Sunday Best

I finished the "Sunday Best" Schnibbles quilt yesterday.

I used a kit from Corrie at

Quilt Taffy.

What a fun little project! I think in my forever house (the house we will someday retire to wherever we decide to go when we're done working), I will have a few smaller quilt racks mounted around the halls and foyer and such so I can showcase all these smaller wall quilts and switch them out for some seasonal variety.

Do you do that?


I enjoyed free-motion quilting it... no marking at all.

I used a variegated soft pastel thread.

I made little pointed leaf shapes in the squares and rectangles and little heart shaped petals in the rounded off squares. I added small soft-brown buttons in the nine background centers just for fun. So, another Scnibbles done! I've still got allot of catching up to do!

For Valentine's Day and just plain cabin fever relief, my husband and I braved the frozen neighborhood roads and went out to dinner at a local sports pub and then out to a movie. We saw "The Wolfman". Good special effects...but the movie was just so so... one you can wait to see when the DVD is released. Then came home and watched the Olympics. :-)

Hubby is out shoveling high drifts of melted roof runoff away from the house. Sooooo hoping we get out of this blizzard snow and ice without roof leaks and such. We are supposed to have school tomorrow after 6 days off... but the neighborhood roads are still so bad... now solid snow and ice pack... not sure how the buses will get through them, so we'll just wait and see.

Am off to sew upstairs... that pile of leftover fat quarter strips from the Full Bloom quilt I just made is calling to me... suggesting a nice springy purse??

Washed Out!

One of the projects I listed earlier that I hoped to complete this month was a stack of fat quarters from the "Full Bloom" collection. Soft florals in both pastels and deeper tones in a very springy design full of flowers and pussy willow branches with birds and teapots really tugged at my "snowed-in" psyche... begging me to sew them up into something beautiful... so I did!

The fabrics were so pretty, I did not want to cut them up into tiny pieces and lose the gorgeous large scale designs. So, I stacked the fat quarters and cut off a rectangle strip on one end to make them into 18" squares. (I saved those cut off strips for a future project!! ) Then I divided them into pairs and drew a line diagonally across them and sewed 1/4" on each side of that line, cut them apart on the line, pressed them and sewed them together again making a simple four-triangle block.

I then sewed the blocks together, added a thin inner border then a wider outer border. I quilted the top then with large leaves coming out of the pieced centers.

After it was all quilted, I added the raw-edge appliqued flowers on all the block centers and corners with a raw edged strip of bright yellow fabric stitched into a curl on every flower.

I bound the quilt then washed it -which I never do!!! But I wanted the raw edges on the flowers to fluff, which they sure did! The quilt looks really old now... all wrinkly and textured! So it is done and ready to put out for spring!

SO, WHERE IS SPRING????

Blue Skies Finally!

We finally woke up this morning to clear blue skies. The winds are still blowing, but no more snow falling! Now the worry is that our gutters are filled with snow that melted and is now solid ice. These photos were taken yesterday afternoon after the majority of the snow had stopped.

We shoveled and used the snow blower on the driveway. Also tried to snow blow a newspaper in a bag hidden in a drift of snow. :-( That took a good while to pull out of the blades.



These icicles are quite wicked looking, aren't they!

We hope our gutters will hold until the ice inside melts.

The local school systems here are all closed until Monday at least. Today is the fourth day the federal government has been closed. First time in history!! We are starting to get cabin fever. I miss driving!

I finished all but 2 blocks yesterday from the Schnibbles

"Sunday Best" quilt out of Panache.

So, that is my project for the day!

Up to the sewing room I go!!

Stay warm! :-)