Tuesday, January 24, 2012

Not bad in a loose, artistic sort of way...

 In a galaxy far, far away....Luke, I am your sister:)  Yep, I have a brother named Luke and I can't think of Star Wars without thinking of him.  Although, my latest quilt is not for Luke.  He can be jelly (jealous, for those of you who don't have a house full of teenagers) if he wants to.  My great-nephew Hayden will be getting this one.
Darth and the Millennium Falcon are my favorites!  The patterns are from a free site, Fandom In Stitches.  You should definitely check them out.  They have some really amazing patterns from all your favorite sci-fi movies and cartoons.  I'm also planning  Harry Potter and Twilight quilts based on patterns from this site.  These are paper pieced and I had to double the size to make them 9" blocks!  Then I added borders until they were 12".  I can't imagine doing one of these actual size!!  There were some itsy bitsy pieces.
 
 R2D2 gave me fits!  How do you do this guy justice with fabric?  I had hoped to find white fabric with blue rectangles to make it some what more literal but it just wasn't happening.  So, with the urging of my family, I embroidered some detail on his... head? 
 I was most worried about Yoda in the beginning because I couldn't imagine getting his face right.  But, luckily, my son Hunter is a really good artist.  I had him draw the details and I just traced with thread.  Hunter ends up doing a lot of my artwork for me.  Thank you, honey:)  All in all, I kind of like this one but it only matters if Hayden thinks it's cool.  Fingers crossed.
 When Star Wars was finished, and by finished I mean ready to be quilted, I decided to finish a few projects from Valentines past.  This little Storm At Sea was the Super Bowl mystery last year.  It's been hanging on my railing all year.  I used some of my least favorite fat qtrs that I won at this months guild meeting as backer.  Got it quilted and stalled out when I realized I didn't save anything to bind it in.  Dang It!  So there is sits until I can go shopping again.  Luckily, I think Sweet Annies still has some coordinating fabrics.

Which reminds me, at our guild meeting, I won 39 red/ valentine fat quarters!  SCORE!!  I think I won it last year or the year before in Jan or Feb because I've won pink before.  And, I won the patriotic month once...

Also, last month I won  a free applique book.  I need to stop thinking of myself as never winning anything!

So, then I moved on to Heart Strings.  I made this quilt top a few years ago for Sweet Annies as a store sample.  I always thought it was cute and knew I'd never make another one.  So, when she was done with it, I bought it back and hung it on my railing for a year.  Sunday, I got it quilted.  And, I've got it at work with me to finish the binding.  My awesome new job allows me to work on this kind of stuff while I'm in between phone calls.  Jees, I'm a lucky girl when I think about it!

Happy Stitches everyone!

Tuesday, January 3, 2012

What the heck? I wanted a less stress New Year!

I have to admit that I've really loved having a 4 day weekend.  There wasn't anywhere for me to taxi the kids to, no holiday to prepare for, just a few days to decompress.  Very nice.  However, the New Year didn't start as stress free as I would have liked.  All the crazy things that were happening on the 1st, (flood in the basement, migraine, Ram's sucking, treadmill broke, car steering going bonkers again), ended up to be non-problems in the long run.  Well, except for Rich having a massive reaction to the cat dander in our treadmill when he tried to take it apart to fix it.  His skin was crawling and his eyes were swelling.  Then he started getting this weird droopy eye thing going.  By the way, the treadmill still only goes 1 or 7.  If I'm going to look on the bright side of things, I can just be grateful for a free excuse not to work out.

In my last blog, I left out a few things I had done in Nov.  The cupcake is from an office baby shower just before Thanksgiving.  I thought they were super cute:)


The quilt is something I made for my niece-in-law in Chicago.  She had a friend that loves Eeyore and needed a birthday gift.  I turned the Y into Eeyore's tail.  I thought it was a stroke of genius, personally.  I hope they liked it as much as I did.


For the life of me, I can't figure out how to move pictures around on this blog so that they look decent.  This is my Twisted Mystery 2011.  I started it last January and we were supposed to meet once a month to make this quilt.  For one reason or another, it seemed like I never got to meet with them or work on the quilt.  I spent several hours finishing the star blocks below the other day. 


I wanted so badly to finish this whole thing.  What can I say, I'm a finisher.  It was like torture for me to sit and work on it.  It's just so repetitive.  So I decided to cut myself some slack and stopped for awhile.  I've still got the Flippin' Flowers and Mist something or another blocks before I can stop.



Above is my latest Quilt of Valor.  All that is left is to have it quilted, bound and labeled.  This took me about 3 or 4 months.  Again, repetitive.  Couldn't handle it for long periods.

Then, just because I could, I started my spool quilt.  A few months ago, my guild had a fabric strip exchange.  I put them to use yesterday & made the spools.  There are about 42, I think.  Each stack has about 6 of the same colored spools.  Now that they're done, I wish I'd had more of the jewel tones.  The green and turquoise are super cool.

And, that is all she wrote.  Happy New Year!