the pink quilt

Here is the top for my Honey's younger daughter that I finished piecing Monday night.

It's a little pink for my taste, but I'm hoping a 9-year-old girl who loves pink will like it!

It also came from Kim Brackett's Scrap Basket Surprises, my third quilt made from her books this year.  It is a pink and white variation on her Scrap-Basket Blues quilt.  And of course, I kept the 2" bonus HSTs from it according to Bonnie Hunter's bonus triangles instructions!

I snapped this quickly on my way out the door this morning and didn't photograph the other tops I'd finished.  I still have to piece a backing for this and get it to Laura at Star City Stitchery.  Again, one thing I love about her longarm quilting service is the ability to watch her work on my quilt on webcam.  It makes me feel involved with every step of my quilt's progress!

More to come later.  I'd love to get a pedicure tonight but still get some time in my sewing room later working on the backing and then my dad's kaleidoscope blocks.  Yesterday was a wash - we survived the earthquake at work (yes, it was scary to feel the entire office building swaying!) and then my Honey's new hire came over for drinks and nibbles, and after he left we just watched a movie.  I have only two more of my Drunkard's Path blocks to hand-piece so I don't know what's up next for handwork!  Maybe time to focus on some quilt labels for a bit?

a sewing "machine"

Well, my son went back to his dad's to finish off his summer just over a week ago, and my Honey's daughters were with us last week for their last week of summer.  We are back to our kid-free weeks and alternating weekends ... for the most part.  I'm letting my son settle back in with his dad and school for a few weekends, and then will have to take a short hiatus on my travel to see him while I recover from next month's hysterectomy.  But during the past week or so, I've been playing some catch-up in my sewing room, including nearly all day Sunday while my Honey took the girls back to their mom.  I finished three quilt tops (the two Hoopla baby quilts and a small wall-hanging for another friend's nursery) on Sunday and cut out all the pieces for a Kaleidoscope (Crossed Canoes variety) quilt for my dad.  I finished a fourth quilt top last night - the blocks were put together on Sunday but the borders went on last night.  Earlier last week I caught up on my Civil War Chronicles blocks of the month.  I've been sewing so much lately that my Honey joked that I'm "just a sewing machine!"  (Yes, he has the kind of sense of humor that makes you groan!)

I really need to get better at taking photos while sewing, but honestly, I usually keep the Droid far away from me to minimize distraction (generally in the form of Words with Friends, solitaire, or sudoku), and since my home laptop seems to have died, my regular camera is holding photos hostage rather than sharing them with the rest of the world.  I will try to do some of that tonight.

On Saturday, we took the kids to spend the day in quaint little Buchanan, Virginia (pronounced "Buck-hannon").  We had a Daily Deal for Blacklight Mini Golf there and decided to make a day of it, including lunch at the gorgeous Rhein River Inn with some DELICIOUS German food, and ice cream afterwards at Ransone's Drugstore with a real, old-fashioned jukebox spinning 45s (which of course the kids had never seen).  We stopped in a few great little shops too, including the Purgatory Emporium, where we found some incredible deals, and a wonderful used book store, Fireside Books.  While there, I found - and bought - a copy of a quilt book I'd never seen before, which discussed a technique I've never tried before.  It's called WedgeWorks by Cheryl Phillips, and while it's out of print, there are a few used copies on Amazon (hopefully they also include the wedge template as the cover indicates - mine did!).

There are some really neat blocks made with striped fabric in mind, so of course I had to stop in at JoAnn Fabrics yesterday to pick up a few yards of stripes so that I can play around with it this week.  It's been so long since I tried anything radically different - normally, I'd paper piece complicated blocks like this, so I'm interested in the challenge.

It feels good to get back into the groove.  Now I go to sleep at night thinking about what I'll try to get done the next day.

Oh, one quick PS - one of my favorite quilt shops, Burgundy Buttons, is having a huge sale.  Anytime I can get a Moda charm pack for around $5 or a Jelly Roll for around $20, I have to spend some money, whether I need them right now or not!  Go check them out!  I'll be back with photos soon!

dejected

I've been struggling with finding time and motivation lately.  I have hundreds of unread feeds in Google Reader from other quilting blogs.  Work is busy (I shouldn't even be taking the time to write this now), home life is crazy with anywhere from one to three kids at home, I haven't been sleeping well - the heat wave and no air conditioning on our second floor where the bedrooms are doesn't doesn't help - and it is SO HARD to find time to get to my sewing room, or even motivation as to what to work on once I get there.  I know this won't last forever but at the moment, I'm not handling it well.

When I read the blogs of people who accomplish so much sewing in a week or even most days, I feel raw with envy.  I have been quilting for twenty years now, and yes, I get envious when I see someone "guest blogging" somewhere prominent who just started to learn how to use a sewing machine two years ago.  I don't know why I'm both the youngest person in my quilt guild and yet somehow far less experienced than these fortunate people who can spend their entire days just buying, cutting and sewing fabric.  If I could figure out how on earth to make a living doing something related to quilting, I would jump at the chance.

I feel like I straddle some kind of gap between two categories of quilters:  old women who find a few moments to sew in between work, family and caring for a home, and young women who are independently wealthy enough and confident enough to just go out in the world and do what you love without worrying about how to pay the bills.  It's not a place where I want to be. 

At quilt guild last night, the president asked for volunteers to teach technique classes for a half hour before the monthly meeting.  Some of the techniques they were looking for volunteers to demonstrate and teach included hand quilting (i.e. quilters knot), photo fabric (how to adhere to quilt), postage stamp quilting and needle turn appliqué.  So last night, after nearly everyone left, I approached her and said that I would teach needle turn appliqué  if she still needed someone.  She was excited since someone who was new to the meeting had asked specifically for that technique.  It's the only form of appliqué I know how to do, and the elephants in the background of this post are an example, but I still have begun second guessing myself and wondering if I know enough to teach other people.  How arrogant am I to think that my abilities qualify me to teach others?  How do I know there won't be someone there scoffing everything I do as ridiculous?

It happens pretty frequently that I say out loud, "someone ought to ..." and when the listener points back at me as being the one who should - write an article, teach a session, develop a pattern - I respond, "oh goodness no, *I* don't have that kind of expertise!"  I am not qualified to homeschool my child.  I am not qualified to redecorate or renovate my house.  I have a bachelor of arts in languages and twenty years of experience in administration and data analysis ... NOT a degree in education, NOT a certification as a licensed contractor, and NO formal training in interior design, in garment construction, in any math concentration which might be required to design a quilt pattern.  I have no credentials whatsoever except a pile of quilts that I can say that I made, with all of their flaws and imperfections.

Huh.  Who ever would have guessed that my sewing room would have a glass ceiling that I installed myself?

finding time: Hoopla baby quilt

This week has been crazy, but better than I anticipated.  Like I said, we have all three kids here this week, and my Honey and I are still working fulltime with no vacation time taken.  My son's birthday was yesterday, my Honey's brother-in-law came to give my son a guitar lesson Tuesday night, and the rest of the week has been about making dinner, shuttling kids to and from camps while we head to work, enjoying a few hours together each night, and getting everyone to sleep despite the fact that we have no working air conditioning in our upstairs and temperatures have been hovering around 100° each day.   I'll tell you one thing I've learned this week:  if you're looking for a cheap way for adults and kids to have fun bonding, go to the dollar store and buy a can of silly string for each person, then spend fifteen minutes running around the back yard screaming your head off as you try to douse one another in the stuff.

Somewhere I found some time to head into the basement sewing room - which also doesn't have air conditioning but is so far underground and cooled by the main level that it's very comfortable.  I thought I'd pull out the baby quilt project I began a few months ago when I learned that my college boyfriend and his wife - married almost 17 years, I think - were expecting their first child this fall.  When they learned that it was twins, the scope kind of changed.  Now they know that they are twin boys, and I am trying to finish them up.  I used two charm packs of Moda Hoopla and some white dot tone-on-tones, and used a technique blogged about in a tutorial by Monica Solorio-Snow.  I laid them out in two different ways - scrappy and graduated by color - and I think I might make one each way since I can't decide which I prefer:

So what do you think?  These were so easy and fun to whip up that when I laid them out and found out I didn't have enough to make them both in a 5x6 grid, I was excited to get back to make some more!  I'll have to put them together into rows and then a top, then add some borders, and send them off to my longarm quilter with backing.  But do you have a preference as to which layout I should do, or one of each?

don't force it

As I mentioned in my previous post, my sewing has had to take a back seat to other issues.  Since writing that post, I drove another 600+ miles round trip to attend my aunt's memorial service (including a flat tire), began going through six boxes of my great-aunt's papers, and scheduled my hysterectomy for mid-September.

When I returned home on Sunday, I found that my Block of the Month had arrived for my Civil War Chronicles quilt.  I spent some time cutting fabric before I was sidetracked in a big way.  On Friday, my Honey had called to ask if his youngest daughter and her friend could go through some of my scraps to play with, that they might wrap them around Barbie dolls or something.  I said yes, they could go through the scraps in my scrap drawer, so he pulled it out and put it on the floor for them and left them to it.  Well, there were also sealed, labeled bags of projects in there that they also went through and I opened my drawer Sunday night to a bunch of empty baggies.  I was upset and it turned into a bigger argument than it should have been, especially because both children left our house with what they took.  The friend brought her scraps back and it was nearly a duffel bag full.  I'm still not sure what my Honey's daughter has and hope I'll be able to retrieve the project pieces.  One of the projects was old signature block pieces I'd collected at my son's baby shower and never made the quilt from it, but so many of the women in my family who signed blocks are now dead, and it was just too emotional for me to think of them gone forever.  I tell you, grieving is a b*tch ... it hits you whenever you least expect it.

I managed to squeeze some time in my sewing room Tuesday night and my Honey joined me to watch the All Star game on TV.  But I was not really ready for it and felt like a novice all over again.  First, I got distracted with the cutting for the Civil War blocks for July and cut them too small ... and didn't have enough fabric to fix my mistake.  Then my seams turned out to be way off and the block ended up with some puffy seams where I was trying to stretch and poke things into place. 

I'm reading the moral to this story as "don't force it" ... if you go to sew just to get caught up but aren't ready to focus, your work will end up showing it.

Tomorrow I'm back on the road for the fourth weekend in a row ... my boy turns 11 next week and I'm taking him back to his father's for his birthday party with all of his friends, while I enjoy a small reunion of sorts with my college sorority sisters in downtown Baltimore.  When I return, my Honey's girls will be there for another full week, the first one with all three kids while both of us adults are working.  It will be hectic and I hope the sewing doesn't add to it.

apologies

I started this blog all gangbusters and have had to let it sit for the past almost-week.  I haven't been back to my sewing room in that time, either.  I put over 900 miles on my car this past weekend and drove through five states.  I had a lovely visit with an old friend and met her adorable infant daughter, and then went right to visit my dying aunt in the hospital and console her overworked and grieving daughter, the same cousin whose husband was killed in January for whom I made the Tool Shed quilt I pictured in an earlier post.  Apparently my aunt had suffered from cancer earlier in her life - which I hadn't known, because my own mother was sick at the time and she hadn't wanted to trouble her further - and it returned with a vengeance.  Her suffering was brief, and she passed away yesterday morning.

My cousin has her hands full.  She drove through the night Friday into Saturday, bringing her mother-in-law and daughter along, and her brother obtained leave from the military to arrive right before my aunt passed, but the house is full of clutter and both of them live at least a thousand miles away.  My aunt's mind was impaired with painkillers by the time we all arrived - she could remember that she had made appointments, but not when exactly - and the hunt for documents or safe deposit box keys is stressful for my cousin.  My aunt's mother is alive but very frail and also lives far away - my cousin cares for her but arranged for a nurse in her absence - and is another source of worry.

Apparently, my aunt's death causes power of attorney over HER aunt to pass to me.  I had no idea, nor what a mess I'm walking into.  It sounded as though my great-aunt (for lack of a better term) has had Alzheimer's for some time, and no one can figure out who the attorney was who handled her will or assets, and my aunt was having a new law firm become involved and my great-aunt moved to a closer facility when she fell ill.  As my great-aunt is no relation of mine - my aunt was my mother's brother's widow - I've met her only a few times in my life, but she and her husband had no children and I worked in the state court system at the time she was redrawing her directives, so I was named second after my aunt. 

If nothing else, this is a good lesson to get your affairs in order and keep them current, I suppose.

On top of that I had my annual GYN exam yesterday.  The doctor confirmed what I've spend the last few years putting off - it's time for a hysterectomy.  Fortunately, it can be done laparoscopically, and will only remove the uterus and cervix (so I will go through menopause naturally later), but it is still surgery and still another item on my plate. 

My Honey left town with his daughters on an impromptu vacation yesterday, which I didn't know about until the night before when I arrived home from my weekend.  On the one hand, it has been more stressful since my son is now here, and I need to make sure he's dropped off and picked up from camp on time, but on the other it's been nice not to have a house full of people to worry about with all the other junk going on.  I would love to find some time to get into my sewing room and relax in front of the machine for a while, and get caught back up with the Farmer's Wife blocks, or work on something else altogether.  Even though it looks like I'll be driving another 750 miles this weekend for the funeral, I'm hoping to find the time somewhere. 

Happy Holiday weekend!

It's Canada day to the north, and Fourth of July weekend here in the States.  Lots of people are gearing up for a long holiday weekend, and I'm no exception.  I'll flip 10,000 miles on my new car this weekend (I got it at the end of January) and we are setting the over/under on weekend mileage at, I think, 1,036.  It will be close.  On the bright side, I will get to see a dear friend for the first time in almost two years - I attended her wedding and she has since had a baby who is now standing and possibly even walking.  I will also visit an aunt in the hospital who has just learned yesterday she has metastasized melanoma and it's terminal.  At the end of the weekend I'll get my son and bring him home with me for the next six weeks (excepting one weekend).

So I'm not taking any sewing projects at all, not even handwork.  Most of the time I'll be seated, I'll be operating a motor vehicle or fully engaged with other people, so the handwork is staying at home.  And this is what currently qualifies as handwork:  my first attempt at hand piecing (which is actually proving to be pretty fun):

At Christmas, my Honey gave me a lot of fabric - three or four different charm packs, and a Moda candy bar pack.  I've been challenging myself to work with them without buying a lot more to go with it.  I loved the colors of the Pure line shown above and couldn't decide what to do.  I did find a collection of four Pure fat quarters on our local shop hop in May, so I pulled out the charm packs and decided to use some templates to cut them and hand piece them.  I was able to cut one of each shape from each 5" square so there was VERY little waste, which I was pleased with.  Now I just have to decide how to put them together.  These Drunkard's Path blocks can go together in SO many variations, and having four predominant colors (white, tan, blue and dark brown) makes it slightly more complicated.  Any thoughts?

I'll enjoy the time off from sewing, because it will make me all the more hungry to jump back into my sewing room next week.  Of course, we'll have three children in the house so I don't know how easy that will be, but my Honey is taking the week off from work so maybe it will be slightly easier than if we were both working full time during the day.

Happy weekend, everyone!  Do you have any sewing plans?