Fun swap and finished quilt top

Heather from "Quiltin like Crazy" and I are having a great swap. She made a gorgeous quilt top from Moda's Swell fabric line that I fell in love with. I asked her if she would mind if I copied her exactly. She had the better idea of swapping it for some quilt fabric. I will be giving her a Jelly Cake from Moda and some April Cornell fabric. Don't tell her, but I think that I got the better end of the deal. Her blog is linked on the left hand side of my blog. Be sure to visit and see the beautiful quilt that I am getting!

Here is the finished quilt top that I worked on early in the week. I love the way it turned out. It was a fun quilt to piece.

Closer up of the borders......I just love that cherry fabric.
Have a great quilty weekend! I am seriously thinking of finishing all my WIP's before I start a new quilt. I think that would be so liberating to have a completely clean slate.
Cathy


Little quilt

I am all over the place in my quilting these days. My daughter adopted a rescue cat a couple of months ago so I made her a little quilt with her name in the corner today. Here she is....such a sweetie!
Back to bigger quilts tomorrow.
Cathy

Working on WIP's - Hunter Star Quilt

I didn't feel like working with long pieces of fabric ( borders) this morning so I pulled one of my WIP boxes off the shelf instead. I have always loved the look of the Hunter Star block but it seemed so tedious. I found this pattern about a year ago and would work on it in spurts. The pattern makes the block easy and lot's of fun.
The fabric is from an old Moda line-Folkloric by Figtree and the cream is probably from P&B Textiles. I love their white on whites, etc.
I am going to make it 4 by 4 and add a small cream border and a larger red border. It should make a pretty good sized lap quilt.

I am almost finished with my quilt from yesterday. Need to add the last borders and load it up.
I hope that everyone has has a good day!
Cathy


Fast and Fun Quilt

This is a fun quilt to make and really fast. I bought the "Oh Cherry Oh" by Moda jelly roll as an impluse when I was checking out at my LQS. It's like candy bars in a grocery store. It is just sitting there on the counter looking so pretty and then next thing I know I am buying it! Here it is on my oh so fancy design wall ( a piece of batting staple gunned to my bedroom wall.....such a beautiful way of decorating! ) The fabric above is for the borders and binding.
I think that I will give this away to Project Linus. The local coordinator said that they could use older children and teenager quilts. This makes a pretty good size and is so cheerful that maybe it will brighten someone's day.
Quick question for all.....are you an impluse fabric buyer or are most of your purchases planned? I have bought way too many kits and fabric on impluse, so that is something that I am going to try to work on.
Take care,
Cathy

Striped binding

I have always loved the look of striped binding. I finished quilting the quilt that was on my frame and now just need to sew the binding on.......striped binding. :-)I tried to make my freehand quilting a little fancier.

Takes lots of practice.

Take care,

Cathy

Little fabric box

You start with a monogram Then you use pretty fabric, mat board, batting and glue.
Put it all together (with sticky fingers) and you get this!

So much fun to make. :-)

That was my Friday night.
Take care,
Cathy



Quilting friends are the best!

I have 3 wonderful friends that I get together with as often as we can to quilt together. We came together to learn needleturn applique and stayed together because we have so much fun together. Here is Nancy -I forgot to take any pictures of her work. I will next time. Here is another Nancy, whom I did take a picture of her magnificent quilt.
All hand appliqued and hand quilted!


She made this for her lucky daughter......I told her that I wish she would take a picture when her daughter opens it because I would love to see the look on her face. And the other quilting friend is Suzanne -but she was a bad girl and wouldn't let me take her picture. I will sneak and do it next time. :-) She is an expert at needleturn and has taught many people how to do it. She has made a Baltimore Album quilt that I need to see put together. I saw all the blocks and they are just beautiful

I am almost finished putting the borders on my DD's quilt and then I will quilt it. I hope that she likes it.
This is on my quilting frame.....I need to get off my behind and finish it. We took out the dinette in our Airstream trailer and put in a couch. One needs to have quilts on all couches as far as I am concerned. Can't leave the trailer out.

I hope that everyone is doing okay,
Cathy





Working on my first large quilt

I have probably made 40 some quilts in the last 2 years, but never any large enough for my queen sized bed. I have been working on this and just have the last border to put on and then it is off to be quilted. It will be about 84" by 84" which is going to make it so snuggly. It does take quite a bit longer to make them big, but so worth it! Fabric is Nature's Chorus by Moda. I am making a lap quilt for my daughter using this Amy Butler fabric. These whirlygiggle blocks are so much fun to do and pretty fast. I will quilt this one myself since it will be small enough for my frame.
I only had 3 people respond to my giveaway, so I will be sending them all fabric. I will contact you tomorrow to find out your color choices.
My heart and prayers go out to all the Australians affected by the brush fires.
Take care everyone,
Cathy

Giveaway time

In celebration of an organized and clean quilting room I am giving away a bundle of six 1/2 yard pieces of fabric- "Baskets and Blooms" by Gundrun Erla for Red Rooster. Sorry the pictures are so bad.




I think that there is a "orange quiltalong" going on, so these fatquarters are up for grabs. Please leave me your email address if you are interested in one or both of the bundles.

I love hearing from you...it makes my day!
Cathy




Clean and organized quilting room

This wonderful daughter with a (straw stuck in her hair.....I don't ask) cleaned and organized my quilting room for me! She loves organizing things, which is definitely not one of my strong points.Tool wall which I have had for a while-it is so helpful and I put things up right after I am finished with them. Which frankly is hard to believe since I am not the neatest person on earth. :-)
View from the doorway


My fabric stash mostly Moda......I LOVE Moda! I know it is a small stash compared to some but it keeps me busy.

With the cleaning I now have a green garbage bag full of fabric to donate/ giveaway so look for a giveaway tomorrow of a 1/2 yard fabric pack from Gundrun.
Heva good rest of the weekend,
Cathy-where we are having close to a 70 degree day. No sewing going on just a lot of deck sitting with the fur kids.



Still here, still quilting

I am still here......just kept thinking that I would take a few pictures of what I have been working on and then post. I am not a camera person, but am trying to get better.

I have a large quilt that I am finishing up and sending to Sharon at Red Geranium Cottage (she does beautiful work)to longarm for me. I have another one almost finished on my Nolting Hobby Quilter that is smaller because my frame is only set up at 7ft. And then I have 4 more quilts in various stages. I need to stop going to quilting blogs because I see something else I want to make all the time! So much talent and creativity out there.

I will post pictures next time,
Cathy

Defying the Laws of Physics...Yet Again (Y'all REALLY Won't Believe This)

The voices in my head are singing Keep It Loose, Keep It Tight by Amos Lee

What I'm Reading: Winter's Child, by Margaret Maron

One of the most heinous tricks in the Jazzercise manual is where they take a perfectly good song, like Mary J. Blige's Family Affair, and make you perform unnatural acts to it. The Queen of Pain currently has Family Affair in her set.

Visualize yourself doing this: Put on some ankle weights--about 4-5 pounds on each ankle will do. Get down on your hands and knees. Now, stick a leg straight out (either one, cause you'll switch back and forth). Move your leg from the hip, and tap your toe out to the side, then straighten, lift, point, lower and repeat. Do this 5,000 times.

Now, with your leg still behind you, do PUSH-UPS while curling your leg toward the ceiling--yep--one of the two with a weight on it. Repeat, switch, etc. for FOUR MINUTES AND TWENTY-SIX seconds. Trust me, it will seem more like four hours. Try it.

On Monday, when I heard the opening beats of Family Affair, I reminded the QOP right off that A) my ankle weights have been mislaid, and B) I DON'T DO PUSH-UPS on account of the built in weights I sport on my chest make it impossible, from the whole gravity and physics perspective. She growled that I could do SOME of them, so I did. Three, I think. It was exhausting.

Yesterday, when the music started, she growled at me that I was going to do ALL FORTY-EIGHT push-ups. I laughed out loud. If she had asked me to run around the ceiling I would have taken her as seriously. I pointed out the obvious, and reminded her that she well knew this was not workable.

"Shut up and do them," she said. "All of them."

Here's the part y'all won't believe: I did.

Here's what I learned at Jazzercise yesterday. Sometimes you should just shut up and do it.

At the beginning of class she asked me what I'd been doing all day. "Editing," I said.

This was true--sort of--in a metaphorical kind of way. What I had been editing (or trying to edit) were my career goals. I've been rewriting the same novel for several years, trying to get the first one just right. (As I understand it, some writers put their first book or three in a drawer never to see the light of day and publish their second or fourth novel, and others write the same novel many times until they have it right. I've always thought of myself as being in the latter group.)

It's REALLY difficult to get a first novel sold in a good economy. When the economy is tight, well, it just gets harder. So, I've been trying to convince myself that I want to do something else--anything else. I have had zero luck with this. I am a writer. I need to write. I need to publish what I write, because, as Leonard Pitts allows, "...a writer without readers is like shouting in an empty room." That's where you get your loons, and Lord knows, I teeter precariously on that brink to begin with.

So today, I will just shut up and do it.

Everything you need to know about life you can learn at Jazzercise...

Well, okay, maybe not, but you can learn to pole dance (which is a good backup career plan--it's recession proof) and you get an occasional kernel of philosophy.

Peace, out...

Susan

Suicide by Grammy

Okay, so, I KNOW better than to go to Precariously Perky Julie's class. We've covered this, right? I planned ahead to go see The Caring and Nurturing One at 4:30. But then I lost track of time. Nothing to do but show up for Julie's class, knowing full well this was suicide. Lest you think I exaggerate, at one point during the class she pipes up with, "Those of you who are grabbing your heart, please make sure it's still beating."

Julie likes themed sets. Today's theme was the upcoming Grammy awards. All of the songs we danced to are nominated for a Grammy. All I can say is that the music industry appears to be experiencing an up-tempo trend. Julie was dancing so fast I couldn't see her feet move. But, she looked good doing it. I feel sure that the moves didn't look the same from the stage. I was on the front row. Honestly, I don't know how she kept a straight face.

There was one slow song--the very last one. It was a stretch/core muscle routine to Gravity by John Mayer. Nothing could have been more appropriate. Standing on one foot while contorting my body, using a hand weight to work my arms, and remembering to point my toes and "make it look pretty" challenged the law of gravity...and reason.

Julie has these pre-printed "Valentines Day wish cards" for us to give our significant others so instead of flowers (which will die) and candy (which will make us fat) our loved ones can get us a gadget that looks like a watch but monitors your heart rate and counts calories burned. If they make a model that has an alarm for when you're about to pass out, I might could use one.

Peace, out...

Susan