Southwest Round Robin Quilt

My quilt top came home today and IS IT BEAUTIFUL!!! Al and I just love it. All the ladies in my group need a HUGE pat on the back for such nice work. I can't wait for the next Round Robin.
Al and I are taking this down to the sewing room to start planning the next few borders to bring it up to queen size. This will be a quilt for our bed in Arizona.

The next projects to finish up...

So now that one little project is finished up, I need to get going on three others.

First one that needs finishing is the last rows on a strippy scrap block that goes to someone on block central. I sent the block out to her but cut it a 1/2 inch short... THAT'S NOT GOING TO WORK! LOL

Then I have 2 purple and cream blocks to do. I'm making the "Rob Peter to Pay Paul" blocks. This is for the BC October Favorite Block Swap. During shop hop, I bought a template to cut these out quicker. It makes a 6" block so I need to make 8 of them so that I end up with 2 - 12" blocks. When I was digging through my civil war fabrics today, I found the perfect purple and cream.

The final project that needs working on tonight and tomorrow night is a gift for a friend that lives in Arizona. I found some cute oriental fabrics (some vintage, some more recent). I'm going to make her a surprise using these... just haven't decided if I should make a small wall quilt or a pincushion. I'm leaning toward the wall quilt since I have a cute pattern in my latest two copies of Quiltmania. I know she love oriental fabrics, so either will probably be good for her.

Making a miniature civil war quilt

I decided to finish up a few projects that were hanging around the sewing room. This was one of them. I started making a bunch of mini 9 patch blocks when I was in Arizona in the winter. I have lots of small pieces of civil war fabrics and they're all so cute, I hate to throw even the smallest bit out. Today I put them together with the green patches and then added the hst border (1/2" blocks). I fussy cut a few of the pieces so that some of the prettier parts show in the quilt. There's a bee, a cat's head, some star flowers, and a few other "I spy" pieces. The quilt is 7" square. This was a challenge to make but lots of fun... just have to add a label to the back of it.

Weekend trip to see Quilt Exhibit and more

Al, Lisa and I took a long weekend and drove into the UP of Mi and then down into Wi to the Milwaukee Art Museum. They have a quilt exhibit going on (that was for me to see)....Lisa wanted to see the buildings. Al just went for the drive :)

The museum opens it wings at 10am so we had to be there for the opening. It was a sight!

Since Lisa is a vegan, we had to find a few vegan places to eat. This one with Al and Lisa pictured was the BEST! Al and I enjoyed it as much as she did. I had meatloaf, Lisa had a vegan salisbury steak... not sure what Al had but he said it was good. Lisa took home a german chocolate cupcake (yup, that was vegan also). She ate half in the car and told Al he could have a bite later to taste it. He thought it was so good, he ate the rest while she was at the pool. WAS SHE MAD! Next time we'll have to buy one for each of them :)

Lisa and I bought lots of fabrics on this trip and bought a few quilt books. I'll post some pics when I get home and can spread everything out. We stopped at Yoders in Shipshewana for most of the fabrics. I love solids and they have TONS!

Making cupcake pot holders

My mom has a tea party coming up in the fall at her church and she needs table decorations and party favors. The theme of her table will be cupcakes ...inspired by this cupcake pot holder pattern. I've stitched up 3 so far, one for the local quilt shop (this will be a Saturday "make and take" class) and 2 for mom... 6 to go for her. Jenn made the top one, isn't it a cute fabric?! These are SOOOOO easy.

Pincushion I made for Gerda

Today I can FINALLY post a picture of the pincushion that I made for my swap partner, Gerda. It took over 2 weeks to wind it's way along the postal road from my house to hers. I was just starting to sweat and wonder if it was lost but it arrived. Thank goodness!

Gerda is always saying how much she like greens and reds so I knew I would have to use those colors. The undersides of the leaves are shades of green wool that I found in Chicago a the quilt festival in April. This pattern is from Sue Spargo (Peony Bloom) but I shrunk it down and kind of did my own thing.

OOPS!

I was working on pinning my blue scrappy quilt and Al found a mistake... how did I not see it?! Well, I fixed it and am now quilting it :)

Garden scraps

The tomato plants are out and needed a bit of help standing up straight so Al cut me some stakes and I whipped out the pretty fabric strips scraps I've been saving. Nothing like a quilter's garden, you know?... Amy Butler ties, Kaffe Fasset scrappy strings, Moda bits... so pretty :) I also left a small pile of tiny pieces out in the early spring for the birds... I figure they might like a little color as they decorate their nests...

Working in the yard...

I've been trying to get a little gardening done lately but with so much going on with family and health concerns, it's been hard. I've scheduled myself to do a little gardening EVERY day so that it doesn't get out of hand... It's also wonderful exercise and I need that.

The strawberries are coming in like crazy. But then again so are the weeds. We've had quite a bit of rain, which we needed since we were on high danger for fires in our area. Seems like it's feast or famine with the weather.... no rain for weeks... then no sun for weeks... what can you do? Today is beautiful... it rained a bit this morning but now the sun is out. We're supposed to get more storms later in the day.

Al built me this strawberry bed and last year he put the chicken wire cage over it to keep the robins from getting a bite out of each of our beautiful berries. While I was collecting a quart yesterday, I had a robin on the post watching me.... I just laughed!! They're all mine this year! MMMMM

a bad few weeks....

This last week has been very busy and also very sad... one of my cousins passed away. He was only 56, a year younger than Al. It came as a shock... We last saw him at Grandma's 100th birthday party/family reunion. He was a wonderful man, intelligent, cheerful and very understanding... he listened. When we visited San Francisco for the first time in 2000, he came with his family to show us around, took us to a wonderful Hunan resturant, took the girls on a trolley car, and to Giradellis for ice cream. He was full of interesting facts about the area... what a tour that was! But the best thing was just sitting and talking to him... he would let you ramble on...without interupting and then offer his advice. He was always willing to give us a hand with arrangements for grandma... help with her paperwork (even though he's half a continent away). He was my uncle's oldest son, my oldest cousin. I'm going to miss him.....

Luck of the non Irish?

Well, I'm not Irish... I have LOTS of nationalities (7) but that's not one of them. BUT boy have I been lucky lately! First getting all those wonderful old fabrics from my daughter, then heading to the resale shop and finding a HUGE bag of silk threads in the 1/2 off bin (45 spools of silk thread on wooden spools for $3!) and then heading to the library and finding a tall stack of free quilt magazines. And they wanted me to take all I could because they needed to make some room! WELL, of course, I just had to help them out with that request! This pile above is just a SMIDGEN of what I took home. I thumbed through about 10 of them last night... think I'll fill the tub with bubble tonight and put another pile next to it.... Take of my record setting baths!