A Work in Progress

Working on these blocks from Jaybird Quilts' Toes in the Sand is helping me move on from the winter doldrums.  Each block is named for a California beach, and I can only dream about what it would be like to be on one of them right now.  Since the pattern calls for making two of each block, this will be a large quilt.  It's intended to be a wedding gift, but more on that later!

As you can see, we've been up to our chairs in snow this winter.  This photo was taken after the great ice storm of  '14 when we lost power for 44 hours.  Fortunately, we have a gas fireplace that kept us toasty for the duration, but I discovered that I get quite cranky when I've been without coffee for 72 hours. Not much on an inconvenience, really, when we knew people who were without power for five days. We've had snow on the ground since December which is quite unusual for us in the Philadelphia area.  As a result, my morale and motivation have taken quite a hit the last month.  I've hardly been at the sewing machine despite needing to keep going on the paper piecing class I'm taking.  I've been working away at those bottles of beer (stitching only--I hardly ever drink the stuff!!) and am up to 62 (of 99) completed.  I didn't make the deadline for the Smalls SAL in February.  In other words, very little to show for my time....

Last March, my husband accompanied me to the needlework show at Woodlawn and was very patient while I closely inspected the entries.  Afterward, we went to a nearby needlework store where he spied a stitched model of Ink Circles "99 Bottles" on the wall.  While I would have glanced at it and wandered away, he was quite taken with the design.  As you can see, the chart came home with us.  I put a few stitches in and went back to other projects.  Soon, there were questions about when the bottles were going to be finished, and soon after that, pointed questions about how many bottles were done.  So I am currently stitching one bottle a day with the goal of being finished by the end of March.  This is actually turning out to be quite colorful and it's fun to have a little finish every day. (And aren't you glad I didn't title this post, 99 Bottles, so you don't have that song stuck in your head?)

I'm just under the wire to check in for the Smalls SAL and Wipocalypse 2014.  I finished this small piece this afternoon.  It's by Melissa Nichols and was a project for my sampler guild a few years ago.  The finishing is supposed to be a pin, but I think I'll make it into a scissors fob. It's stitched in tent stitch over one with AVAS.  The top two bands are double running stitch which turned out to be surprisingly easy over one. I realized this afternoon that the house was supposed to be pink and the roof was to be red--oh, well. It's been a busy month for me and I have lots to post about, but that will have to wait as we are meeting friends for dinner this evening and I need to get ready.  Hope everyone is getting lots of stitching done!

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, ...