Happy fall

This cute little thing (about 16" x 13") was made by a guild member and
I bid on it and won it in our silent auction at last year's quilt show.
It hangs on the door of my sewing room.

Now, I have done paper piecing before and I gotta tell you, I am not that
crazy about it, but I certainly do appreciate all these little pieces .

Tomorrow, my wonderful husband, Jim, and I will celebrate our 33rd
wedding anniversary. We will probably just go to dinner and a movie.
Sorta like a date!

Another thing I love about our anniversary is that means that Fall is
here!!! I love Fall. So this weekend I will get my fall stuff out.
Stay tuned for pics next week.

I have a busy month coming up. Saturday is a sew day sponsored
by my guild at the library. Then October 14 is our QUILT BINGO.
On the 19th my bee is going to a retreat for 4 days. (I am so excited
I can hardly stand it!) Part of the fun is in the planning.
And the very next weekend on the 27th is a square-in-a-square
workshop.

I have some Christmas gifts to finish and another wedding quilt
to start so I hereby declare October to be QUILT MONTH!!!

Until next time...
Susie

Mystery for Bee

I am either brave or stupid!
I am running a mystery for the members of my bee.
Eight other women are trusting me to make this quilt sight-unseen.
I found a great pattern and of course I had to make it a little larger.
(The pattern was for a square quilt and I am making it more rectangular).
This makes it harder to figure out the yardage and the number of
pieces to cut.
I like mysteries that are harder to figure out until the very end.

Let me tell you I am losing sleep over this.
I have checked and re-checked my figures.
I am pretty sure I have it right.

We are on step three so far.
Above are my fabrics and below are some of the pieces.

Everyone wanted to use fabrics from their stash, which I agree with since
they don't know what it will look like. I gave them guidelines like a print,
a dark, an accent, and a background. We needed two yards of the dark
and the print which made it limiting (for me at least) to find large enough
pieces that would coordinate.
I know they will like this quilt, and I'll keep updating as we go.

Until next time...
Susie

Fun quilty weekend

Well, my laundry didn't get folded, my carpet is fuzzy from dog hair,
and we had leftovers for dinner on Sunday but I finished my celtic
quilt top!!! I actually finished the center knot in class and the rest
during the weekend at home.

On Saturday I attended this class sponsored by my guild, Southern
Comforters of Bowie, Maryland and taught by Peg Bingham.
She has published many books on Celtic knots and lives in Ohio.
Take it from me, if you ever get a chance to take one of her classes,
go for it. She is a great teacher and her patterns are amazing.
This looks complicated doesn't it? Peg's books are so organized
that all you have to do is follow step by step. In each of her books
you can choose from many different sizes and shapes too.
This quilt is called Overhand Knot. I actually changed it a little
and Peg was gracious enough to help me figure it out. She liked
my change so much she is going to put it in the next printing of
this book.


Here is Peg (on the left) holding up some of the samples she brought.
She talked about color and fabric selection too.

I took a class from Peg a few years ago and made this table topper/wallhanging.
This pattern is called Square Knot.

What a pieceful weekend I had.

Until next time...
Susie

Best job in the guild

Here is a photo of a corner of my sewing room. This is the guild
library. (Part of my stash is on the shelves above--and I keep my
own personal books across the room so they don't get mixed up.)
I haven't counted all the books but I would guess its in the
hundreds. I bring around 20 different books every meeting
(twice a month) and sometimes members come over to browse.
My budget this year is $350. I am in the process now of taking
inventory and removing the outdated books. Next week we are
having an auction to sell them at our guild meeting.

Each evening I have been doing one of three things depending
on how I feel.
1. Piecing my black, white and red
2. cutting scraps
3. finishing hand work on the binding on my Trip-around-the-world

I have ADD (made worse by menopause!!!) so I like to have
many things going at once. I try to give myself a limit on
the number of projects that I am activly working on at once
so I am not completely all over the place.

Last nights guild meeting was a lecture by Peg Bingham.
She will be teaching a class this Saturday on one of her
celtic patterns. I took a class from her a few years ago
and she is delightful. Last time I made just a small table
topper but this time I am making a twin size quilt with
Christmas fabrics. You can see the fabrics in my Aug 20
post. I'll be sure to take pics and share them.

Until next time...
Susie

Displaying quilts

I have quilts all over the house, draped or folded over chairs and
various quilt racks, but this is my favorite way to show my quilts.
I bought it at a quilt show a few years ago. I keep my king-size
quilts in it along with some of my antique quilts.

This weekend my plans are to continue with the mess in my sewing
room, work on the binding on my trip-around-the-world that I
quilted last weekend, cut some blue scraps, and of course some
piecing on my black & white & red. I bought a tall plastic drawer
thing that I want to find a place for and start filling it up with my
cut scraps. Instead of hand work at my bee I have been taking
scraps to cut. My dream is to get caught up on organizing my
scraps Yeah right..that'll happen!

Have a great weekend.

Until next time...
Susie

Heartbreaker...Heartmaker

My grandmother (we called her Gam) made this quilt (the one on the
right) sometime in the 1930s. I had it on my bed when I was a little
girl in the 50s and when I got married my mother gave it to me. I swear
I don't know how it got in this condition. It was kept in the linen closet
for years, moving with us a few times. When I started "officially"
quilting in 1999 I dug it out and it was almost in shreds. And this is the
good side!!!! I decided that someday I wanted to recreate it and went
in search of the right color pink. Believe it or not it was hard to do
because many of the reproduction pinks were too peachy. I finally
found it along with the curve master foot.

The original quilt is machine pieced and hand quilted. I duplicated
all the sizes exactly but machine quilted in the ditch. I then copied
the daisy for the large white areas to hand quilt and the cables
for the borders. I have finished the center and now working on the
borders. The batting is just a good quality flannel, making it a
dream to quilt through.

I think about Gam alot when I am working on it. This is one of
the joys of quilting...feeling a connection to the past as well
as making a connection to the future. Does anyone else feel this?

This old quilt doesn't have a label but you can bet the new one will.

Until next time...
Susie

I am not a perfectionist, but...

I did it!. I finished quilting my king-size Trip-Around-the-World. I started
Friday night and finished on Sunday night. You can see the backing fabric
at the top of the picture. Don't you just love finding a piece of fabric and
knowing that it is perfect for something? That is how I felt when I saw this.
I didn't get the border fabric in the photo. That is a perfect border print that
I found the same way. I will take a pic of the whole quilt when I show it
at show-and-tell at guild after it is bound.

I started this quilt in a class at my LQS given by Norma Campbell. She
has very organized instructions for the piecing, and the pressing. Since
I am a pressing nut, I was very impressed. I wanted to make the whole
thing from my stash, but didn't know if I could find 24 half yard pieces that
would match. So I walked to the other side of the room, turned around, and
gazed at the shelves holding my stash. I was looking for the thickest folded
pieces that would indicate it had 1/2 yard or more on them. Well the pieces
that jumped out were blue and yellow prints. I filled them in with greens,
lighter blues, yellows and darker blues. The fun part came in deciding
the order of the fabrics.

Now here comes the perfectionist part. I had some sections left over from
cutting the borders and thought if I had enough I could use it for the binding.
I squeezed out enough, all 408" and sewed it on. As I was doing the hand
sewing on the back, I decided that I didn't like the way the print showed on
the front, so I ripped--literally ripped-- the binding off. It wasn't an anger
thing, but a practical thing. If I had to pick all the stitches out it would
have taken me days. So I just ripped it! It didn't hurt the quilt or the
binding. I re-ironed it and will sew it on tonight and start over. I am usually
very laid back when it comes to my quilting but this really bothered me
for some reason. I knew that every time I saw that quilt on my bed I would
zoom in on the binding. Now it will be perfect--I hope!

Until next time...
Susie