous!

Jane Longstreth! Jane* has been a work-in-progress since 2005 or so and I finally put the last stitches in her during the June 17 Friday Night Sew-in. We've had our ups and downs along the way, including frogging of some of the over-one verse and restitching the basket twice (miscounting) as well as the lower left border (again because I cannot count). Those over-one flowers on 36-count are tiny ! But the stem-stitched leaves caused the most anxiety and kept me from working on this piece for quite some time. Those leaves got ripped out a time or two, but I think they are passable. One of the other things that was hard for me about this sampler is that the motifs are not always symmetrical. I had to let some of my sense of order go! I'm so glad I persevered. *A little history about the sampler: Jane Longstreth is one of a group of well-known pieces from Chester County, Pennsylvania. Jane was the youngest of seven children and she stitched this sampler when she was 14. The origi...

You can still sign up for Friday Night Sew-In here . I'm planning for a finish or two tonight. Jane Longstreth is soooo close to being done and I have a quilt that just needs three outer borders to be completed so perhaps I'll have a couple of pictures for you tomorrow.

I clean out my needlework closet once a year on a carefully chosen day. It's a task that has to be done when I have the entire day free and when there are no other family members around. I simply refuse to let anyone else see the extent of my stash (not even you, my readers, and thus, the picture of the backhoe). This past Monday was the day for the 2011 clean out. My husband was playing in golf tournament at a course 45 minutes away from our house. Our two college-age children were out of the state on their summer adventures. Let Unearth Day begin! However, the day did not start as planned. I'm a morning person and even though it was my first weekday off from work for the summer, I was up and going at 6:00. I was more than ready to dive into the closet by 9:00, but my husband was taking his sweet old time getting out of the house. I thought he'd never leave! Eventually, I had the house to myself and pulled everything out of the closet, dusted shelves and scrubbed the floor...

Early on when I began quilting, I finished piecing and doing simple machine quilting of the stitch-in-the-ditch variety on some projects. Then I followed the instructions in a quilting book and successfully made the binding for them. Must have been beginner's luck because for the life of me, I couldn't do it again when it came to completing this snowman wall hanging. I fussed and fussed with it and couldn't get the angle right for sewing the two ends of the binding together. I even bought a special ruler at a quilt show that was supposed to give me a perfect angle and I couldn't figure it out with that. It was beginning to get in the way of my quilting enjoyment and making me avoid quilting. Finally, I took my problems to the owner of my LQS and she walked me through the steps again. Voila! Perfect binding! This cute little guy was a paper piecing project. (Have I mentioned that I really enjoy paper piecing?). He was to have been completed in January for Nancy's UF...