Here's the block I made for the Quilt Pink challenge:


If I were to do it over again I would reverse the positions of the white challenge fabric and the muted floral print.

I finally decided to just chuck the second block I made. The design worked - mostly - but the values were misplaced in the block so the whole thing didn't read well. Live and learn! That will be one block I will not save for an orphan project. I may salvage part of it, but the bulk of it will go in the trash. (And I don't often throw fabric away!)

Speaking of orphan projects, here are a couple more placemats for DD and family:

This house block was from my earliest days as a quiltmaker. A couple of the fabrics in it are not 100% cotton and are very thin. I know better now! I added the strip of ribbon with hearts on it to dress the house up a bit and some scenery on either side to get the desired width for the placemat.

This Log Cabin block was donated for a charity quilt but must have been leftover after the quilt was made. Once again I only had to add a strip or two to bring it up to size. Good primary colors for Miss Margaret to learn her colors from!

Now I have to get back to those gifts I'm making. Holly pointed out that there are only 5 weeks until Christmas, and most of these gifts have to be shipped across country. Ack! Forgive me if I don't make it to your blog very often in the next couple of weeks! ;- )

Stash Enhancement

It's been a long time since I've dropped any amount of money in a LQS (local quilt shop). Until this week, that is!

Because of my chemical issues I can't be in most fabric stores for very long. Depending on the shop, I can get foggy headed in 15-20 minutes. At that point I have a hard time making any kind of decision, whether it's how much of a fabric to buy or whether I want it at all. I might even begin to feel weak or excessively tired. I haven't been to a quilt show in some time either, to avoid the cloud of fragrances that crowds tend to create. As a result I have begun to do a little fabric shopping online. One can only go without new fabric for so long!

Fabric.com was having a sale on some flannels recently. The top two prints in the picture below are flannels from them that I thought would be fun to use in preemie quilts. The colors are pretty true to what I'd seen onscreen. Somehow, though, the bear print is even cuter in person! I checked out other sale fabrics while I was there and went for the teal dot print as well, but that was all.



Thursday my friend C~ invited me to accompany her to a nearby city to check out the new Trader Joe's there (yeah!). I was happy to go given that I had fared so well two days earlier when I went to the mall with DD and her darling daughters. C~ and I did Trader Joe's and two quilt shops and the Salvation Army thrift store as well! I bought more flannel at the first quilt shop (the top two fabrics below) and apparently only four other pieces of cotton (seemed like more on the day). Actually, C~ paid for the piece on the extreme right. It's going to be part of a challenge we're doing with a few other friends of ours. Oh yes, there was one other purchase at that stop. It's a potential Christmas gift though so I won't reveal what it was. ;- )

That shop seemed to be okay for me, healthwise. I waited too long to have lunch, though, and paid the price. But after lunch we hit the thrift shop and I scored two cool neckties (which I didn't think to photograph). Then it was on to the second quilt shop. I only bought one piece of fabric there. It's the print on the extreme left in the photo above. Lots of fun dog-related words and phrases for that doggy quilt I'm going to make someday.

Of all the places we visited that trip, the thrift shop was the worst for me. I tried to get in and out of there as quickly as I could but I had to look carefully at every tie!

The next day I had the opportunity to pick up Miss Margaret from her other grandmother and deliver her to her mom. I was feeling well enough on the way back home to stop in at a favorite quilt shop that I hadn't been in in a long time. This is a store where I'd be happy to just have "one of everything!" in the store. Exercising great restraint, I only came home with these prints:

Two of them may go into another Christmas gift. The lime green was just for me, just because.

The shop had one more challenge packet left for their Quilt Pink 2007 block challenge. It contained these two prints:

The white on the bottom is actually a pink mini dot. I bought a couple of the fat eighths the shop had preselected to go with the challenge fabrics too. Yesterday I made up one block for the challenge. It took a ridiculously long time to get that block made, and then I wasn't all that happy with it. It's not bad, but I know it could be better (and would have been better if I'd been thinking more clearly). Oh well. Today I've made up a second block from the leftover bits of the first block. Once again, it doesn't quite live up to my expectations but it is what it is. I may photograph them for you tomorrow. It will require good light and it's too late for that now.

Oh yes, there was one other print from that store:

This was manufactured by In The Beginning especially for the western Washington shop hop this year. I'd never seen it before - that gives you some idea of how long it's been since I've been in that store; the shop hop is in June. I thought it might be fun to incorporate into things for relatives who used to live here but are now living in browner, dryer (and sunnier!) places. Which brings up the point that there will be things I'll be working on in the coming weeks that I will be unable to show you because they will be Christmas gifts and I'm not sure who's reading my blog and who isn't. With any kind of luck I'll remember to take their pictures and share them with you after the holidays!

Not George Clooney!

I didn't track down the source, but apparently the question is floating around in blogland, "What's on your bed?" My answer is, "Not George Clooney!" Or Johnny Depp or Matthew McConaughey or anyone else exciting ;- )

No, Helen Roll is on my bed at the moment. At least that's what it says on the back of this quilt:



This is my $10 thrift shop treasure which apparently belonged to Helen Roll before she passed away earlier this year. It's a lovely warm quilt but it's only the top layer. Underneath it we have the pinwheel quilt which will go to Miss Margaret when she gets a little older:




I'm not sure whether I've blogged about this quilt yet or not. The Double Pinwheels were made when DD was in elementary school. She picked out some of the fabrics that were used in the blocks. That project was put on the back burner at some point, to be lost in the mists of time. Last year (?) I unearthed the blocks and decided to make a quilt for DD's darling daughter out of them. Of course there were half a dozen or so of the big pinwheel blocks that were too small or otherwise unusable so I went back into my block stash and found some regular Pinwheel blocks exactly half the size of the Double Pinwheels. At that point I decided to put the pinwheels on point (this is turning out to be a very pointy story!). I needed a few more of the smaller ones to fill in the blanks and made sure to make them out of fabric from the same time period. Some of them were made out of scraps from the dresses my mother had made for DD. The center of the quilt needed to be a bit longer before I added the border so I created the primitive hearts. There's a row of them along the top and along the bottom (which you can't see in this picture). They include fabrics from Margaret's other great grandmother. The border fabric also came from that great grandmother. You probably can't tell from the photo, but I machine quilted around each pinwheel. Because DD is such a fan of tied quilts, and Miss M likes to twiddle them, I included ties of embroidery floss in the setting triangles around the perimeter of the quilt. It's not fancy but it's serviceable and that seems to be what I do.

I was really pleased to be able to include all of the women on this side of the family in Miss Margaret's quilt. Hopefully I haven't set the bar too high for future quilts for the other grandchildren!

What I Did on Saturday

Ta da! The Lincoln Logs blocks are all sewn together!

This was the perfect project for me on Saturday because I had a bad reaction headache and needed a distraction. Sewing the blocks together was a fairly mindless activity. I had to take two of the blocks completely apart and put them back together again to make them big enough (the maker of the blocks had taken too deep a seam allowance), one block had a seam where one fabric had only been caught by a thread - literally! - so I took that seam out too and put it back together, and one block was exactly the right size and had to be taken in to make it fit with its' neighbors. When I spread the top out on my bed afterward I was dismayed to see an area with too many light fabrics in it for my taste. I had sewn the blocks exactly the way I'd laid them out on the floor; the problem just didn't show itself until they were actually sewn together. {sigh} What to do?

I thought about moving the offending block(s) but then I'd have to replace it with something from somewhere else. Y'all know what happens then! One thing leads to another and I'd have nothing but a pile of blocks again. I could make a whole new block but I didn't want to leave out any of the blocks my friends had made for me. I seriously considered the suggestion to tea dye the light blocks to tone them down. Eventually the idea dawned on me to just take out the light pieces in one or more blocks and replace them with something darker. I played around with the scraps I had until I found something I thought would work. Swapping out the two smaller light strips from one block made all the difference in the world. That was the only change I ended up making. Whew!

I didn't get to see the granddaughters on Halloween. But when I went over there on Friday Miss Margaret was dressed up in her princess dress and fairy wings, which was her Halloween costume and is currently her favorite outfit (of course!). SHE WAS SO CUTE!!!

And I forgot the camera.

DD has promised me a picture. They were here briefly yesterday but Margaret and I were too busy playing to get any pictures taken. Baby Susan played rag doll the whole time she was here, asleep in her mother's arms. At two months old she is the happiest baby I've ever seen. When she's awake she smiles and laughs and coos and gurgles. I feel like the luckiest grandma in the world!

Happy Halloween!

Just a few more of my decorations... I think the rest of them will have to wait until next year!

Moda witches ~ some of my favorite of all time :- ) These were cut from a border print stripe and backed with an appropriate print of another cotton. Then I filled them with polyfil and plastic pellets to give them weight and make them free-standing.

An addition to the entrance of our home:

And a close-up so you can really appreciate the sentiment:

The hallway in its' almost-complete state:

Not a great picture, but the best I could get under the circumstances. The beaded curtain is made up of little glow-in-the-dark skulls and bone shaped black beads. Love it! The black fabric on the wall is covered in green skeletons. You may be able to see the broom I've left in the corner. I've also hung a (small) witch's hat on one of the hooks on the right wall. (Unfortunately, behind my rain hat and umbrella. I might have to move that.) There's a glow-in-the-dark skeleton hanging from a noose back in the corner too. And there are a couple of soft-sculpture ghosts hanging around. (What appears to be a light fixture overhead is actually a sort of sky light.)

And now, for the next holiday...

Buenos Dias de los Muertos!

(forgive my Spanish - I really have none!)