A Work in Progress

We have had a house full of kids (our own  three plus one of my daughter's housemates) since December 20.  We had a wonderful Christmas together with some very special memories.  I've also had a lot of meal preparation, washing dishes and laundry, and very little sewing time.  This morning, though, I had to take my daughter to an early appointment and when we got home, she fell asleep on the couch.  No one else was up, so I took a cup of coffee with me into the sewing room and spent some time straightening up and putting the threads from a finished project away while I listened to a podcast.  When I emerged, my husband and one of my sons were on their way out the door for some "guy" time (our other son went back to New York yesterday).  The girls were still asleep so I headed back down to the sewing room to start the block-of-the-month for my quilt guild.  We're using Barbara Brackman's Civil War Sampler this year and I decided t...

My Scarlet Letter sampler, Scottish Band, is finished!  In my mind, it's a major accomplishment as I had to deal with a dye lot issue that caused me to frog the left half of the medium blue flame stitches as well as an issue with the chart.  For the life of me, I couldn't get the placement of the flame stitches on the chart to look like the picture of the sampler.  After I've lived with my finish for a week or two, I'm pretty pleased with the way it came out.  And I've almost forgotten what a pain it is to do the backstitches around the letters.  My Amazing Christmas Stars quilt is also done and in use.  This was a Designer Block of the Month from Fat Quarter Shop for 2009 or 2010.  It was hard to get a picture of the entire quilt inside my house, so the top two pictures are the left and right sides.  The bottom photo is a closer picture of the center of the quilt and the third one is of my favorite block.  My longarm quilter did...

My apologies for neglecting my blog during the last month.  I was having all kinds of crafting fun making things for the bazaar at my church last weekend.  I made tablerunners from the 10-Minute Tablerunner pattern that you can find by doing a google search for it.  They do take a bit more than ten minutes, but are super-easy and turned out to be a good seller. I also had lots of fun making these zippered bags from a pattern from Atkinson Designs.  I also made travel pouches for pierced earrings to match each bag.  If I were doing the 101 scrap projects that Amanda Jean is doing over at Crazy Mom Quilts , the brown bag and blue bag would be scrap projects #1 and #2.  The big hit was these wine gift bags that I made from a pattern called "All Corked Up," but I would guess that you can find a similar pattern on the internet. This was the first year we ran the bazaar and I would call it a medium success.  For those of us who donated items, ...

Actually, a Sunday finish of Bent Creek's Spooky Row.  This is what I accomplished last week during the retreat with the Delaware Valley Sampler Guild at the Lankford Hotel in Ocean City, Maryland.  The weather was great--well, almost too hot, but the view from the porch was wonderful as always.   Retreat is a lot of fun with great friends, good food, and entertaining conversations.  Not to mention the opportunity for stash enhancement at Salty Yarns (no affiliation).  I acquired a new chart or two and added this needleminder to my collection.  Perfect for the season and to help me with my Inchies project!

I'm making some progress on the Scottish Band Sampler (Scarlett Letter).  The Hungarian flame stitch eats up a lot of thread and a lot of time.  I'm liking the secondary pattern that is emerging.  I'm hoping to finish this one entirely before I go to my sampler guild's retreat next weekend, but I would settle for a finish of the eyelets and flame stitch.  Speaking of the sampler guilder, one of its members who shall remain nameless (she knows who she is) committed a tremendous act of enabling.  She brought in a needlepoint piece she had obtained through the Shining Needle Society, a Yahoo group.  Of course, I had to check it out and now I, too, am taking a class through the society.  Here's my progress on Inchies, a wonderful design by Kathy Rees of Needle Delights Originals.  I have self-imposed a limit of one "inchie" a day because these are like potato chips--you can't stitch just one!  And if you are interested in needlepoint, do...

Two friends came over on Thursday for a day of sewing.  I've learned to select projects that don't involve too much concentration when we get together so I worked on a few different things. First, I made a few of these blocks.  I picked up the flannel prints in the center at a guild meeting to make into a charity quilt.  I've looked at the assortment and played around with a couple of different ways to make a block and finally came up with this to put into a rail fence pattern.     Then, I put together 23 half-square triangles that will go into a quilt for my son who is at Louisiana State University.  Although the colors in this picture look a little different, the HSTs are purple and gold.       I ended our time together by making flying geese units to put in the border of my Designer Mystery Block of the Month from 2009 (or was it 2010?).  I blogged about some of the blocks here  and  here .  Now...

Progress continues on the Scottish Band Sampler (Scarlett Letter).  I had set a goal of finishing this by the end of August-ha!  As predicted in the instructions, the flame stitch is "quite challenging."  For me, it was not the actual execution of the stitch, but the placement.  What I have done follows the chart, but doesn't look like the picture of the finished piece.  After frogging and restitching twice, I'm going with what I have now.  I'm sure it will be OK and as long as I don't display the picture from the chart next to my completed sampler, no one will be the wiser.  Since I last posted, we  made a trip to retrieve our daughter from her summer internship on the coast of Maine.  She stayed with her boyfriend's family who very graciously showed us around the area during the weekend we were there, and treated us to a fabulous meal of lobster.   Our daughter was home for three days and then we packed up ...