Mystery Quilt Fabrics!

A trip to Austin to see our grandsons usually means a stop at The Sewing Basket quilt shop in Salado and this time was no different! Since they were having an awesome sale of 30% off all fabric in the store (25% off +5% more if you gave a donation to the Animal Shelter), I just had to get my fabrics for the Mystery Round Robin quilt that my friend, Debi is doing for this coming year 2008! It will be done nesting style, so the fabrics will never leave home--quite a saving on postage--right??!! I had decided to do it in Christmas fabrics and love what I got! The first block will be posted around January 1st with instructions on her blog. Sounds like it will be lots of fun!

We had a great time in Austin with the grandboys and seeing our son-in-law's parents from Ohio. Evan had lots of fun calling us his "Texas grandma and grandpa" and his "Ohio grammy and grandpa!" Nathan just grinned at us with his 16 month old grin, but I'm just sure I heard him say "grandma" once or twice!! Such treasures. There's nothing like giving a grandson a kiss on the cheek and getting one in return!!! What a blessing!

Let quilting help you make someone smile!

Jan

Heirloom Romance Quilt

The start of a new year and the start of a new quilt! This one is called Heirloom Romance and is quite different from the quilts I am used to doing--a step outside the box, so to speak! It has lots of embroidery and crazy patch blocks and beadwork--there's something new for me. I went to the store to buy the beads and was I in for a surprise--overchoice!!!! Two aisles of beads--any kind of bead I wanted there for the taking. I guess I shouldn't be surprised because when I was in Ohio on one trip, my daughter and I went to a bead store--what fun that was, beads of every color and kind and description! It was hard to make up my mind, but I finally made the decision and came home with some beauties.

The first picture shows one of the purses with the embroidery partly done--it will have flowers in the purse and beadwork on it--I think the beadwork will be done after the quilt is quilted, so they don't get smashed by the hoop. The second picture shows 2 of the crazy patch blocks--these are 2 of the smaller ones. These are paper-pieced. There is the option to embroider on the plain blocks of these if desired. Have to see about that! All in all I'm thrilled with it and ready to take on the challenge!!! I hope I feel this way further down the road--LOL!

Let quilting help you make someone smile!

Jan

New Floss Organizer System!

For Christmas, one of the nice things I got (they were all nice!) was a new embroidery floss organizer system. The first picture shows my old way--envelopes. The second picture shows the new way--bobbins. Since I have collected all the colors over the last 20+ years, it is going to take me awhile to transfer all those skeins of floss to the new systems. As of today, I have 1 1/2 boxes out of 3 done! I'm making progress! I think my dear hubby gets tired of hearing the little bobbin winder squeaking it's way around, but so far he has yet to say anything!!! What a patient man!

Sunday afternoon we put the Thimbleberries BOM on the quilt frame--it uses up every spare inch of the frame and we will be awhile quilting this one--but it's good to be working on it!

I hope you had a good Christmas--we had a nice quiet one --talked to both of our girls, which is always so nice and ate a nice dinner--although we did have one problem--me! I somehow didn't turn on the oven for the ham and we couldn't figure out why it wasn't baking! Finally Maynard figured it out--I thought I had lowered the temperature after baking the apple dumplings, but instead I had turned it off!! Oh dear! It finally cooked and we ate an hour late--good thing only the 2 of us!!!

Let quilting help you make someone smile!

Jan

Bird Treehouse Top Finished!

The top of Bird Treehouse Thimbleberries quilt is finished! This is the one that my dear daughter gave me for Christmas--she gave me the trip to the quilt store and the gift certificate to purchase the fabric for the quilt, that is! Doesn't it have a nice wintery feel to it?! Once I got going on I just couldn't stop and just HAD to finish it!!! It went very quickly.

Also Maynard finished quilting this little quilt for Project Linus called Toybox that is from Claudia's BOM on Quilt Shoppe. So I finished the binding on it and another one is ready to go to the East Texas Chapter of Project Linus. That makes a total of 43 for us this year--I hope 43 children have had a blessing from these quilts because we sure have had fun making them and prayed that they would go to just the right person in need.

Let quilting help you make someone smile!

Jan

Tree Birdhouse Block

This is the middle section of the quilt that I purchased with my gift money from my daughter for Christmas--it's a great winter quilt! The birdhouse will have large, antique, black buttons on it for the bird holes, but I'll put them on after it is quilted. I can tell that this one will go together quickly. Thimbleberries are such nice fabrics to work with ----no wonder my friend Debi loves them so much!!!

I also finished the block for week #6 in Crazy Mom Quilts quilt of the week quilt along. Can't believe we have done 6 of them already!!! These are going to make a neat Christmas lap robe for next year!

Let quilting help you make someone smile!

Jan

Forever Flowers Top Finished!

It's just the top and it's not quilted, but it's finished--I just put the last border on!!!--Fresh from the sewing machine! I think this one is going to go to a long arm quilter to be quilted so that the applique will stand out--I don't want to quilt over the applique--and I'm not confident enough on the Little Gracie to quilt this one and Maynard is just comfortable with pantograms which won't work on this one either!!!It feels good to mark another one off the list!

Maynard won 2 tickets to a college tournament basketball game at American Airlines Center in Dallas through a TV station promotion, so we will be spending Saturday afternoon there. Doesn't that sound like fun? We will see Texas Tech and Stanford play. Seeing how we are from Indiana it will be interesting to see Bobby Knight in action again!!!

Let quilting help you make someone smile!

Jan

Second String Quilt Blocks!

Here's some more string quilt blocks. This one is from the book "Strips and Strings" by Evelyn Sloppy. You sew a string piece 5" x 40" long and trim it to 4" x 40" long, then sew it to a solid piece--in my case green. (As seen in the first picture.) You then sew that piece to another piece just like it and cut 10" triangular blocks, unfold them and have blocks like in the second picture--very hard to explain, but the book does a great job of making it all very easy! Like my friend, Debi, I'm trying to use up all my scraps and this is a good way to do it!

Feeling like organizing the other night, I dived into my big basket of scraps and weeded them out--I cut all the pieces that were big enough to cut into 2.5" strips and put anything smaller than 2.5" into a separate bin for string quilts. Then I got out my book "Can of Worms" by Debbie Caffey to pick out some quilts to do. Lots of ideas in there! So that should keep me busy, too! Now I plan to go through my stash and pick out anything smaller than a FQ and cut it up for these string or 2.5 quilts--sounds like a good cold weather day project! It's called stash busting, isn't it??!!

Let quilting help you make someone smile!

Jan

Monthly Bluework Snowmen!

These little snowmen tell a tale of each month and are done in Bluework. They were so much fun to do that I didn't want them to be finished!!! I hope you can see them all right in the picture--it was hard to get a good one since they are on a light background. I'll hang these on my seasonal wall in January to cheer me up!

The countdown to Christmas is going faster it seems, but I did get my Christmas cards finished this afternoon and hope to do some baking tomorrow or maybe Wednesday to sent to Maynard's work and to give to the neighbors--always fun to do. I can't decide what to make--maybe marshmellow layered brownies or kringla. Both sound really good to me, maybe I should make both and really blow up my diet?!!!!

Let quilting help you make someone smile!

Jan

Great Shopping Adventure!

My great friend Debi and I had a wonderful shopping adventure today! After breakfast at IHOP, we ventured to Dallas to Golden D'or Fabric Outlet for $2.99 fabric. What a selection they had. It was Debi's second trip and my first, so she showed me the way around--they had a huge amount of all kinds of fabrics, but we hit cottons, of course. We didn't even get to the clearance room! The fabrics were all well-known brands and it was hard to decide just what to get! I got some fabrics for backings for Project Linus quilts and some for whole cloth quilts for Project Linus and the rest just because they were pretty blenders and some because they had music on them for my collection of music fabrics. What a fun shopping day!

Debi also gave me the cutest teapot with music on it (I love the piano) and made me a cute pincushion for my collection and also gave me a neat pattern as a Christmas present. I am blessed having a friend like Debi! We met online at the Quilting Passion Forum. We hit it off right away. She feels like the sister I've never had!

Friday, our Tuesday Sit N Sew group met for a Christmas party--there were 14 of us who met at Jackie's house and what a fun time we had! We did sit and sew for awhile and then had a wonderful pot-luck lunch. Then we had a very different Chinese Gift exchange. We each held our own bag while Jackie read a story about the "Wrights" and their comings and goings which had us passing the bags to the "right" or the "left". Soon all the bags were all mixed up and so were we!!!! Then we did the exchange part, where you could open the bag you had or chose another bag or take someone else's gift--it was lots and lots of fun and laughter and a few moans and groans when someone got their gift taken and replaced!!!! I ended up with a Fons and Porter thread tin that I was very happy to receive! It was a wonderful day and made lots of memories!! We voted on a new name for our group which is "The Frayed Edges Quilters."

Let quilting help you make someone smile!

Jan

Tiny Trees and Block of Week!

Tiny Trees is a mini quilt that measures 12.5"--I need to find just the right binding for it and was hoping to find a green stripe of some kind that I could cut on the diagonal--another trip to the LQS--won't be too hard to take!!! LOL!! I found this pattern when I was in Wisconsin and it is by a local gal in Hudson, Wisconsin. I thought is was so cute!

Also finished my Block of the Week from Crazy Mom Quilts blog--I like these blocks so much--I know I say that every time, but I can't help it!!!!!

Is anyone else working on their Christmas cards list? I'm diligently trying to write a letter, I figured I was going to say the same thing to all the out of towners, so I wrote one letter and typed it up on Word Perfect and printed out some stationary on PrintShop and printed the letter on it and there you go---now to address the cards and sign everything and I'll be done!!! I love getting cards, and I usually love sending them, maybe it's the gray weather that we've been having that's getting me down--it's hard to celebrate Christmas without snow, I must admit, but I don't really miss shovelling it!! Can't have it both ways, now can I?!

Let quilting help you make someone smile!

Jan

Christmas Wreath Wall Hanging

Time to get out a few Christmas things, so the first thing is the wall hanging of the Christmas wreath: I made this several years ago and each year sew new embellishments on it--it is loaded with all kinds of fun things--the manager scene that my daughter, Amy sent me is my favorite.

We had a wonderful time with our grandkids and our daughter and her husband--seems like the time flies by when we are with them,of course time spent with family is precious and with grandchildren is even more precious because they change so much in between each time we see them! My daughter took me to a wonderful quilting store, The Glass Thimble where she gave me a gift certificate and I got to shop for a wonderful quilt! I picked out Thimbleberries fabric for a wonderful winter quilt. Thank you so much, Amy! An even more treasured gift was pictures of the grandgirls in photo coasters--of course I may be a bit prejudiced, but I think they look like models!!!!

Let quilting help you make someone smile!

Jan

Ode to Dear Jane Sampler

After several years of working on some Dear Jane blocks and coming to the conclusion that I was doing too many alternate blocks because I couldn't do the original blocks (too hard!), I decided to call it quits and use the blocks that I had and make a sampler. I named it "Ode to Dear Jane." I'm very happy with the way that it turned out and only have to decide how to quilt it now! I truly admire those that have finished a Dear Jane quilt and those that have finished more than one!!!! Quilting is supposed to be fun and this just wasn't fun for me anymore, so it was time to turn to other things. It's good to know when to say no to some things and I feel much better now that I have made this decision!

Also I finished the Block of the Week from Crazy Mom Quilts blog. These are so much fun to do and I thank her for doing this!

I'll be off to visit my grandgirls in Ohio for the next few days so will be away from my computer, so therefore no blog messages. Instead I'll be playing 5 and 2 year old games!!!!!! And some visiting with their mom and dad, too!!! We're hoping we don't run into the big storm that is supposedly headed that way--maybe it will stay north of them!!

Let quilting help you make someone smile!

Jan

Two quilts--alike yet different!

Finished 2 more Project Linus quilts that used the same pattern--Just Can't Cut It---but different focus fabrics. The first one is Tea Party Picnic and the second one is Zoey's Zoo. I used the same accent fabrics from a sale at my favorite quilt store, Quilt Mercantile, and then different main fabrics so the look is just a little bit different in each one. This is a great pattern if you don't want to cut up your focus fabric into small pieces, so that more of it shows.

Let quilting help you make someone smile.

Jan

DFW Gang Guild Week-End

A couple of years ago a group of us from the DFW area who had meet each online at the Quilting Passion forum got together and had a shop hop--we had a ball and got along together so well that we decided to meet again and have a Sit N Sew party on the first Saturday in December. So last year we did just that! We had a ball. Then this last year we got together at a quilt show and decided to declare ourselves a guild --wooo hooo---no rules or regulations, just a fun group of gals getting together having quilt related fun!!! We had our first quilt related block challenge and we were off and running.

All that was leading up to this last week-end when we meet for our 2nd Annual DFW Gang Quilt Guild Get Together in Rockwall, Texas for 2 days of quilt related fun! We had out of town guests this time who had heard about all the great times we had and just HAD to join us! Sheryl came in from Missouri, Dorothy and a friend, Mara Del came from Kansas, Dorie came from Oregon, Darsie and Mary Lee came up from Houston, and Lynn came in from California. Add on our regulars and we had a group of 15. We had doubled in size from our first meeting!!! WOW!! What fun!

Friday we spent on a Shop Hop and hit 5 different quilt shops in the area! I'm sure we made a big impact on the ecomony of the DFW area!!! We certainly made a dent in our pocket-books! So many choices and so many people to help us make our choices! Then on Saturday we had our Sit N Sew at "Stitching Memories" in Rockwall (see picture above). Every chair was filled and the room was filled with lots of laughter and the busy sounds of women working on all kinds of quilting activities. We had door prizes, a FQ lotto game, a game to guess who made the blocks in our challenge quilt and an Ornament Exchange. We even found time for lunch! Then at 4:30 the husband of the "locals" meet us at Salt Grass restaurant for dinner. All in all the bestest weekend ever. We are all exhausted, but what a good tired it is. There's something about getting together with like minded people that makes you feel just downright GOOD!!!!

Let quilitng help you make someone smile!

Jan