My Guild Challenge Entry

Today was my Guild's quilt challenge reveal at the Hartsville Museum.
There were lots of great quilts submitted and I will post more of those tomorrow.

For now I will show you the quilt I submitted.   

 The theme was "Quilting in the Carolina's".

 I had a hard time coming up with something to fit the theme. 

I finally decided to use my Lithia Park quilt since I worked on it in both NC and SC.

 I worked on English paper piecing the flowers and appliqueing them down as I traveled, visiting relatives in NC and SC.  I figured that would fit the theme literally.

I impressed myself with my cute little applique circles.

That was the first time I hand appliqued circles.

 I quilted the border with some inspiration from Sew Kind of Wonderful.

  I moved out front to the sunshine to try and pick up some more of the quilting details.

Here it is hanging in the museum.  It is one of the first quilts you see as you come in the door.

Now I need to start thinking about next years show.  The theme for that one is

"America the beautiful: My home sweet home."

I have no clue what to do for that one but I want to come up with something wowing for next year so I better get crackin.

=^..^=

Back to Quilting Shirts

After finishing up Mr Mayor I started the quilting on Shirt Quilt #3. I finished it up and put the binding on yesterday morning.  I wanted to take a photo yesterday, but it was raining all day. I thought it was going to rain again all day toady too, but the sun finally came out this afternoon.

I did some big loops in each of the 4 patches.  The single patch got some smaller loops.

I did some meandering in the white sections and then wondered if I should have done something a little more fancy. But then I turned the quilt to the back and realized the meandering is perfect.

I love the back and how it looks like a totally different quilting design than it does from the front.

This makes three of the 6 shirt quilts finished.  And to give myself some extra work, I started a 7th top this morning.  I had enough squares to make 35 pinwheel blocks.  When I get further along on those I will post photos.

This makes finish #14 for the year.

=^..^=

Mr. Mayor

This week I was working on a costume for my oldest son.
He is playing Mr. Mayor in the play Suessical Jr.
   The play is being put on by the Lake City Community Theater.

Dress rehearsals were this after noon and I finished up the last stitch on his bow tie this morning.

My youngest is also in the play.
He plays JoJo.  I didn't have to do much for his costume.
I found some white pants and white shoes and we died them yellow.
The LCCT provided his bow tie.

My daughter is also in it.  She is a Bird Girl.  Her dress was provided too. All I had to do was alter it to fit.  It was a little too big and kept falling off the shoulder.  We also added some extra boas to the back for some "feathers".  I snapped this shot as we headed out the door to play practice.

I stayed to watch the whole show at practice today.  That was my first time seeing the play from beginning to end. All the actors looked great in their costumes.  They have dress rehearsals all week, and tomorrow characters get fitted for microphones.  The play starts Friday June 8th and has a show on Saturday and Sunday.   Both Mr. Mayor and JoJo have a couple solos.  I am very excited. 

=^..^=

AYOS for May - Doc Top Done

I finished my Doc top Tuesday evening, but it rained all day yesterday so I didn't get a chance to take a photo of it till today.  I really like the way this one turned out.  I have always wanted to make a Card Trick quilt and now I have one.  Thanks Sinta and Sherri for giving me the "umph" I need to get these projects done and to use up the fabric I keep buying.  :)  Can't wait for the parade tomorrow.

=^..^=

Doc in the Works

I made some good progress on my May Schnibbles project, Doc, yesterday evening.
I have all my half square triangles cut out and trimmed and all my fabrics matched up.
I even made the first block.  Only 8 more to go.  I feel like the rest will go together lickety split.

=^..^=

Faceted Jewels Top Complete

All of my sewing this week has been spent finishing up my Faceted Jewels Quilt.  I didn't take pictures of the progress this week because I didn't want to bore you all with the same quilt pretty much over and over, sewing a block together and then a row together isn't too exciting.  But the top is all finished now and I took it outside this morning to get a full shot of it.  There is 2192 pieces in this top.  All but the white were individually cut from my scraps.  I am so in love with this quilt.  I have admired it on Cupcakes and Daisies blog for a long time and wanted to have one of my very own and now I finally do. Well at least the top part.  :)

=^..^=

May FNSI

I spent my FNSI working on my Faceted Jewel quilt.  I now have all the blocks sewn together and the two rows on the right sewn together.  I also have the first border, which is 1/3 of the original blocks, sewn on to each block.

I laid out the second row border to get a feel for the completed circles.  I still have to make some more geese for that border though but I didn't have enough wings (I guess they are called wings) for those geese  so I cut out some more this morning.

Everything is coming together slowly but surely for this one.  I could be going faster, but I keep picking out my stitches to fix the points I cut off while sewing.  I have heard the quote, "If you can't see it from a galloping horse it is fine."  But I don't ride horses so I have to fix my points.  :)

=^..^=

  

May Schnibble Project

There hasn't been much sewing going on the past two days, but I did get my fabrics picked out for my May AYOS.  I will be working with two charm packs of Friendship by moda.  

=^..^=

15 Blocks to Go

I got all the "54 40 or Fight" blocks sew together over the weekend.  Then I laid out the alternating blocks on the design wall and have a total of 3 of them sewn together.  This is suppose to be a scrappy quilt, but I have a fear if I just grab colors out of the pile I will end up with the bottom corner of the quilt being all blue.  So I organize it before I sew it all together. I call it my controlled scrappy look.

When laying it all out I realized I am short one Goose.  I either lost it when I was shifting stuff around, or I miss counted when I cut and sewed them all out a while ago.

Here is the full version of my design wall.  I LOVE IT!!  I had been taping a flannel backed table cloth on the french doors, but I kept having to take it down for various reasons.  So I built this design wall.  It is made from two blue insulation boards that I got from Lowes.  I trimmed them down and taped them together with white duct tape to create a wall that measures  6' 8"  x 7'.   Then I put some warm and white batting on top of it, wrapped it around to the back and taped it on.   It is light weight for good portability yet stable enough to hold up all my fabric.  I love it!

Behind the design wall is my shelf of fabrics and my daughter's sewing machine, which she doesn't use (I still have hope that she will get it out and want to sew something again one of these days). To the left, which you can't see, is my sewing machine and computer.  I must admit I spend most of my day in this part of the house.  And now that our TV is broken, thanks to some rowdy boys, the kids spend most of their time in here too.  I must say, it is a nice place to be.  :)

=^..^=

Jewels in Progress

I decided to pull out my Faceted Jewels quilt and get some good progress on it before I start back into quilting my stack of basted quilts.  I still need to piece most of the those 54 40 or Fight blocks together. I put them up on the board to make sure I didn't end up with all the blues in one block.  

Wow, after a blog post hunt I see that I cut this one out a over a year ago.  Good thing for blog posts or I would have sworn I cut this out only a couple months ago.

As I was was putting the squares up on the design board I kept thinking about Frodo, Sam, and Gandalf.  Probably because when I was cutting out all these small pieces I was listening to the audio book of Lord Of the Rings.  I wonder if I will always think of Lord of the Rings when I get this project out.  Perhaps I should rename it to my LOTR quilt.  :)

=^..^=

Leftovers are good.

I added some red sashing to my leftovers from my strip tube quilt and got the top sewn together.

I used the same herringbone fabric from the Reunion line.  My daughter says it looks pink instead of red.
 I guess the tiny red lines mixed with the tiny white ones makes it look more pink instead of red.

I wanted to add a blue border from the same line, but the only blue I had left was this one.  It comes across as way to busy for me though, so I haven't sewn it on yet.  Perhaps it would look better as the binding.

What do you all think?  Omit the border and use it as binding? or Keep the big border?

=^..^=

Strip Tube Top Complete

Sunday I was a little under the weather.  Enough to stay home from church, but not bad enough to stay away from the sewing machine.  I spent all day Sunday sewing most of this top together.  I got all of it done but half the green inner border and the outer border.  I saved that for this morning.

The picture on the tutorial I used only had 5 triangles across, but I had so many extra triangle units I decided to add an extra row.  That makes the top a 78 inch square.  

I used 38 out of the 40 strips from my jelly roll.  That gave me 19 tubes to cut from. 

Each tube gave me 9 squares (4 sets that matched and one odd ball).

I also had a 2.5 inch strip left at the end of each tube, and a a triangle that wasn't quite big enough to make a full square.  I was going to sew the scraps together and add them to the back of the quilt, but after rearranging them on the design wall, I realized that I just need to add some sashing and a border and I have me a whole new quilt!


I also made myself a new design wall on Friday.  I am so excited about it.  I will try to get a good picture of the whole thing later on.  It is huge, and portable, and huge!  I love it!


=^..^=

May Guild BOM

 Guild meeting was last Thursday and May's BOM was a basket pattern. We were told to use a floral fabric for the basket background, a basket colored fabric for the basket, and a light color for the border.  This is what I came up with.

 Unfortunately, I left my block at home so it didn't get up on the wall at guild meeting.  Silly me, I took it out of my pile of stuff to take to guild meeting to put my name on the back and then forgot to put it back.  I didn't get my name in the drawing this time around, but that is ok.  I won last month so I would have felt really greedy if they picked my name again, but I still want to participate and make sure there are lots of blocks in each giveaway.

We had a low turn out this time around there were only 10 blocks turned in, that includes mine and Frances's, who brought her unfinished block in an envelope for the winner to finish.  :)  

The pinwheel block in the upper right corner is the block for next month.

Hopefully next month there we will be back up to our usually big numbers.

=^..^=

Binding Complete...

And my Summer Day quilt is now ready to be gifted.

I didn't want this quilt too get too stiff with lots of quilting so I went with the all over swirls. I did to do a wee bit of custom quilting in the two borders though. Nothing too fancy, just something a little different than the rest of the quilt.

I found a great cupcake fabric for the backing and what makes it even better is that it was on sale!

I wanted to wrap it up and mail it right away, but my husband suggested I give it away in June when I can do it in person.

So per the name of the quilt, I will give it away one Summer Day in June.

This makes Finish #13 for the year.

=^..^=

Lots of Quilting Going On

I spent the past couple weeks busy quilting.  Some of my own stuff and some for others.  A couple of them are for my guild  quilt show in June.  I am so excited to show them off, but I don't want to spoil any surprises so I will only post some teasers of those.

This is the quilt I turned in for the show.  It was a kit from Connecting Threads that my mom gave me for Christmas a couple years ago.  The backing was made from the left over fabric from the kit.  I was surprised and excited to find that there was enough fabric leftover to piece together a backing.

This makes Finish #12 for the year.

This next one I quilted for Martha.  I love it!  Can't wait till I can show more of it.

This quilt belongs to Tish and isn't going in the show so I can show all of it.

She calls it "No More Peas Please".

She doesn't like a lot of dense quilting, so I did some straight lines through the chains and then some loops in the half square triangles.

I also finished all the quilting on my Summer Day quilt, I didn't take a picture of it yet though.  I am still working on hand stitching down the binding.  I have two more sides to go!  Should be done tonight and I will snap photos tomorrow.

=^..^=