Celtic Solstice - Still on Step 2

Yep, still on step two, but I am making some progress.  I got all my white and yellow squares marked, and have various steps completed for step two.  I knew the king size would slow me down a little but not this much, but to be fair, I do have some really good excuses for being little behind on the mystery.

First off, when step two came out and after all the Christmas parties were over I had to study for a final exam for my Microeconomics class. I aced that with a 96 and got an A in the class, and I am sitting pretty with a 4.0 GPA over all! Yehaw!

For those who don't know I started back to college about a year and half ago.

I'll finish this coming May with my Bachelors degree.

When step three came out I was packed and driving so I could take a ride on this: The Carnival Dream.

When Step 4 came out I was somewhere in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean.

The kids said all they wanted for Christmas was a cruise, so Santa brought them one a week early.
We spent the week walking on beautiful beaches

Snorkeling in the blue water...

And exploring the islands of  Nassua, St. Thomas, and St. Maarten.

Can you believe I did not even miss my sewing machine?

After the cruise we spent a little time in Daytona Beach, Florida. We got home in time to relax for a day before heading out to visit relatives for Christmas.  The wee bit of sewing time I did squeeze in was reserved for my Starry Night Quilt. I really wanted that one done by the end of the year.

So December was a busy a month which didn't leave much time for Mystery sewing.
And those are my excuses, and I'm sticking to them.  ;)

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Starry Night Complete - 4th Finish 2013 FAL

I've had quite a busy December and didn't get as much sewing done as I'd like (I'll give more info about my December adventures on Monday), but I did get another project knocked off my 2013 FAL list.  I finished binding My Starry Night Quilt late last night.  Got it done just in time for Christmas next year. 

  

I went down to the beach today to visit with family so I decided to bring my newly finished quilt along for a photo shoot.  No fancy quilting on this one, just some meandering and some continuous curves.
This quilt is for me and will be used till it wears out.  

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Pretty Pouches for Christmas Presents

Merry Christmas!
I can finally show off the little creations I made for my friends and family.

First up, two jewelry pouches.

I really like these jewelry pouches. Hopefully my two young friends in MN do as well.

I can't gift an empty pouch, so I added a couple necklaces and a pair of earrings for both of them. 

For my friend in TN, I made a pencil pouch. I used this free tutorial.

I like the look of scrappy batiks. I makes me think that this pouch is perfect for an artist.

 I even made the ends scrappy.

For the stitching on the top I used a heavy weight variegated thread. It think it helps add to the scrappiness.

I also sent her three ear bud pouches.  One for her and her two daughters.

I am very proud of these three.  They are the best ear bud pouches I have made.
The actually turned out as circles!  The other ones I have made turned out as wonky weird ovals.
They still ended up with a home though, my daughter is the savior of pouches gone bad.

And of course, some hand knitted dishcloths to give away.
Hope you all have a Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays!

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Gamecock Quilt

 If you live in South Carolina you are either a Clemson Tiger fan or a Carolina Gamecock fan.

I particularly don't see the point in rooting for a chicken when everyone knows that tigers eat chickens.

That being said, one of my guild mates wanted me to quilt her Gamecock quilt for her.  She is giving it to one of her relatives for Christmas.  I finished it a couple weeks ago and gave it to her at our December guild meeting.  She did a great job with the piecing.  She even fussy cut the row of Gamecock logos so there is a chicken... er I mean Gamecock centered in each square.  

I quilted some overall freehand footballs for her mixed with some double swirls.




She did request that I put one tiger paw in the quit for her. I was happy to oblige.
She obviously knows Tigers trump chickens.

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Celtic Solstice - Link Party #2

Here are my pieces for step 2 cut out and ready for sewing.  I spent most of the weekend attending Christmas parties and finishing up some holiday gift sewing - I'll post those photos after Christmas - so the sewing part of this step is still on the to "do list".  

Check out the progress from everyone else working on the mystery at the Monday link up.

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Celtic Solstice - Link Party #1

I did pretty good tackling step one of the Celtic Solstice mystery quilt this weekend.

I sewed all my orange triangle squares together and 20 of my white ones.

And got half the blue on the remaining white triangles.

220 more seams to go and I'll be done with step 1.

Yep, I am doing the king size version!

To see how everyone else is doing check out the link party on Bonnie Hunter's blog.

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Starting Celtic Solstice Mystery

Usually when Bonnie posts her mystery quilts I sit back and watch as each step is posted. Then when the big reveal is posted I wished I had played along.  So this year I am doing just that.  This will be the first of her mysteries where I follow the steps as they are posted.  This afternoon I took a break from my regularly scheduled quilting projects to cut out all the pieces for step one. I am going to tackle the king size version!

Now i'm off to the sewing machine....

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3rd Finish for Q4 FAL

I was working on my Starry Night Quilt in hopes of having it ready for Christmas, but I had some cat interference and then I ran out of white quilting thread.  So what is a girl to do when the closest shop that sells white Guterman thread is 30 miles away?  ....

She gets out her yellow and pink threads and quilts up a different project on her Fourth Quarter Finish Along list.  

This is my Schnibbles Leap Year quilt.

I made it when I was playing along with Another Year of Schnibbles.

It was cold at the park today, but the sun was nice and bright.

My daughter's artistic view of how quilts should be displayed.  :)

I really like this yellow fabric, but as I started quilting it I made a mental note to myself to watch out for fabrics that have something "imposed" on them instead of it being part of the print. 

 I'm not sure what this white overlay stuff is, I usually see it on white on white fabrics, and I have been good about avoiding those but I didn't think to look for it on colored fabrics. So when I saw this yellow in the discount bin I didn't even think about it being like those white on white fabrics that my machine hates so much.   When my needle hits it a glob of white stuff head on it jerks slightly, makes a big hole, and gets me off my groove, which makes my next few stitches out of whack.

And sometimes it will make the machine skip stitches.

What ever that white stuff is, it is too thick in places and my needle doesn't like it at all.

Sometimes, it will just flat out break the thread as the needle goes down.

The fabric is pretty and feels nice to the touch, it just doesn't make for fun quilting.

This must be Sheen's favorite spot.

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November FNSI

When I signed up for "Friday Night Sew In" I commented that I was going to sew the night away.
What I really did was "press" the night away.
Each stack below has 10 blades in it.  That makes a total of 400 blades that needed be be turned and pressed.

Who knew turning and pressing 400 wedges would take most of the night.
All these blades will end up making two quilts, one for me and one to give away.  

I did want to get some actual sewing done for FNSI so I stayed up long enough to sew one full Dresden plate together. It was nice to be working on this Christmas quilt and the one I posted yesterday.  I have spent most of my time quilting for others these past couple weeks so it was fun work on a little something of my own.  

Click here to see what every one else worked on last night for FNSI, (scroll down for the link ups).

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Christmas Top Done

After fiddling with different layouts for my Half Square Triangle strips, I finally came up with this layout.

The top is made from nine big star blocks, but when they all got sewn together a whole new pattern emerged. Perhaps I can do some quilting to emphasis the stars.  

Tonight for Friday Night Sew In, I am going to tackle my Dresden blades.  I have quite a few left to press before I can even start sewing them all together.

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Cutting Up My Christmas Strips

 One of the items on my Q4 FAL list is to make a fourth Christmas quilt out of the 2 inch Christmas strips I cut at the beginning of the year.  I didn't remember how many I had cut out so when I counted 80 strips, I realized I could definitely make more than one quilt out of all these strips.

(The cut squares above the strips were used in my HST Christmas Quilt top.)

I started out sewing a red and green strip together to get 40 pairs.  I took 12 of those pairs, sewed a 3.5 inch white strip on top to make a tube, and cut them using the strip tube method.  So far I have laid them out in double hour glass blocks, but I may do a pinwheel instead, or even a mixture of both.

I took the remaining 28 pairs and put them together to get 14 strips of alternating red and green. 

 I decided these would make a great festive Dresden plate quilt.  Each strip gives me 20 wedges, which is how many wedges there are in one Dresden plate using the Easy Dresden Ruler by Darlene Zimmerman.   I plan on making these scrappy, and I want each Dresden to have one wedge from each strip strip, but that means I will need 20 different strip sets so I need to cut and sew 6 more alternating strips.  That will give me 20 Dresden plates.  That might be too many for a small quilt, so I'll break it up into two Dresden quilts.  That will give me three more Christmas quilt tops when I am finished, which is good, I have big plans for these beauties.  ;)

In the middle of my cutting, Jasper must have thought I needed a break.

He sat right on top of the strip I was cutting.

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Halloween Costumes

It's that time of year again, the Night of the Nan Ya Halloween party.  It is usually held the Friday night before Halloween, so costumes have to be ready by then.  This year the kids helped out a lot with their costumes.

My youngest wanted to be Gandalf.  He has really been into the Hobbit lately and he was determined to be the wizard.  I found a hat pattern in the internet and used it as a base for his hat.  Then I did some quick throw over the shoulder and sew up some seams for his robe and cloak.

I found a cool tutorial for the staff.  Mine didn't turn out quite as spiffy as the one on the website, but turned out good enough for what we needed.  We bought the beard and wig online.

My next oldest couldn't decide what he wanted to be.  It was down to the last hour before the party so I suggested we at least paint his face, so we came up with this.

My next oldest is playing Frodo in a road show in November, so he decided to go ahead and be Frodo for the Halloween party.  His outfit was more "put together" than sewn.  We collected his items from the thrift store. $1 for pants. $1 for the shirt.   The vest came from the ladies side for $1.98. I hemmed up the pants and took in the waist a little. For the shirt I ripped the collar off and that was it. 

The only thing I sewed was the hood on the cloak.  The cloak is from fleece so I didn't even have to hem it.  I found a good pattern for the cloak on the internet.  The furry feet are trimmed flip flops with a dog wig cut up and glued on.  I think we need to find some brown colored hair spray to lighten them up for Halloween night and the road show.

My daughter's pirate costume was was thrift store finds too.

Shirt $3, Pants $3.  (It is interesting how the ladies items are triple the price of the men's items at the thrift store.)   The black striped pants fit her perfect and didn't even wrinkle.   I was little sad to cut them shorter. They would have made a nice addition to her regular wardrobe.  I was going to make her a red vest, but we found this one at Walmart.  $14 was worth a few hours of my time so we bought it.

Make up, jewelry, and boots we already had on hand.

I sure get a kick out of Frodo being way taller than Gandalf.

We took home two prizes at the Halloween party.  Yay!

They don't announce 1st, 2nd, or 3rd - they just pick top three.

Gandalf took home top three for his age group of 9-12

And Sarah got picked as top three in the Adult category.

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