I am a BAD blogger!! And I do apologize for being such a slug!! I simply cannot figure out where November and December went??
I know part of not blogging is that I only write my blog posts on my laptop...which I rarely ever even turn on anymore... I have a cool Zaggs keyboard attached to my iPad and pretty much only use that. I need to figure out how to post from an iPad. Anyone do this? Please give me tips and tricks and what app you use!
Well, lots to share! Since I last posted, I went on a four day quilt retreat with over forty guild members in the mountains of West Virginia. It was ever so fun and productive!! I completed a pumpkin quilt top (still not quilted yet), did some applique on my Cozy Christmas blocks and worked on our guild mystery quilt. None of which is completed yet, so no pix yet!
This year, I fell in love with trees in trucks for Christmas, so I made this little wall quilt for my sister for Christmas
and I made a larger one for me. It is all sandwiched and pinned and ready to quilt.
I've been wanting to find a china cabinet to fit a space in my morning room, but could not really find just what I was looking for. Then I found this cabinet at a consignment store for a really good price.
Solid oak, but the golden color was too light to go with the other furniture pieces in that room, so I darkened the stain and also painted the doors black.
I really LOVE how it turned out!! It matches the other pieces perfectly and also shows off my black and white dishes just spectacularly!! I am so happy with it!
I had been given this cool scarecrow pattern and embellishment kit years ago, and I finally got it made!! Yay!!
I always love the fall colors up against royal blue! Just really makes those golds and oranges and red really pop!!
And the last few weeks, I've been super busy making handmade bee gifts!!
For one bee group, I made seven quilt drafting notebooks with a ruler, mechanical pencil and colored pencils inside.
And for the other bee group, I made us all covers, mats with pockets, thread catcher and pin cushion, and an inside machine bed pad,
and tiny Dresden plate spool pin doilies
for our featherweight machines using a fat quarter bundle of 30's prints.
Of course, I have more adorable photos of our new grandson, Neal!!
He is now 11 weeks old! And soooo cute!
He smiles readily and is discovering his hands and what they can do!!
And he will be here tomorrow with his parents for Christmas!! We are soooo excited!!
I know when they get here, time will fly again, and I'll be too busy to post until after New Years! So I hope you and yours have a most wonderful Christmas and a very blessed New Year!
And Yogi and I will try to post more often in 2017!! Promise!!
Our local quilt guild chapter, Haymarket Quilters Unlimited, has a little quilt show going on this month.
We have a wonderful committee of girls who collected the quilts and set up the displays and manned the weekend hours.
The quilt show name is "Quilting Colorful Seasons of Love".
So the committee collected quilted items for each season and holiday.
The Haymarket Museum is right downtown and was originally a very small clapboard church.
And when I say small...I am not kidding.
When our local wonderful quilt shop, Oh Sew Persnickety, got in the new Tula Pink fabric collection, Slow and Steady, I fell in love!!
So, I just had to make it up in a quilt!!
I love, love, love the cheddary orange print, so I used it for the background.
It's a simple design made of traditional blocks by May Chappell called "Squiggly Bits".
It was a fun and easy quilt to piece!
Just a few new pix of my adorable grandson, Neal!!
He is so very precious...
and so very, very loved!!
Yogi has met Neal, but with his almost total loss of hearing and limited vision, he wasn't too interested until Neal started crying loudly. Then Yogi started looking around, as he can not tell anymore where loud noises are coming from. :-(
Now that Halloween is over, the holidays always seem to rush up on us!! Are you madly sewing up gifts by now? I am!!
I felt I needed some wall quilts to put out with my September school decor, so I started by making a cool pencil quilt for the wall by the kitchen!
I wanted primary colors... but wish I'd chosen two lime greens with less value different between them. I really love the architect handwriting fabric I used for the background!!
Do you do that? I always find myself critiquing my quilts when they are done... shoulda, woulda, coulda...
The pencil points were done with paper piecing... and I still don't enjoy doing paper piecing at all. YUCK!
It takes forever as it is so counter-intuitive to me!! But it certainly ensures perfect piecing and points.
Then I needed a new quilt for over the fireplace.
So I designed and created my BAA (big ass apple) quilt.
This took forever, too... auditioning fabrics for the apple.
I made the pieced background and free-motion quilted a stipple all over it first.
Then I appliqued the tree branch and leaves and apple on top!
I sketched out the apple on paper first with crayons, and the leaves were originally the correct size for the apple...
but when I made them that big on the background, they really took away from the apple, which I wanted to be the focal point...so I made them much smaller.
I am happy with the way it turned out and I got lots of compliments on it!!
I also have a new antique child's school desk, that my dear sister Sally gave me. I cleaned it up and it sits now in front of my quilt ladder in the family room.
I put a pencil and apple and a stack of vintage Dick and Jane books on it!!
It's all put away now, as all my Halloween decor is out! YAY!
Yogi wants to know what you are working on these fall days?
