Don't let the Door Stop You Blog Hop

Welcome to my day of the "Don't Let the Door Stop You" Blog Hop, hosted by
Carla of Creatin in The Sticks and Mdm Samm of Sew We Quilt.

   Say Hello to Mumford.  He is my newest feline companion.
He will hold the door open for my two real kitties as they head to the gentleman's lounge - aka the litter box.

 What a nice little fellow Mumford is with those pretty green eyes and those hand stitched facial features.
The patterned called for a cat nose button, but I didn't have one on hand so I drew a triangle where his nose should be and filled it in with some thick black thread.

This is Jasper and Sheen, my two feline boys.
Very seldom are they this cuddly.

The pattern came from SewCutePatterns and is called Attack Cat.

It is a stuffed animal pattern, but can easily be converted to a door stop by adding some

heavy "stuffing" in his body section.  I'm partial to poly pellets.

Mumford was easy to put together and looks fabulous.
Here he is with the flash, giving us a better view of his shifting "fur" colors.

Be sure to check out the other great door stop hoppers today.
Clicking on their sites below

January 30th
Just Let Me Quilt
Quilted Delights   - You are Here
Meadowbrook
Hill Valley Quilter
Pampered Pettit
Life in the Scrapatch
Seams To Be Sew

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A Finish Just in Time For Snow

We have snow and ice!  Very seldom do we ever get snow and when we do everything shuts down.

They canceled school yesterday in anticipation of snow.

We could have had a perfectly good half day if we wanted to.

but to be on the safe side they closed everything.

Freezing rain started last night around 5 o'clock yesterday.

I went out to take a few pictures and then enjoyed the rest of the evening in my

sewing room working on my Christmas pinwheel quilt.

I finished the quilting and binding this morning and the dogs and I went out to do a photo shoot in the snow.

Belle likes to eat the snow.

Dean was a happy camper and running all over.

We even saw Roscoe, the neighborhood cat.

I never thought I'd have a quilt with snow in the background.  I'm so excited!

I love seeing quilts in the snow.

I wasn't going to put any quilting in the white part of the pinwheels but as I was about to add the binding I decided they needed a little something, so they all got some squiggles.

School was canceled again today ...

and tomorrow for good measure.

That includes my college class tonight.

I am ok with that.  :)

Notice the choice of foot wear for southern snow.

This is my third finished quilt of the year.
It is also my January finish for A Lovely Year of Finishes, - My goal setting photo can be found here.
It is also my first finish for Quarter One of the 2014 Finish A-Long.




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Project Quilting Challenge 2 - Upcycling

This is my entry for Challenge 2 of Project Quilting.  Rules for Challenge 2 Can be found here.

Basically the whole project had to made from materials that had a previous life as something else.
We also had to include two materials that were never intended for use in a quilt or clothing.
Again you didn't have to make a traditional quilt but you did have to have either patchwork, applique, or three layers stitched together.  I decided to go the non traditional route and I appliqued the front door on in order to stay within the guidelines.

I really struggled with this challenge. I am not one to up-cycle anything. I usually give away old clothes and unwanted items, so I was racking my brain trying to come up with an idea. Finally near the end of the week I had the pincushion idea pop into my head.

I have a bin full of old denim pieces that I cut from worn out jeans. I save them to use as patches when needed. I decided the denim would make great walls for a cute little house pincushion.

I added some fringe, beading, and yarn as vegetation. These items came from my daughter who had salvaged them from other items.

The two items I added that usually can't be found on a quilt are a bottle cap, and a CD. I put the bottle cap as a wall decoration. It reminds me of the quilt images that can bee seen on the side of barns. I used the CD to make the windows. I cut it into tiny squares and glued them on.

The door is an old piece of felt that had been tucked away in a drawer.

The roof is denim covered in a gold mesh. Another treasure from my daughters stash.

The pincushion measures 3 inches wide x 4 inches tall.

You can see all the other entries at the Project Quilting Flikr Group.

Can't wait to see what the next challenge theme is.
Hopefully I can come up with something more quilty next week.

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Celtic Solstice Step 2 Finished - FNSI results

I finished step two of The Celtic Solstice mystery.

I sewed last night and a wee bit this afternoon to get all 244 of these sections sewed together and pressed.

 I even cut up the orange and yellow for Step 3.

For the rest of the evening, I am going to spend time working on my entry for Project Quilting.  The challenge this week is upcyling.  I am very much out of my element for this theme, I had no clue what to make, but I finally came up with an idea the other day. Nothing to fancy but good enough to stay in the challenge this week.  I'll post pictures tomorrow before noon.

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First FNSI of 2014

Tonight is the first Friday Night Sew In (FNSI) of 2014.  I have a birthday party to go to for the first part of the evening, but later on tonight I will be finishing up Step Two of the Celtic Solstice Mystery.  I have spent the past week quilting for some guild mates and tonight I want to piece.  So I decided to put these chevron blocks are on the agenda for FNSI.

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Wake Up to Kona Blog Hop

Today is my day for the Wake up to Kona Blog Hop and I am excited to show you what I created!

I started with this Classic Color Palate roll up and a bunch of Kona White and a wee bit of Kona Pacific.
I was inspired by the "Jelly Roll Strip Starburst" pattern by Kimberly Einmo.

I sewed the strips into groups of two and cut them on the 45 degree angle to get the diamond shapes.

The jelly roll gave me enough for 10 color coded stars plus four scrappy stars, I only ended up using two scrappy stars for my first project.

This is one of the bigger quilts I have made.  It measures 76 x 96 inches.

It needs a little more quilting in the white sections and the border and then it will be finished.
I am thinking about entering it as my challenge quilt for my quilt guild's annual show.
The theme is "A little Color in My Life".  But to do that I want to put some really spiffy quilting in the white space and that will take me awhile to finish up.

I am loving these pretty points!

I have really impressed myself with this one.

A little patience and a hot iron really pays off.  :)

After I was done cutting my star blocks I had a lot of these scraps leftover.  I am not one to throw away fabric so I came up with an idea.  It meant getting out the stitch ripper and the rotary cutter again but it was worth it.  The idea was to make a bunch of small pinwheel blocks and turn it into a small child's quilt that had pinwheels with wide sashing.

These are some of the scraps trimmed, grouped, and ready to be turned in to 3.5 inch pinwheels.

But then my husband gave me a better idea.  He looked at my design wall while I was in the middle of sewing together the first quilt and he said, "I really like these fancy pinwheel blocks.  You don't see these everyday."  When I told him those weren't the blocks I was making he didn't seem as excited. I told him they only looked that way because I was sewing the other half of a star block.  He really liked the pinwheels, so I got to thinking... 

Why not use the two left over scrappy stars and turn them into the fancy pinwheels you don't see everyday.
To spice it up even more I added all the tiny 3.5 inch pinwheels in the border and some more Kona White and TADA!  

I call this one "Floating Pinwheels".  It is 50 x 50 inches

I think I like it better than the first quilt and already want to make another one using the same color combo as the pinwheels that were on the design wall.

And as if that wasn't enough, 

I still had some scraps leftover so I decided to make a pouch.

The gray I used is Kona Pewter.

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These twenty 1.5 x 2.5 inch scraps, plus one jelly strip (a brown that didn't seem to fit anywhere), are all that is left from that jelly roll.  I could probably chuck these, but you never know, I could find just the right project for them.

Make sure you go visit the other hoppers today.

They have some great Kona projects to share with you as well.

I Piece 2-Mary

A Reformed Heath’n

From This To That

A Quilting Sheep

CeLynn’s Sunflower Patch

Robin’s Fabric Nest

Quilted Delights - (Me)
Sew Me Something Good



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Project Quilting: Challenge One

As I was hopping around different blogs the other day I came across something called Project Quilting. Since school doesn't start again for me till next week I decided to jump in the challenge.

This is season 5 of Project Quilting and this week was the first challenge of the season.

The theme this week is "String Along with Me". 

There were only a few rules that had to be followed:

1. The entire quilt (except the back) had to be made of strings - fabric strips 

no larger than 2.5 inches.

2. The quilt had to be started and finished during this week.

3. The quilt didn't have to be traditional but must have at least one of these three elements:

A: include patchwork

B: include applique

C: have three layers stitched together.

(When I first read these three items I didn't see the "at least one" so I ended up doing all three.)

At first I had visions of making a cool landscape quilt like this one, but I knew that wouldn't be possible to do in one week.  After perusing all the string quilts on Pinterest and Google images, I found this Exlpoding Star Tutorial.  I Instantly fell in love and knew I had  to make a quilt using that Star. 

I made 6 star blocks and fiddled with different layout designs till I came up with this one.
I measures approximately 40 x 56 inches.

When I was putting the Blue string blocks together it made me think of the Ocean. 

But I couldn't figure out how stars could fit into an ocean theme. Finally it hit me. Starfish. So I named the quilt "Relaxing Starfish"   The Rainbow stars are the starfish resting on coral, surrounded by the Ocean.

   I had been at a loss as to what to applique on the quilt,  but once I figured out the name of the quilt I knew what I was going to applique.  I punched out some green Starfish and placed them on the blue string blocks and machine stitched then down.  It is lightly quilted, just in the ditch, but if I come up with something clever I may go back and add more quilting to the blue string blocks.

From start to finish, this quilt was fun to put together. Even when it got to be the wee hours of the morning.  I do believe it is in the top ten of my all time favorite quilts that I have made.

All projects had to be posted by noon today CDT.

Go check out all the other entries  HERE.

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2014 Finish Along Q1

I did pretty good with my Q4 Finish Along for 2013.  I got 6 out of 12 complete and even though I didn't get 12 done, it was nice to have 12 on my list.  I am a fickle crafter, which is one of the main reasons I have so many UFO's to begin with, so it was nice to be able to pick and choose which finish I wanted to work on.  For this quarter I am going to list 12 again.  A few from last quarter that didn't get on the list and a few new ones.

1. My Christmas Pinwheel Quilt.
I'm also putting this one as my January goal for "A Lovely Year of Finishes".
You can see all the other January goals for "A Lovely Year of Finishes" at this link party.

2. My new Christmas Quilt top.  Not sure what to call this one yet.
It went from a pile of strips last quarter to a quilt top.

It also got basted last quarter but didn't quite make it to the machine.

3. My Christmas Dresden Quilt.
These Dresden plates also came from the pile of strips from Q4 last year.

4. Christmas Table Topper - I cut out fabric to make two of these in 2011 - one for a friend and one for me.  The one for me never got finished.

If I get these four projects done this quarter, I should definitely be ready for Christmas by December.  :)

5.  My Slide Show quilt.  It is already basted, so I might as well put this one on the list again too.

6. The Mondo bag is back for this quarter again too.  I really want to get this one done this quarter.

7. Ric Rac Quilt.  It has been basted for quite a while now.

8. My Baby Cakes Quilt - This was a kit from Connecting threads and is made from flannel.

9.  Wild Thing Quilt - Another kit from Connecting Threads.  

 10.  Doc Schnibbles Quilt Top

11. Dimestore Schnibbles Quilt Top

12.  Jewel Box quilt.  It still needs a border and then it is ready for quilting.

  That is four projects a month.  Some are small and some are big, but most are almost complete so I should have a good chance to get at least half done, if not more, for this quarter

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