Time for a Treat...

...because I have two finishes to celebrate! The food quilt is officially done, binding and label and everything. I'll probably turn it in on Tuesday.

I also finished this wall hanging. All it needs now is a good title/name. (I thought I had one in the middle of the night the other night but I didn't get up to write it down. Do you think I can remember it now? Of course not.) I'm open to suggestions.

This measures about 23" wide by 20" high.

I don't know what possessed me to pick this up and work on it again all of a sudden. Guess I've just been in a handwork kind of mood lately. I used scatter stitching to hand quilt the purple areas around the hearts, in a blend of rayon and silk flosses. Next time I'll probably go back to beads. For some reason I enjoy sewing beads onto a quilt more than I enjoyed this process. Go figure.

Haven't begun the batik blocks I was threatening to make a few posts ago. Instead I dug out this stack of Shoo Fly blocks and will be making a few more so there are enough to cover my bed. It's been looking like summer around here for the last 24 hours or so, and what's more appropriate than a quilt of summer-y garden flowers?

These blocks began their lives as entries in a block of the month drawing in my local quilt guild. I was the fortunate one to win the blocks. (Woohoo!) I think about a dozen of them were made by other quilters. I don't remember how many I originally made for the drawing (your name goes into the hat once for each block you make). I do know that I liked the blocks so much that I decided to keep making them so I could eventually have a bed quilt for myself. There are currently 31 in the stack. Last night I figured I would need 42 to get the size quilt I want. That shouldn't take long ;- )

Remember the batik scraps I said I'd found recently? This is what I did with them.

Just orphan blocks at this point, but you never know what they will become someday!

Playing

The Foodie Quilt is back from the quilter. I still have to make the binding but I trimmed it and spread it out on my bed just to see how it would look.

That's DD's pillow on the bed too. Amazing how well it co-ordinates with the everday pillowcase!

I got up full of energy yesterday so this is what I did:

Last week or so I signed up to make the word 'play' for Tonya's four letter word quilt. I had to draw the letters out on graph paper to make sure they would fit into the 6" x 12" brick format she asked for. Between the P and the A and the Y I was afraid my block would be more like 20" long!

It turned out pretty well if I do say so myself :- )

This morning I had another bright idea. I thought Tonya could use more letters for her quilt so I did this:

Can you see that the letters are made out of letter prints? You should be able to click on the picture to see it in a larger format. I cleaned up the edges of this block for its' picture but left it slightly bigger than 6 x 12". Tonya can trim it down as necessary. It ended up being kind of skewed before I sewed the final edging strips on so I compensated with those final strips of background fabric.

I have to say, the easier letters have left me feeling like I might want to do some words for myself someday. I suspect my words will be a good deal larger though. Those strips of green between the letters in the word 'more' are only half an inch wide. Talk about fiddly work!

Fairies in the Garden

So yesterday was Mother's Day here in the United States. I had a lovely day, with one exception.

My DD bought this beautiful fairy print a couple of years ago on the rare occasion when we were at a quilt shop together. At the time the idea was that I would make a wallhanging out of it for her. The quilters among you can probably guess what happened next. Or rather, what didn't happen.

To be fair, it wasn't all my fault. I didn't make the wallhanging right away (that was the part you guessed, right?) and then she decided she didn't really want another thing to hang on her walls anyway. So the fairies went to the bottom of the pile again.

For her Mother's Day I wanted to finally use at least some of the fabric to make a gift for her. DD and her family go to one of the few remaining drive-in theaters in the country as often as they can, and they take every pillow they own when they go to make the experience as comfy as possible. So I thought I would make her another pillow. I fussy cut the fairies and pieced a few simple blocks and had the top done in a resonably short time. (It's about 18" x 24".)

The back had me stumped for a while because, of course, I had nothing left of any of the other fabrics I'd used on the front. (Except for the fairies, but I didn't want to use them on the back.) Eventually I found a batik in my stash that had the same colors in it as the leaf print that borders the top. Got the pillow assembled and started stuffing it... and ran out of fiberfil. Of course I didn't think of doing this for her until the day before Mother's Day and I couldn't get any more fiberfil before she arrived to wish me a happy Mother's Day. {sigh} Oh well. They will be coming through here again next weekend; I'll give it to her then. :- )

Happiness is Hot Water and Bluebirds

Who'd a thunk that having a new water heater installed in the attached garage would take me down for two days? Apparently enough of the fumes from whatever chemicals the plumber used seeped into our living spaces to incapacitate me. Go figure.

For those who may be interested, we ended up just replacing the existing water heater with a new one. Turns out that since we already had an electric tank in place going tank-less wouldn't improve our efficiency enough to offset the extra cost and inconveniences. That made the decision much easier to make.

These are the stragglers of the scrappy blocks I'd been making...


There are a few batik blocks too but I haven't photographed them yet. I had a very pleasant surprise in the mail and photographed it instead.

Remember the Birds of Change Exchange and the give-away I did? Well, others also hosted give-aways and I won one!

These delightful little bluebirds are from Kristin over at kleas. They even came with their own nest! Both birds are made from recycled materials: the bigger, darker bird out of velvet and the smaller bird out of a knit. My favorite parts are the tails and crests made out of real feathers.

Kristin does a lot of different crafts and teaches at a preschool in her area. The kid in me would love to be one of the students in her class. Reading about their activities even fired up my middle-aged brain!

Spring Couldn't Be Any Prettier!

We are having a spectacularly beautiful day. Another one! We had a bit of cloud cover yesterday and rain last night, but today is gorgeous again. This is what one corner downtown looked like earlier in the week:


And the river along whose banks our fair city was built:

I gotta say, when the weather cooperates, this place can't be beat!

Unfortunately, our household had a bit of a rude awakening this morning. Our water heater developed a leak overnight. There was some mopping up to do, bathing was brief and chilly, and now we have to shop for a new water heater. Anyone out there had any experience with tankless water heaters yet?

I think I'm about done with the scrappy blocks for the time being. I found myself getting bored with them the other day.

I pulled all the blocks out and played with them on the design wall a bit but nothing came together. I guess they will go back into the orphan box for the time being and wait for the muse to come by and inject some magic into them.

There are almost 50 Shoo Fly blocks, nearly 40 Churn Dash blocks,

between 30 and 40 Bow Ties, and four butterfly blocks.

I'm not entirely done cutting scraps for patches though. I found some short pieces of batiks leftover from other projects and have begun cutting them up for future use. This little task may be the bridge I need to get me making blocks for either the new batik quilt for myself or the one for my DH. I'm not entirely sure of the color scheme I'm going to use for his so I may begin with mine. Let's face it, there are a lot more bright, tropical batiks in my stash than the darker ones!