Quiltluver

Progress Update

2011-12-24T20:59:00.000-05:00

If you read my last post, you know I was at the hospital headed for surgery. The surgery went well with no complications. The pelvic mass was a cyst and there is no evidence of cancer. The other mass was attached to my stomach, and was completely removed. No evidence of cancer around the GIST tumor. However, because of its' size and the fact that these tumors have a tendency to turn into cancer, I will have to be monitored and possibly take some medicine for a while.

Recovery has been a bit slow. I thought I was headed home on Thursday. I was slowly eating again after no food for a week. They removed a small portion of my stomach, and it has caused a bit of a problem in keeping any food down. So, it's Christmas Eve and I'm still here at the hospital. Today was a good day. I think they've got the meds figured out and my body is starting to work as it should. If all goes well, I should be able to go home tomorrow. I know it will be a slow recovery, but I'll be happy to be at home with DH and my fur "boys".

Thank you for all your kind words, well wishes and prayers. I think they worked!!

Hope everyone has a wonderful Christmas.
Karen

Life is Tough Sometimes

2011-12-17T13:20:00.000-05:00

It's been a while since I've posted, partly because I just didn't feel like posting. Perhaps there was a bit of depression with my brother's death. Then, it was a pretty busy year at work as our company changed hands (again) and we had some major work to do from the acquisition. Then, life got in the way. This is not a quilty or fun post, and it goes from bad to worse, so if you want to skip the rest of this post, I understand. I do feel as if I've made many blog friends however, and felt I needed to update my friends on what is happening.

In September, my mom was diagnosed with stage 4 lung cancer. I've kind of taken charge of the situation, making sure that I try to make it to the important Dr. appointments and that she is not alone for chemo treatments. I had no idea the kind of time and effort that goes into cancer treatment. My mom had a short set of radiation treatments, 3 chemo treatments, and many more consultations and blood draws than I can count. Her health was compromised with lung disease to begin with. The pain that drove her to seek medical attention has mostly subsided, so I think the treatment has been effective. We are hoping that 2-3 more chemo treatments will do the trick and then it will be a watch and wait situation. She and my father did manage to make a trip to Florida at Thanksgiving time to see her grandson graduate from firefighter school, and to meet her new great grandson. They had a good time, so I'm glad she got to do that.

Fast forward to this week. I was having lunch on Wednesday and felt really full after I ate. As the day wore on, I got more uncomfortable, and I certainly didn't feel like eating dinner. After an uncomfortable night, I had my DH take me to the emergency room. After several tests, it was determined that I have a rather large tumor pressing on my stomach. I haven't been able to eat anything since Wednesday and it is rather painful. The tumor could be benign or malignant. Rather than delay things with additional testing when the outcome is that I'll have to have the tumor removed anyway, it was decided to go ahead and schedule surgery to remove it. In addition, I also have an enlarged ovary that they want to check at the same time. They won't know anything about these 2 masses until the surgery is done. So, tomorrow I will be in surgery. I will try to update my friends on the outcome when I feel well enough to do so. I've delegated care of my mom over to my siblings as I have to take care of myself now. DH has been a big help and a great comfort.

So, that's why you haven't heard a lot from me this year. Prayers right now would be helpful and appreciated. Thank you to all my blog friends. I feel like I've gotten to know many of you through your blogs and facebook, and I really appreciate all of my friends.
Take care,
Karen

Happy Easter!

2011-04-24T11:33:00.000-04:00

It’s been a while since I fell off the face of the earth. I haven’t felt like blogging or anything else for some time. Work has been consuming my life for the past several months since the company I worked for changed hands. I’m starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel, and the good news is that so far, I still have a job. That is always a concern when your company changes owners, something I’ve been through 4 times already with this company.

Had a bit of a scare a few months ago with DH, who ended up in the hospital for a few days with chest pains and shortness of breath. After 2 urgent care visits, 2 ambulance rides, 2 emergency room visits, admittance to 2 hospitals, and many tests, it was determined that he had a 30% blockage in one artery. The doctors were not concerned about the blockage. The doctors felt that the chest pains were the result of a prolonged flu virus, and that his heart muscle had some stiffness due to sleep apnea. I finally convinced him that if the flu can put him in that kind of tailspin, then perhaps it was time to start getting a flu shot (which he got). Using his CPAP machine for the sleep apnea is another struggle he is trying to work through.

I did manage to get to some quilt shows over the last few weekends. I’ve got pics, but they are still on my camera so I’ll get those unloaded for a later post. But here’s a pic that always brings a smile to my face as it looks like my cat Lumpy, who lived with us for over 16 years until we had to put her down 5 years ago this month.

It has been a long winter, and spring is having a hard time settling in. I am grateful that we’ve managed to avoid those tornadoes that seem to be popping up across the south and mid west. I feel bad for those areas that have been hit hard over and over again with bad weather. I did enjoy the beautiful, sunny day we had yesterday (finally!). I’ve been missing my brother and his family as we have a quiet Easter at home today.

I’m saw this awesome performance the other night, which I thought was appropriate for this day. She has such a powerful voice, and I love the guitar playing by Vince Gill.

And last, but not least, I saw this on Facebook today and had to share this with you.

All I need to know I learned from the Easter Bunny!

• Don't put all your eggs in one basket.

• Everyone needs a friend who is all ears.

• There's no such thing as too much candy.

• All work & no play can make you a basket case.

• A cute tail attracts a lot of attention.

• Everyone's entitled to a bad hare day.

• Let happy thoughts multiply like rabbits.

• Some body parts should be floppy.

• Happy Easter everyone!

Merry Christmas

2010-12-25T10:43:00.000-05:00

Spending a nice quiet day at home after a crazy week. I wish everyone a safe and happy holiday with family and friends. I love this video. Enjoy!

It was a bad and good day

2010-12-11T00:05:00.000-05:00

We laid my brother to rest today. Mother nature chose to honor us with our first measurable snow, with just enough to make the roads a bit messy while heading to the cemetery. For a cold, snowy day, there were a surprising number of people who showed up for the graveside service. My former sister in law was there with her son, my nephew. I hadn’t seen her in many years since her divorce from my younger brother. But at times like these, as we stood there and hugged in the cold, I found that there is no “ex” family. She was there to see my mom & dad and comfort them over the loss of their son.

As I helped my mother to the where the service was held, her hands were cold as ice. As people sometimes do at these times, she forgot her gloves at home. I gave her my gloves and held her hand as we said goodbye. My father seemed a bit dazed and confused. It was a somber affair. And then just like that, it was quickly over. His last 6 months from diagnosis to death—it just happened too fast for me. We headed to the VFW hall where his friends put together a lovely lunch.

It was great to see all of my family together again, nieces, nephews and other family members who had moved away and hadn’t been seen in a while. Lots of hugs, and I got to meet my 6 month old niece, Clara. I watched as Clara was passed around from person to person, such a sweet baby who kept looking at everyone with big brown eyes. Babies are wonderful at times like these. It’s funny. I remember Clara’s mother, Amanda at my grandparents funeral 33 years ago.

At most memorials or funerals, there comes a time when everyone has a good laugh as they share a memory of a loved one. Today was no exception. My niece, Amanda, provided the perfect way to celebrate her father’s life. My brother loved to party with his friends, and he loved his beer. Amanda brought in a life size cut out of her father, with a can of beer attached to his hand with velcro.

Looks real, doesn’t it? Mark’s many friends gathered around him and posed for one last picture as we all giggled and laughed. Yes, it was a good day to celebrate life.

Thank you for your prayers and comments over this past week.

Reflections

2010-11-30T20:56:00.000-05:00

I thought he was a pain in the butt when I was growing up. The older brother just close enough in age to taunt and tease me through my teenage years. The brother whose act I had to follow in high school (I was Miss Goody Two Shoes), when his former teachers were expecting me to be a trouble maker like my two older brothers. The older brother who got his own room when I still had to share a room with my younger sister.

He married his high school sweetheart Ruth Ann just barely out of high school, and little Amanda was at my wedding a year later when I married my high school sweetheart. Alisha and Andy rounded out the family, and before long, they all grew up and started on the next generation with three sweet grand babies, Amelia, Violet and Clara. As families do, we got together at holidays, birthdays, picnics and special celebrations. Then, like many others, my brother and his wife had to sell their house last year and moved to Florida (away from family and friends) in search of employment. Last year was the first Christmas without my brother, his wife and family in more than 34 years. I always appreciated the fact that my sister in law always hosted the family Christmas for many years, but I think I took our family gatherings a little for granted and thought the family would always be together.

My brother Mark lost his battle with scleroderma today. It happened way too early for his 54 years on this earth. This past spring, he was diagnosed with scleroderma. Scleroderma is a skin condition where the body produces too much collagen. This makes the skin rock hard, which then makes it difficult and painful to move the joints. You can imagine what it does to your internal organs. Mark was in and out of the hospital 5 or 6 times since September, suffered kidney failure, and was put on dialysis a month ago. The irony is that there are no specialists in this disease in Florida, yet there were specialists at the University of Michigan, not far from where he lived for most of his life. His family tried to get him moved up here to Michigan for treatment, but at that point, he was too sick to be moved.

I had to go to my parent’s house on Saturday, to be there to support them when my sister in law called with the news that he was failing, unconscious, and would probably not be with us for too much longer. Unfortunately, due to health issues, neither of my parents were able to fly to be by his side. His wife and children were by his side as he peacefully slipped away at home.

He is survived by his wife of almost 35 years, 3 children, 2 son-in-laws, and 3 grand kids. We are grateful that his kids got to spend time with him in the week before Thanksgiving before he went into the hospital for the last time. My heart is aching for my sister-in-law, who has a tough road ahead in Florida without her family and friends close by for a support system.

This is a picture of their family, taken when they were all together just before Thanksgiving. He loved being a Grandpa.

I’m glad that he is no longer in pain. He was too young to go. I will miss him, and pray for his family as they suffer through this difficult time. May he rest in peace.

Mark Reid 1956-2010.

Comin’ up for air

2010-11-21T15:59:00.000-05:00

I decided to take vacation day so I could have a long weekend. Work has been as busy as I predicted, and a bit stressful as well. This weekend has given me a much needed break to relax, recharge my batteries, and catch up on the blogs. Sounds like many of you have been busy as well.

I am moving along with my French braid quilt, and decided to tackle the backing this weekend. The instructions in the book had us cut way too many strips for the quilt. So, I wanted to use up those strips for the back. I got out my EQ and designed my first quilt. This is the plan.

Because I’m just learning EQ, it’s not exactly how the quilt will look. But it’s close enough to what I envisioned in my mind. The background will be plain white fabric, and you’ll probably see a bit more of a white border than what the picture is showing. The binding is the red stripe fabric that I used on the front of the quilt, which I will cut on the bias so the stripes are at a 45 degree angle.

I got the 2 strip sets done this weekend. Other than the plain white fabric, which I purchased, everything else will be scraps from the front of the quilt.

Well, I’m off to make some Finnish pasties, which I love to make and put lots of extras in the freezer for those nights when I just don’t feel like cooking. I will be taking next Wednesday off so that I can have a long 5 day holiday weekend. Can’t wait for that!

Hope everyone has a great Thanksgiving!

Thanks for stopping by.

Catchin’ Up

2010-11-07T22:22:00.000-05:00

Life has been a bit crazy lately. The company I work for has changed owners (for the 5th time in 15 years). Things are getting busy as we change focus, systems and procedures from a public company back to a private company. I had a quick business trip to Chicago last week, and the next 3 months are going to be quite busy. Not complaining. Change keeps things interesting, and I’m grateful to have a job. Let’s hope I can survive any corporate downsizing.

On the quilty front, I’ve been doing quite a bit of quilting over the last 3 months. Was pleased to get my Halloween quilt done (thanks for all the lovely comments and to all that voted for me), and am getting back to work on my French Braid quilt. I’ve also been to a few quilt shows in the past month. Here are some pictures from the Grand Rapids quilt show last month.

I thought this double wedding ring was so unique with their choice of background fabric. You usually don’t see a large print like on this particular quilt. Aren’t the colors gorgeous?

I love picture quilts.

I love this fall quilt.

This was a whole cloth quilt that was later filled in with colored pencils. The quilting is stunning.

I love the colors on this one…

Another gorgeous use of color…

Love this hankie quilt, and great quilting.

And, of course, a cat quilt to make me smile

Hope you enjoyed the show. I may be a bit scarce over the next few months. I do try to catch up with everyone’s blogs on the weekends. Even if I’m not commenting, I still enjoy reading your blogs. Take care.

Halloween Quilt Finished!!

2010-10-29T07:17:00.000-04:00

I am so happy to report that after 2 years of trying to complete my Halloween quilt in time to be shown for Halloween that it’s done!! The last few weekends have found me finishing the FMQ that I’ve been struggling with, completing the binding, and adding the leaves to make it look like a pumpkin.

Here is the full size quilt:

I entered my quilt into the Quilt Gallery contest to win a fat quarter bundle. So if you like my quilt, can you take a minute to please vote for my quilt? Here’s the link: http://quiltinggallery.com/2010/10/29/trick-or-treat-halloween-quilts/

Thanks for stopping by, and

HAPPY HALLOWEEN!

My Commute

2010-10-12T07:04:00.000-04:00

Over 30 years ago, my husband and I decided we wanted to “live in the country”. So we moved to a small town that was a half-hour to an hour drive from several large suburbs. This was the start of my career in commuting. On a good day, my commute is 45 minutes one-way, about 35 miles. On a typical day, it is about an hour. We don’t even want to talk about what happens when it snows…

Generally, on a federal holiday as we had yesterday, the commute is pretty light. I was about 10 minutes into my commute yesterday when traffic came to a complete stop. We then proceeded to crawl along for another 10 minutes before I could see some flashing lights ahead. I crawled along for another 5 minutes before I saw a state police car in the middle of three lanes. The car was pulled sideways, blocking the lane so we had to move to either shoulder to pass.

As I got closer to the police car, I could see something on the ground on the other side of the car. There were no other mangled cars in the area. As I went around the car, I looked and saw a dog that looked like a yellow lab laying on his side. I also saw a Michigan State Trooper sitting cross-legged on the pavement stroking the dog.

That image of the trooper sitting on the ground stayed in my head for quite a while. It was so sad. All day long I wondered if the poor dog was ok. Today, the local paper had the story. The dog was darting in and out of traffic, and people were swerving. The trooper managed to block the highway and get close enough to the dog to attach a hitch to his collar. The dog was scared, tired, and his paws were bleeding and hurt from the pavement. A passer-by stopped to help with a blanket. The dog is being treated by a local vet and will be ok. The word is going out to find the owners, but if they are not found, others have offered to take the dog.

HAPPY ENDING!! Thank you, Michigan State Police Trooper Deanne Oswald-DeBottis.

Pioneer Days

2010-10-10T21:43:00.000-04:00

Today was one of those fall days that one remembers fondly when we’re in the middle of winter with snowstorm after snowstorm. It has been a long time since we’ve had such a beautiful, crisp and clear sunny day. The fall colors were in full display as we took a little drive to enjoy the day. I had seen a notice for Pioneer Days at a historical village.

Now, this place is in the middle of a very rural area, and we were amazed as we drove up and saw how many cars and people were there. They have over 150 volunteers for this annual event, which benefits the historical society that preserves this lovely farm.

There were lots of people in Civil War period costume demonstrating the various crafts and tasks from that era.

They had a quilt set up for a quilting bee…

A little spinning…

A little weaving…

Some beer making… (see the beautiful trees and lovely blue sky?)

This little crib was in the kitchen of the historical house.

These goats were awfully cute. The kids were having lots of fun!

Cute lambs…

They had lots of produce, pies, jams, pumpkins, and other assorted food as well as crafts for sale. These had a tag that said these were snake cucumbers. I’ve never heard of them!

A little music…

I bought some wool for my Halloween pumpkin quilt.

Hope everyone had a great weekend! I wish my Canadian friends a blessed, Happy Thanksgiving.

Fall has arrived

2010-09-25T19:57:00.000-04:00

Brrrrr! Yesterday, we had a high temp of 87 (20 degrees higher than normal) with wind gusts of 40 mph and today, we’re down to a high temp of 56 degrees. Strange weather we’ve had all summer long, and now the weird weather seems to be stretching into fall. No gradual lowering of the temperature. Nope, we went from hot summer right to cool fall. Oh, well, it’s time to celebrate fall so I redecorated my blog.

You haven’t heard from me for a while because I’ve actually been quilting for a change. The French Braid class I took did what I wanted it to do, which was to give me a deadline to work towards each week as I got closer to the class date. I used the class as an excuse to take some days off work. I do think my mind may have been elsewhere while I was quilting. In the picture below, the squares at the top of the picture are all supposed to look the same—the middle strip was sewn correctly (right sides together).

Did you ever wonder how you can sew two pieces of fabric wrong sides together, take it to the ironing board to iron, take it to the rotary mat and cross cut it into several strips, sew it to the quilt and only then figure out that something wasn’t quite right? (But my points matched!!!)

I got most of the quilt done, and only need to cut and attach the final border. I did manage to master a mitered border on this one.

I generally avoid mitered borders, but the striped border I chose just begged for mitering. Since I was in a class, I took advantage of the teacher’s help to show me how to do this. The method the teacher used was so simple that I don’t know why I had such a fear of it prior to this.

This is one of the lovely ladies I met in class. Her quilt had several beautiful batiks in lovely magenta shades. The purple quilt on the wall was the class sample.

This was another class quilt in progress. I love the colors that were used in this quilt.

I don’t have any pictures of my quilt yet, but when I do, I’ll get them posted. I have managed to keep up with reading everyone’s blogs, even though I haven’t been commenting too much. Thanks to everyone for visiting and I do appreciate all of your comments!!

Quilt class

2010-08-18T16:08:00.000-04:00

It’s been a few years since I took a quilt class. I was in the LQS a few weeks ago and they had a lovely purple French Braid quilt on the wall as a sample for the quilt class. I don’t know what got into me that day, but I immediately signed up for the class and bought this book.

In reading the book, it looks pretty easy, and I probably could have done this without the class. BUT. . .sometimes I need the structure and deadlines that classes bring to motivate me to stay on task to finish the quilt. Plus, it’s kind of fun to take a class with other quilters. We have one quilter in the class who has already made this quilt 8 times. The teacher asked him if he wanted to teach the class! (he said no)

I decided that I was going to make this with as much fabric as I can from my stash. So, I spent one evening pulling out this and that fabric from my stash. I realized that my stash consists of mostly batiks! And although this quilt seems to be perfect for batiks, I didn’t want to make another batik quilt. Instead, I decided to use the floral fabrics I bought a few months ago when I went on the Shipshewana shop hop. That’s my quilter’s ADD kicking in. . . buying fabric for one project and using for something totally different. This is the fabric I decided to use.

Of course, when I went to the “pre-class” to select the fabrics, I still had to buy a few more yards to get the run of 10 fabrics I needed for the braid. I have a feeling that I’m not done buying fabrics to “finish” this quilt.

Rather than rush home after work to get to the class, I decided to take the day off to get all of my supplies and fabric ready to go. I’m excited to start this new quilt. Guess I better get going. Don’t want to be late for class.

Grand Haven Quilt Show

2010-08-08T22:31:00.000-04:00

Can’t believe it’s been a month since I last posted. No excuse. Just feeling kinda lazy this summer with this heat and all. I did manage to go to a few quilt shows in the past month. The weather finally broke a week ago, and I pulled one of those “I’m taking tomorrow off” vacation days. DH and I took a drive on a beautiful sunshine day to Grand Haven, which is on the coast of Lake Michigan. They were having their Coast Guard Festival, but unfortunately, the Coast Guard ships were not due in til Monday. It would have been fun to see all the ships. The Grand Haven Lighthouse Guild held their show called “Sand, Surf and Sunsets”. This is the first sight I saw when I entered the lobby of the building.

She’s kind of cute…

I like nature quilts

I like this log cabin layout

Love these old blocks.

This house quilt was charming.

Quilt shop. The quilt between the windows was 3-D.

I love the secondary diamond pattern on this quilt.

Hope you enjoyed the show!

Shipshewana, part 3

2010-07-11T21:33:00.000-04:00

Let’s get right to the quilt pics, shall we?

This one had some awesome quilting

A closer look at the quilting

A blue ribbon winner. Great design & colors.

Another neat design

I’d say a lot of work went into this one.

More fabulous quilting

Then there was this beauty

A closer look at the beautiful fabric choices

I love bold colors on a black background. The borders really compliment the inner blocks.

Of course, we had to have a cat quilt picture. It wouldn’t be right not to see a cat quilt on this blog.

Hope you enjoyed the show. Thanks for the lovely comments on my prior blogs about the journey. It was fun. This is one quilt show that will definitely be on my list next year.

Shipshewana, part 2

2010-07-10T11:54:00.000-04:00

Continuing on our trip around Shipshewana from the previous blog, we decided to ignore Mrs. GPS after we left the quilt show in Topeka. We turned right, and she said “re-calc-u-lating” in that snotty voice of hers, so I turned around and went left. Again with the re-calc-u-lating so I turned right again!! (see Shirley’s blog for more funny stuff about the GPS). I knew from working on the MapQuest that we just needed to head north and we should come out somewhere near Shipshewana.

We came out exactly where we needed to stop at the Little Helpers Quilt Shop. This store was not on the shop hop, but has been a favorite of mine whenever I’m in the area. It is a store built on an Amish farm, and they have some very beautiful quilts and other assorted hand made items for sale. We must have been hungry for lunch as we both ended up with a jar of apple butter. This one is a little different because it is flavored with red hot candies. It is pretty tasty! Anyone know what the difference is between apple sauce and apple butter? Tastes the same to me.

Next stop, Essenhaus. Yessss, finally some lunch with some of the chicken they are famous for, finished off with a shared slice of red raspberry chocolate pie. I won’t torture you with any pictures (don’t have any pics), well, maybe a little torture with a description of a smooth chocolate pie (think French Silk pie) with fresh raspberries and whipped cream on top.

Full of sugar and ready to go, we went to the next quilt shop, appropriately named, The Quilt Shop at Essenhaus. It was there that I decided to go crazy and buy fabrics for the shop hop quilt. I just fell in love with this quilt, the colors and fabric that this quilt shop used. Here is a picture of the quilt

What was I thinking? I already have so many UFO’s!! I do love the soft green, pink and black floral fabrics. Next stop, the quilt garden at Essenhaus.

And finally, to Shipshewana and the quilt show (and two of my favorite shops, Lolly’s and Yoders). This was a juried show, and the quilts were amazing.

The quilting on this one was gorgeous.

a closer look

I bought this pattern a few years ago. It's on my to-do list

I like this basket weave pattern.

I like the colors and the checkerboard pattern on this quilt.

So colorful! Reminds me of my NYB quilt.

I’m drawn to pictorial quilts

Love the quilting on the bear quilt

I don’t want this post to take too long to load with all of these pics, so I’ll stop here and post more in the next few days. Have a great weekend. Looks like the weather is going to be beautiful!

A day in Shipshewana

2010-07-05T22:18:00.000-04:00

We couldn’t have picked a better day to go on our shop hop in Shipshewana. Picture a sunny day with blue skies, white fluffy clouds, temperature about 80, and low humidity. We had our day planned to stop at 8 quilt shops, 2 quilt shows and several quilt gardens. Our first quilt shop, Caroline’s Cottage Cotton’s was a cute little shop in a converted house. Unfortunately, as we drove up, we noticed the big yellow bus carrying MANY quilters. Too many for that little place. It was a cute place, though, with a nice selection of fabric.

Back on the road, we headed to the next shop, Homespun Treasures. It was a very friendly shop, with lots of people waiting to help and fresh popcorn, yummm.

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They were so friendly and one lady demonstrated a new ruler, the double diamond ruler. So I bought it (definitely an impulse purchase) after seeing her demonstration. Has anyone used this ruler? It makes this:

You can find the ruler and instructions here or at a newly found favorite blog, I Have A Notion (click on the side to go to the store). The owner of the blog writes some pretty funny stuff. Be sure to read the Aurifil Thread Heist.

One of the ladies at Homespun Treasures told us about the million pillow case challenge project they had going on in the town square, a few blocks away, so we checked it out. All the hand made pillowcase were strung up in lines around the courthouse—so pretty! We were on a mission, though, so we didn’t stop. As we were leaving, the BUS showed up again. Whew, missed that one, but it turned out they had returned to the shop because someone had left their purse at the shop. Amazing that the bus would turn around and come back for one quilter’s problem.

As we traveled to the next shop, Emmatown Fabric and Gifts, the GPS took on a new life. We started talking back to Mrs. GPS as she routed us down this and that winding road. Where in the world are you taking us, we asked?? Lost, it took us to the wrong side of town and we had to turn around. But, it was a blessing as we drove by many beautiful Amish farms and were forced to slow down and enjoy the trip. We saw farmers plowing their fields using horses instead of tractors, beautiful gardens, clotheslines filled with freshly washed laundry, and even went by a farm that seemed to be gathering for an occasion, a wedding perhaps? There was a field next to the barn marked for “parking” the Amish buggies. Unfortunately, I was driving so there are no pictures. :( Here is a stock photo I found that looked like what we saw.

Our next stop was the quilt show in Topeka. This was a bit different from other quilt shows I had attended. It was more of a quilt sale than quilt show. Many beautiful quilts, quilt tops and blocks were for sale at some very reasonable prices. Several were hand quilted by the Amish. The fabric room had beautiful fabrics on sale for $4/yard. They had a bed that they laid the quilts on every 5 minutes, so that was fun to see them laid out like that. I only took a few pictures at this show

This is getting to be a long post, so I’ll continue the story later this week. If you’ve enjoyed the trip so far, come back to see some beautiful quilts from the Shipshewana Quilt show.

New York Beauty

2010-07-03T21:54:00.000-04:00

It’s done!!! Finally, 3 years after it was started, my New York Beauty is done. The trip to Shipshewana was the push I needed to get this done. Why? Because (shhh…don’t tell anyone) but I bought some fabric for a new project and told myself I had to finish a UFO before I started another project. So, that’s why you haven’t heard much from me lately.

I’ve been seeing on other blogs The Process Pledge, where quilters discuss the process of making their quilt, so I decided to do that with this quilt. It all started with a class at the LQS a couple of years after I started quilting. I saw the sample for the New York Beauty on the wall and decided to make one. This quilt was made with purchased foundation fabric from a bolt. I believe it is a Karen Stone product and it looks like this:

All of the foundation pieces are printed on the muslin:

It’s like paper piecing, but you don’t remove the paper. You cut out the muslin templates. Then you sew the templates to the fabric. They give you the lines for the outer edge of the fabric and the 1/4 seam line. You sew the fabric to the muslin in between those 2 lines. They numbered the rays of the sun so you would know the order and the direction to sew.

They give you the step-by-step instructions as part of the fabric purchase. But since I was new to the foundation piece technique (I had never paper pieced), I was glad I took the class.

They even give you a quilt label and possible quilt layouts.

The back of the quilt looks like this:

It is easy to sew, even the curved seams, because as long as you sew on the 1/4” seam lines, your quilt comes out straight and even. And your points don’t disappear. Did I mention no paper to remove??? The downside is that the seams are a bit thick where 2 pieces come together as you have 4 pieces of fabric instead of the usual 2. So quilting may be a little more of a challenge. I plan to send this one out to be quilted.

When I took the class, I had no stash (imagine that), so the LQS helped me pick out the batik fabrics. I had a great teacher who encouraged me to not be afraid of the colors and just start making blocks. She said I could “play” with the patterns later when I was done. I decided that no 2 blocks were going to be the same. When I found the overall pattern I liked after the blocks were finished, I was short by several blocks, so I added several purple batik blocks in the corners. This worked to frame the quilt, calm it down a bit, and not take the attention from the NYB blocks. I added a dark blue/black batik for the borders.

Since all of the NYB blocks were lined with muslin, I felt I had to line the purple blocks and the borders so the quilt would have a uniform feel to it. The teacher even suggested that it would make a nice lightweight quilt if you didn’t use batting in the quilt. But I think I ‘d still like to use batting.

I stitched stay-stitched the muslin to the outer border edges so it wouldn’t flop around.

Since we’re talking about the process, I had to include a picture of my helper. He comes running when I turn the sewing machine on. I have to put down a blanket for him, or he lays on the quilt I’m working on.

And here is the finished quilt. Lots of colors that I wouldn’t normally put together, but it seems to work for me.

I’m quite happy with the finished quilt, and glad to have a UFO off my list!! I'm also taking a cue from my friend Shirley to post something positive on my blog for the month of July. Today, I'm glad that Google for changed Blogger so that you get a true preview of your blog before you post.

For those in the US, I hope everyone has a great 4th of July. I love this quote by Erma Bombeck.

“You have to love a nation that celebrates its independence every July 4, not with a parade of guns, tanks, and soldiers who file by the White House in a show of strength and muscle, but with family picnics where kids throw Frisbees, the potato salad gets iffy, and the flies die from happiness. You may think you have overeaten, but it is patriotism. -Erma Bombeck”

It is also a day we remember to thank all of the men and women of the armed forces who have sacrificed so that we may have the freedom to enjoy this Fourth of July. Take care, and drive safely this holiday weekend.

Catchin’ Up

2010-06-27T21:38:00.000-04:00

It’s been a great week. After thinking about it for the past few years, I finally decided to buy Electric Quilt 7. It was delivered this week. The first night I installed the program, I ended up playing for 3 hours!! It was fun, though. Here is my first attempt to design a quilt.

I started with this simple block.

I love making a disappearing 9 patch, so I decided to cut this block vertically and horizontally down the middle. I flipped and turned the blocks around and made this complicated looking (but very easy) quilt.

Flip a few more blocks around, and I got this:

Amazing!! All from the same block.

Change the colors and layout with a few clicks of the mouse:

This is going to be fun! It was a good thing this program came on Tuesday, because I lost my internet connection due to storms for the next 3 days. I’ve been trying to catch up today with my blog reading. Talk about internet withdrawal…

On Friday, I went with my friend to Shipshewana for the shop hop and quilt shows. I will blog later about the great day we had along with pictures of some amazing quilts as soon as I can get them unloaded from my camera. I was so inspired, as I often am when I go to quilt shows, that I spent Saturday and Sunday sewing my New York Beauty quilt. I have the 4 borders all cut and ready to sew, and then I am finished with the top!! I will take a picture to share once the borders are on.

Take care, and have a great week!

Midland Quilt Show

2010-06-05T22:37:00.000-04:00

I finally got a chance to download the quilt pics from the Midland quilt show I went to (a month ago?) Oh well, there’s no time limit for looking at pretty quilts.

I love the colors in this quilt.

I thought this quilt created from a picture was interesting.

I love the colors in this quilt. The sign said there was 5,237 pieces in this quilt that were individually cut and sewn together, and there are only 2 blocks in this quilt. Whew, that’s a lot of work.

These were part of a children’s book challenge. Such creativity!

I love the pictures in this quilt.

This embellished quilt was very pretty.

The quilt show was held in a historical village. The building next door was having a blacksmith show. There were several old carriages and sleighs. This sleigh “cutter” with the quilt cover caught my eye.

Another sleigh.

This ambulance sled from 1890 was fascinating. I wonder what's inside that black trunk?

I like this fringed carriage.

It was a lovely quilt show in Midland. Traveling to get to the show took us through many beautiful areas with gorgeous historical (and huge) homes. Unfortunately, it was a bit rainy for us to get to see the Dow Gardens. I've never been there, but I hear it is beautiful. I hope to get back there soon.

Hope you enjoyed the show!

Honoring our service men and women

2010-05-31T16:44:00.000-04:00

Today is a happy day because so many people have the day off, but I can't forget the day's meaning.

On Memorial Day, it is with both joy and sadness that we celebrate the lives of those who have gone before, some of whom have paid the ultimate sacrifice to ensure the freedom of many. We sing a song of praise for the fallen, and send a word of thanks to our members of the armed services. We salute the men and women, past and present, who have sacrificed for the freedom of everyone!

I previously posted this song on my blog, and thought it was fitting to repost it today. It made me a little sad for all of the men and women in the military who were away from their loved one. It is such a beautiful song that I was inspired to find the lyrics and the video.

It’s 2 am and I can’t sleep,

been like this for me all week
we lost another good man yesterday
I close my eyes and say your name
it’s the only thing that keeps me sane
and think of you, half a world away
I fight the tears, it’s hard to live like this
lying here, there’s so much that I wish

That every child would know the taste of freedom
there are dreams still worth believing
that just might come true in the end
I want all these troubles far behind us,
better days to come and find us
and I just want to be in your arms again

It’s 6am, I need more sleep
it's been another hard long week
the kids are wearin’ me all but down
I close my eyes and say your name
it’s the only thing that keeps me sane
silence is such a lonely sound

Baby be safe, I know you've got a job to do,
keep the faith, and all the love I'm sending you

Let every child feel the taste of freedom,
that there are dreams still worth believin
that just might come true in the end
I want all these troubles far behind us,
better days to come and find us
and I just wanna be in your arms again

ohh whatever I may have to do,
nothing's gonna stop me coming back to you,
every stolen moment washed away, yaa,
I want all these troubles far behind us,
better days to come and find us,
I just wanna be in your arms again,
I just wanna be in your arms again, again, yaaaa

Hope everyone has a safe and blessed holiday. Take care,

Shipshewana is calling!!

2010-05-29T11:27:00.000-04:00

There’s a Quilt Festival coming up in Shipshewana, and I plan to go. And I’m hoping some of my internet friends will join me on what promises to be a fun day for all. What’s the attraction?

A shop hop featuring 8 quilt shops in a 30 mile radius of Shipshewana
Two, count ‘em, 2, yes, I said two quilt shows. You know how I am about quilt shows—I love ‘em!! I went to one of the quilt shows last year, and blogged about it here. It was a wonderful quilt show.
There is a Quilt Garden Tour going on in Northern Indiana. They’ve planted many gardens in the shape of quilts or quilt blocks. I plan to hit as many quilt garden spots along the route as we can fit in. Here’s a site that did a story about the planting of the quilt gardens (the Quilt Garden Tour site may be having server problems.)
Lunch at Essenhaus, featuring good Amish food, a quilt shop and several other cute shops.
Shopping in the famous Shipshewana where we’ll find 4 of the quilt shops on the shop hop, the quilt show, and many other wonderful, quaint shops.
You can read more about the Shipshewana Quilt Festival 2010 here. They also have several workshops with some pretty famous names, some book signings, etc. The festival runs from June 23rd – June 26th.

So, here’s the plan (so far, but I’m open to suggestions). I’m taking Friday, June 25th off from work to go to the events. (I’ll need the weekend to recover from the trip). I plan to map out the Shop Hop route along with the quilt shows and quilt gardens. I would love to get a group to ride together, caravan, meet up along various spots on the route, and/or have lunch together. I’d love to meet up with anyone who would like to go to any or all of the above events. I think we’d have an awesome time! If you are interested, please email me and let me know what part you are interested in doing or if you have any other ideas. I can coordinate rides, where we can meet up, or other details of our fun adventure.

You know you want to go, so what are you waiting for? Granny Lyn, Rhoda, Pam?? Other Michigan peeps? Anyone from Ohio or Indiana? Send me an email!!

Blogger’s Quilt Festival!

2010-05-21T07:35:00.000-04:00

Thanks to Amy for sponsoring the Blogger’s Quilt Festival. I know I will spend hours looking at all of your beautiful quilts, and hope that you will follow the link above. It’s a lot of fun! This is a quilt I finished a few months ago for my co-worker who is battling malignant melanoma. She is currently struggling with her first round of chemo, which requires daily hospital visits for a month. We are all praying for her.

I used a soft apple green minky fabric for the back. I took every precaution in prewashing and testing the permanent pens (note Sharpie markers are not 100% waterproof—thank goodness I found out before I tried to use them on the blocks). I sprinkled the blocks with water and ironed them before I put the quilt together to make sure it wouldn’t bleed. I was disappointed to find that a few of the pens still bled into the fabric a bit during the final washing. Here are some pictures of the quilt

Some close up pictures of the messages before it was quilted. I was so glad I had gathered quotes from the internet as several people used them. All of the messages were very inspiring!

Faith

Hope

Love

My co-worker made a beautiful tote bag, with lots of pockets, to put the quilt in. We filled the tote with small books of crossword puzzles, email jokes, candy, gum, hand lotion, lip balm, tissue, a water bottle, and a card signed by everyone.

Thanks for stopping by my blog.

Blog Layout 101

2010-05-18T07:05:00.001-04:00

I’m not an expert, but for those new to blogging from MQB, here are some of the things I’ve learned along the way about the layout of your blog. Changing the look of your blog is easy. It takes longer to find the right look than it does to change your blog.

Blog design sources
When you are reading the blogs that you follow and find a blog layout that you like, look up in the upper left corner of the blog. If that blogger has not done any custom design, you will often see the name of a website designer in the corner. Below are several websites with free blog designs.
http://www.thecutestblogontheblock.com/
http://www.myonecuteblog.com/
http://fondossholy.blogspot.com/ (this one is in Spanish, but use the pictures to find what you want and copy/paste the code)
http://www.delightfuldots.blogspot.com/
http://scrappinblogs.blogspot.com/

You can find more by Googling “blogger templates” You are looking for something that says “free blogger backgrounds or free blogger templates”

Templates
To change the look of your blog, go to your blog Layout, and click on Pick New Template. There are several to choose from. Most of the free blog templates tell you to use the “Minima” template. I’ve found that many of the blog designs will also work with the “Rounders” template, which is the template that I use. I prefer this template for one main reason, and that is for the background of the text. You’ll notice that many of the free templates have various designs or colors in the middle of the design. Personally, I sometimes find it difficult to read a blog with pictures or other items running through the part that I need to read. With the Rounders template, I get the look I want on both sides of the blog, but the middle of the blog is opaque, and so you don’t see the full blog template background. I then change the colors on my template to match the sides of the blog. If you do use a blog template with a background, make sure that you change the colors of the blog text so it is easy to read.

After you have picked your blog template, go to the page elements on the Layout tab. You’ll see several sections to the blog layout.

Header and Blog Post
Click on “edit” in the header section. This is where you enter the name of your blog and a description about you and your blog. You can also upload any picture and it will show at the top of your blog. The picture of Redford that is currently on my blog is 800 x 600, which is a good size for a picture. You don't want too big of a picture, and a much smaller picture will not fill the entire header area. I checked the box, “shrink to fit” and I selected to have the picture behind the blog title. Save it and click on view blog to see the results. If you don’t like the picture, remove the picture and try again with another picture. Also click on edit in the Blog Post section and check out your options there.

Gadgets
Gadgets are the way to add pictures, buttons, pretty blog templates, and just plain cool stuff! Click on add gadget, and it will take you to a window with all kinds of choices. Look around and see some of the cool gadgets that you can add to your blog. You can add a picture, or a list of some sort like a UFO list or book list by clicking the + button next to the item. Click the features or popular button in the upper left corner to see more gadgets.

Usually, when you add a template or button from another blog, you are going to use the choice of HTML/Java Script. Don’t worry about technical computer language. Most of the time you are just cutting and pasting script that someone else has already done. Click the plus button next to this choice, and it will open up a box where you put your script. You can give it a title (that will show up on your blog). I don’t put a title on the blogger templates, and I usually drag them to the bottom of my gadgets so I know that the last gadget is my template. Go to the free template site, find the template you want (I use the 2 column templates). Underneath the template will be the code. Highlight and copy (CTRL C) all of the code, and then go to your gadget layout box and paste (CTRL V) the code in the box, and then save and view your blog. There are also usually instructions on the free blog template site on how to do this. Read each site’s instructions for using their template—they are usually the same process, but some are slightly different. Also, look around the sites for blog headers too. If you don’t like what you did, just delete the gadget and try again!

Fonts and Colors
Go to this section after you have your template and change the various colors of your background, header, side text, etc. I usually change this up when I load a new template, especially if you go from a lighter color to a darker color template. You want to make the blog easy on the eyes. Some of us have “older eyes” than others, and a light background with dark text is usually easier to read than a dark background with light text.

Moving things around
Click and drag your gadgets up or down to get them where you want them. You can check out to see how Molly dragged her “followers” to the top of her blog or check out Shirley's. cute blog. Go ahead, play around. You can’t hurt it. Anything you do to the look of your blog can be changed back, and it won’t hurt your blog post.

Most of the sites do caution you to save a copy of your template before you make changes. You can do this in the Edit HTML tab by clicking the download full template button. That is mainly if you are going to fool with the code, which I don't recommend unless you know what you are doing.. If you are new to templates and don’t have any special programming, you can always just go back to the Pick New Template tab and select a new one. Your font and colors may go away, but those are easy to restore.

There are some websites out there that will help you design a blog header. I played around with one several months ago, and you can read about it here.

Well, I hope this gives you some help on making your blog pretty. Do be careful, though, not to load too much on your blog as it will bog it down and take longer to load. I expect to see some new blog layouts, and if you leave me a comment, make sure your email is set up so I can reply to you. Send me an email if you have questions. If some of you more experienced bloggers have more tips, feel free to leave more hints in the comments section.

One more tip. The CTRL button is a very useful tool. If you hold down the CTRL button while clicking on a link, it will open up the link in another window. I use this all of the time so I can go back and forth between 2 or more windows.

Take care,

Blogging Tips for MQB bloggers

2010-05-16T21:39:00.000-04:00

With the closing of MyQuiltBlog, I know that several MQB bloggers are new to Blogger, and could use some help. I’ve put together a few tips of some of the things I’ve learned about Blogger. Hope this helps!

Pictures
We all love to see your pictures. If you are having trouble with inserting pictures into Blogger, go to Settings, Basic and find the setting “Select post editor”. Make sure you select “updated editor”. The “old editor” was the source of many frustrations with blogger. Add pictures the same way you did in MQB. Upload from your computer or use a URL from a photo you’ve uploaded to Flickr, Photoucket, Webshots, etc. Just click on insert image icon and upload your photo or URL. If you upload your photo to Blogger, it stores the photo in Picassa. Drag the photo to where you want it to appear in your blog. Click on the photo to see some choices for sizes, centering, etc.

Moving your Blog Posts
If you want to move your blog posts from MQB to Blogger, it is fairly easy. However, your pictures won’t move with the post. So, you’ll have to re-add them to Blogger. To move your blog, open MQB and open the Blogger new post screen in a 2nd window. Highlight your post in MQB, hold down the CTRL key with the letter C (or use copy) and go to the Blogger post screen and place your cursor in the edit screen and hit CTRL V (or paste)

Blogging
Personally, I think Blogger is a bit limiting with its’ fonts, font sizes, and picture handling. I love, love, love using my Windows Live Writer for writing my blogs offline (it’s a free download). I insert photos exactly where I need to see them, a preview shows what it will look like on my blog, and there are lots of fonts and other editing options that Blogger doesn’t offer. I wrote about this last year, and you can read more about it here. I also like the way it handles links—it opens the link in a new window so it is easier to come back to my blog to finish reading it.

Comments
We all love to get comments and want to encourage comments. Some blogs have comment moderation set so that you don’t see the comments until they are approved. Others have word verification set for their comments to prevent spammers from commenting. For me, I prefer to have no word verification and let the user see their comments immediately. I’ve never had a problem, and figure if I do start having problems, I can always go back to verification. If you don’t want to have your readers enter the word verification when they make a comment, go to Settings, Comments, and check no for word verification. Also make sure that “anyone” can comment. Look at some of the other settings while you are there to see what else you might want to change.

If you don't want any comments on a particular post, you can click post options at the bottom of your post to change the setting for that post. You can also schedule your post to publish at at specific time. This is also in post options.

While you’re in the comments settings, I encourage you to use Comment notification email. This sends you an email whenever someone leaves a comment on your blog. If the commenter has their email set up on their blog, you can send them an email response to their comment. I love this feature! It adds a whole new way to connect to your readers. You should, however, check the email address before you respond. Just watch for email addresses that say “noreply-comment@blogger”. I can’t tell you how many times I sent off a response to someone who left a comment and my response went off into space. It took me a while to figure that one out!!

Profile
On your dashboard, you will see a place to Edit your profile. In there is a box to check for showing your email address. I highly recommend you check this box. When other bloggers have giveaways on their blogs, they use this to contact you if you have won. This also lets them help with a question you may have left in a comment, and to respond to a comment you have made on their blog. If you’re not comfortable giving our your email address, set up a new Gmail or Yahoo email just for this purpose. Just be sure to check your email. Also in your profile if you check the box to show the blogs you follow, others will be able to see the blogs you read. This is a very good way for former MQB bloggers to find some of the “old gang”. Just look and see who others are following or who their followers are. You’ll find them. Also, make sure you put a picture in your profile. It makes it easier to identify you in your comments and as a follower.

Google Reader
When I discovered Google Reader, I thought it was the greatest tool for reading blogs. That usually where I read most blogs because they load faster, and I can read the blogs quicker. One irritation I have, however, is that some bloggers have their site settings so that you only see part of their blog, and then you have to visit their blog to see the rest of the post. I must confess that there are many times when I skip those blog posts rather then click through to the blog. If you want your reader to be able to see your full blog in the Reader, go to Settings, Site Feed, and make sure your Allow Blog Feeds setting says “Full”. Amy from Amy's Creative Side has a great tip for easier blog reading that lets you use the Next button to go from one blog to another. You can read about it here.

That’s all for today. Don't be afraid to play around with the settings on your blog. You can't hurt anything and can always change the settings. Hope you found some useful tips here. In the next few days, I’ll put together another blog post on blog layout and changing up your blog to make it pretty. It will give me a good excuse to change my blog layout.

Welcome again, new MQB bloggers.

Cat TV

2010-05-04T07:08:00.000-04:00

Every couple of years, a robin decides to build a next on the light fixture above our front door. Mama robin always gets peeved every time we drive in the yard and go anywhere near the front door. This year, it is providing endless entertainment for the “boys”, especially since their screen porch playground is closed for renovation. They sit there and chatter at the robin, who is not too happy about the company. This weekend, several small mouths started popping up over the top of the nest, and worms are dangling from mama robin’s mouth. It was a little too dark to get a picture of the nest today, but we did manage to get this picture of one very interested Redford cat watching his “cat TV”.

“I’m going to get you little birdies!”

Dexter Quilt Show

2010-05-02T21:34:00.000-04:00

First, I want to thank everyone for their well wishes on my health. The shingles rash is healing with the help of some steroids, although the hot flashes from the steroids are still working overtime.

It was a humid, rainy weekend. Perfect for going to a quilt show or two. Mom and I went to the quilt show in Dexter on Saturday and enjoyed our lunch in a nice smoke-free bar (thanks to the new Michigan law banning smoking in restaurants that went into effect on Saturday). Although I love going to quilt shows, and appreciate the amount of work that goes into putting one together, I have to say that quilt shows in churches are not my favorite venue. I prefer to see the full size quilts, and be able to look at them up close rather than having them draped over church pews that you have to view from the aisle in rather dim lighting. This show was more about older quilts, and had a collection of older Sunbonnet Sue quilts. There was also an exhibition of someone who must have been a treasured member of the guild or church who had several beautiful quilts that were all hand made.

This was one of them, apparently the quilter’s first quilt!!

This was another one, in the most beautiful shade of soft yellow

This one was cute, an entire quilt made about weight loss

Sunbonnet Sue

I love the typical Amish colors in this one

I did make it to the Midland quilt show, so I’ll get those pictures in the next blog.

Hope everyone had a good weekend.

Itch, Scratch, Itch…

2010-04-26T20:05:00.000-04:00

I’m feeling rather old and tired. It is 7:30 at night and I can’t keep my eyes open. This pattern is a repeat of last week where I swear I was in bed by 8:00 every night. It started with a small rash, you know, the kind where your bra rubs you the wrong way on a hot day? Unless you’re a guy, and then I guess you’ll have to imagine something else. Anyway, I woke up one day and there were little bumps all over the rash. Go to the store, get some cream to sooth the little bumps. Go again looking for something better to help with the itch.

I worked all week, and finished off the week by cleaning out old files in a dusty, dirty plant basement, sneezing, coughing and hacking all day. The only good part of that day was that I had a co-worker helping who is a quilter, and we starated our weekend early by visiting our favorite quilting store (part of our reward for doing the crummy job) near the plant.  Ahh, the weekend and I don't have to wear a bra...  The real fun begins.   Damn, someone is sticking sharp needles in my skin all hours of the day and night!! Too late to go to the Dr., unless I want to spend hours in urgent care on a weekend. Wake up Sunday morning with 8-10 red bumps on my arms, chest, face and legs. Uh oh, something is wrong, so I resolve to call the Dr. first thing on Monday.

I get to work and call the Dr. and get an appointment. I check on my co-worker, and she tells me she has a rash on her face! She calls the Dr. and gets an immediate appointment.    She calls after she sees the Dr. and tells me she has shingles. I go to the Dr. and I have shingles too. I'm told I had shingles as a baby and the virus can lie dormant in your body until your immune system is compromised. With 2 colds in 6 weeks, I guess my system was compromised.  Both Dr.’s tell us we are not contagious. Doesn’t sound right to me. I feel like Typhoid Mary…

The Dr. says there is not much they can do for me because the most effective treatment needs to be started in 48 hours, and I had this longer than that. On the good side, it is starting to heal and there are far fewer sharp needle pains. Lesson learned. Don’t wait to go to the doctor! Now if I can just get this itching all over my body to stop I’d be in good shape. Benadryl is my new best friend, and it does a good job of helping me sleep too!  I'm sleepy so I guess I’m off to go to bed. Hope tomorrow will be a better day.

Some eye candy!

2010-04-24T23:08:00.000-04:00

I had an unexpected treat today. I found out that Black Sheep Weaver’s Fiber Art Guild was throwing their 6th Annual Spring Fling. I’d heard of this group, but had never attended any of their shows. DH was working so I took a little drive to the show. Boy, was I glad I went. This is a talented group of artists that had something for everyone. There were paintings, beautiful photography, a little pottery, jewelry, a few quilts, silk scarves and purses, and of course, lots of beautiful fiber art. Everything was very presented very beautifully in an old, former church building.

This was an amazing 3-D picture made of beautiful brown fibers. There was a similar picture that I didn’t get of a beautiful horse.

This was a gorgeous woven piece (so tall).

Another woven piece. The colors are beautiful.

This shawl had a lot of texture. It looks so light and lacy.

I love the blue colors in this sweater.

A lovely quilt

Cute!

This scarf was so soft!! I can’t imagine how this is knitted (I assume it was knitted?)

Some pretty hand dyed yarn

I was so tempted to buy one of these scarves, especially the $10-$12 ones in the middle. I’m kicking myself for not buying a scarf. I don’t know how they can sell them for such a low price!

Love the owl!

Leave ‘em with a smile.

At this point, the batteries in my camera died or I’d have more pictures to show you. I did manage to buy a couple of gifts for my new niece that should be born in the next few weeks, but I can’t show those to you quite yet.

Hope you enjoyed the show!

It’s been a while…

2010-04-11T22:15:00.000-04:00

I’ve been fighting a cold all week, my 2nd one in a month. Thought it was allergies, but the lack of energy and body aches convinced me it was another cold. Ughhh. So, I took Friday off and just slept a lot this weekend. I am finally feeling better, well-rested and ready to start a new week. I did actually get a little quilting in. I sewed a few rows on my New York Beauty quilt. One more row to sew and then I can start sewing the rows together. I am very pleased with how it is turning out.

A few weeks ago, I went to my first quilt show of the year. It was one of those beautiful spring days with lots of sunshine. A little cold, but warm enough to walk around downtown Marshall where the quilt show was held. Here are some of the pictures. Sorry for the quality of the pictures. I forgot my camera and had to use the phone camera.

It is unusual to see this pattern in black and white, but I like it.

There were several antique quilts

I had seen this quilt at another show, and I was glad to see it again.

These ducks are so cute!

I love the colors in this one.

This was my favorite quilt. Sorry it is so blurry.

This picture shows the detail that went into this quilt.

A quilt how wouldn’t be complete without a cat quilt!

I love these hats

This one made me smile!

Hope you enjoyed the show.

National Quilting Day

2010-03-21T17:57:00.000-04:00

As lazy as I've been about quilting and blogging lately, I couldn't let yesterday go by without doing something quilty. I visited one of my favorite stores, Keanes, in Mason. They have a lovely little store with lots of home dec items, and a nice little fabric department. I also visited a store nearby, Yards of Fabric. I was soooo tempted to buy some pretty spring-like fabric but I held mysef back.

I decided to pull out one of my UFO's to see if I could finish it. I made these New York Beauty blocks in a class, probably 4 or 5 years ago. At the time, I was pretty new to quilting and into everything being matchy-matchy. I found a lot of batiks that I liked, and the teacher encouraged me to make the blocks all different. She said, "Just start making the blocks without worrying how they will go together". So, I did just that and ended up with 24 blocks that I really liked. I tried putting them together in a pleasing arrangement and quickly got overwhelmed, so it became a UFO. Since I had 24 blocks, I tried putting them together in a 4 x 6 arrangement, but I just couldn't get the pattern I liked. So after fooling around, I ended up with a 6 x 6 pattern, which meant that I was now short by 12 blocks. If this was going to get finished, I knew I had to do something different than making 12 more blocks. So, I found some dark purple batik in my stash, and used that as a filler. I like this better as it calms the pattern down a bit, and sets off the blocks This is the pattern I came up with.

I don’t think I like the bottom yellow block. It kind of shouts at me. Do you like this arrangement better?

Here’s the center block. A little low contrast on one of the blocks. Would you swap that block out for something with more contrast? I was going for similar colors in the middle.

The only problem is now I have a 64 x 64 quilt. My ordered brain says that the quilt should be longer than wider. Any ideas on a border (if I even need one)? I don’t have any more of the purple batik I used for the filler, but I do have lots of batik fabrics.

Hope your weekend was a good one!

Pi Day

2010-03-14T21:04:00.000-04:00

We were in a restaurant today having a late lunch, and I mentioned to my DH about the cute post that Linda at The Quilting Cat wrote about her beautiful cat, Piwacket, and the fact that it is National Pi day. You know, Pi, the math equation? So, what do you think he does when we leave the restaurant? He stops at the Grand Traverse Pie Company to buy a pie. Silly man, it’s not that kind of Pie day!!

Now, if you’ve never had a pie from this place, it is heavenly. It is better than any homemade pie I’ve ever had. It is a company based in Traverse City, home of the cherry capital. So, of course, we had to have their very special cherry crumb pie, made with Montmorency Tart cherries from Traverse City, Michigan.

From Wikipedia, The Montmorency cherry is a variety of sour cherry (Prunus cerasus) grown in the United States, Canada and France, particularly in Michigan and in Door County, Wisconsin.^[1] Montmorency cherries are part of the lighter-red amarelle cultivar of sour cherries, rather than the darker red Morello cultivar. The tree produces large, light red fruit (although some trees produce a darker red fruit) and has been cultivated in the United States since at least the early 20th century.^[3] It is the most popular sour cherry in the United States and Canada, and is extensively used in cherry pies,^[4] as well as in jams and preserves. Montmorency cherries are also marketed in dried form,^[5] and Montmorency cherry juice and juice concentrate is also sold.^[6]^[7]

In checking their website, I see that they also offer sugar free pies, pies made with Splenda, and some interesting combinations like Cherry Peach, Cherry Apple, Blackberry Peach etc. I had no idea they had so many varieties of pies. Maybe that’s a good thing. . . I knew they had been growing and adding several locations in Michigan, but it looks like they are also shipping pies all over the country. Apparently, even Oprah thinks their pies are special because they are featured in her magazine.

So here’s to having your dessert first, and forget any plans for dinner. Have you had your pie today?? I hope it was a good one.!!

Orchid Show

2010-02-26T07:11:00.000-05:00

I will be the first to admit that I’ve been a little spoiled this year compared to the rest of the country when it comes to winter snow. We missed most of the major storms that seemed to batter certain areas of the country. This week has made up for some of the storms we missed. 8” of snow on Monday (a tough 1-1/2 hour commute home), an icy 2 hour commute home on Wednesday, a long commute to work on Thursday due to an accident on icy roads that closed the highway over 5 hours, and 2-4” of snow predicted for today’s commute. I’m ready for spring!! I am soooo looking forward to the orchid show this weekend at Michigan State University. To feed my need for spring, here are pictures from the show 2 years ago.

This last picture is not a real orchid. It is actually made from clay plastic. It looks real, doesn’t it?

If you’re in the area of MSU in East Lansing on Saturday or Sunday, be sure to check out the (free) orchid show put on by the Greater Lansing Orchid Society. It also includes a vendor show where they sell orchids--very difficult temptation to resist!!

On the quilt front, I’ve been working away daily on the comfort quilt. I can’t believe that I’ve just about completed it in 2 weeks. The binding goes on this weekend and then I’m done. I’ll post pictures after the gift is given. Meanwhile, I’ve completely neglected your blogs over the last few weeks, so I have a lot to catch up on.

Take care, and THINK SPRING!

Busy Weekend!

2010-02-15T19:52:00.000-05:00

Thanks to everyone who suggested a quilt pattern for my comfort quilt. I decided to make a disappearing nine patch along with some log cabin style blocks to fill in the rest of the quilt. For the nine-patch, I went with 10” squares and ended up with big 14” blocks after cutting. I figure I will only need 12 blocks along with a 5-6” border to get a good size lap quilt. I got 9 blocks done over the weekend, and will finish 3 more this week. I’m kind of making this up as I go along. I LOVE the disappearing nine patch blocks!! I had never done these before and they were so easy to make.

I told DH on Saturday morning that I was going shopping for fabrics for the quilt. He pointedly looked at the wall where I have my stash and said “you’re going to shop for fabric”? Yes, I said, because the colors in the this quilt are not colors I have on hand. This was the first time he had ever made reference to my stash. Hmmm…maybe it is getting too big? Nah…he has just as much “stash” as I do only he calls it “home improvement materials and tools”.

Here is the fabric I purchased. Lots of soft greens and pinks with dark red and green accents . I love the red paisley. Yay, I finally get to use paisley in a quilt.

I took the blocks to work so people could sign them. I decided that this was going to be a “hope” quilt, so I found lots of inspirational messages & quotes of hope on the internet. I printed them out and took them to work with me.   I gave everyone the choice to put whatever they wanted on the quilt, and offered the “hope” quotes for those who wanted to pick one out and use it along with their signature. I thought this would be much more comforting for her to be able to read some of the messages as she is going through the treatment. I think it is going to be a beautiful quilt, if I do say so myself! I’ll take pictures next weekend when I finish the quilt.

Now, what to put on the back? I wanted to use Minkee, but the LSQ owner kind of talked me out of it. Said it was difficult to quilt unless I “pinned the heck out of it”.    She thought that flannel would be a better choice for the back. As you know, I’m not too good at the quilting part, so I’ll probably do something simple like cross hatch or stipple. Has anyone used Minkee for the back of a quilt?   Is it easy or difficult to quilt? I really wanted to use something soft for the back of the quilt, and I love the feel of Minkee. . .

Then, yesterday we were planning to go to a nice dinner at a local restaurant, but that didn’t work out for us. DH said at about 4:30 that he just didn’t feel right and that his heart had been racing for about 3 hours, and his hands were shaking. He said he was going to drive himself to the urgent care. I told him “no way” was he going to drive himself, and I took him to emergency. Good news is that it wasn’t a heart attack and they don’t “think” it is anything serious. He is going to have to wear an “event” monitor for the next few weeks to see if the problem recurs. But we spent 4-1/2 hours in the emergency room. Uggghhh.

Hope everyone had a great Valentine’s Day.

Need Help!

2010-02-09T22:53:00.000-05:00

A co-worker just received some pretty devastating news yesterday that she most likely has Stage 4 cancer, and will start treatment in March after more tests to see if she is strong enough to handle the rigorous treatment. We are all praying for her.

A co-worker and I want to make her a comfort quilt, and only have a very short time to do it. I need any help you can give me with a quick & easy pattern. I’d like to gather signatures from our co-workers to incorporate into the quilt. I plan to go shopping this weekend to gather what I need to make the quilt, and prepare some blocks for signatures on Monday. I’m thinking pre-cut layer cakes or charm squares might be the way to go, but am open to ideas with FQ’s as well. Large block sizes will probably be a good thing.

Any ideas or links where I can find a pattern?

Thanks for your help!

Something new. . .

2010-02-04T21:37:00.000-05:00

I seem to lost the urge to quilt lately. But I am happy to report I have been able to make a few more blocks to complete my pinwheel UFO.

All I have left to do are 3 more blocks to complete this final border row and I’ll be finished with the top. I need a quilt show to get my mojo back!! Well, there is a shop hop next weekend, maybe I’ll check that out.

As for the something new, I decided to try my hand at knitting. For a long time, I’ve admired the knitting that Rudee does. She’s an awesome knitter. So, I was in Lobby Hobby one day and this soft curly yarn was just calling my name. So, I bought it. I pulled out my trusty Reader’s Digest Complete Guide to Needlework which showed me how to cast on. It felt very awkward, as did the first few rows of stitching. The stitches were very tight, but after the first few rows, it got a little better. I am very slow, but everyone has to start somewhere. This is what I’ve done so far
I don’t think this will replace my love of quilting, but I’m glad to be doing something creative.

Take care, and pictures of quilts on your blog would certainly be appreciated!!

Playing Around

2010-01-09T23:09:00.000-05:00

I've been playing around and found a really cool website to make a blog header.

Here is what I've come up with so far:

Here's another one

And one more

The website is called Scrapblog.com.

I can change out the pictures whenever I like.

Which one do you like?

Santa’s on his way

2009-12-24T08:15:00.000-05:00

The little ones are getting ready for Santa. Amelia is 3-1/2 and she’s been sick for the last few weeks. She finally was well enough to visit Santa. She looks pretty happy.

Then there’s Violet, who is 1-1/2. She visited Santa a few weeks ago. She was all smiles watching Santa for a while with other kids on his lap. Until she got up close and personal. She and Santa did not bond very well.

Is it just me or does Santa have extra large hands these days? (sorry, I couldn’t resist)

The cookies have been made, and there is plenty of milk in the house for Santa.

The decorations are up. This is my niece Amanda, the mother of the two cuties.

Ahhh, the excitement of children.

I love this picture.

C’mon Santa, hurry on over to my house, and please bring Rudolph.

He sprang to his sleigh, to his team gave a whistle,

And away they all flew like the down of a thistle.

But I heard him exclaim, ere he drove out of sight,

Happy Christmas to all, and to all a good-night.

Update

2009-12-23T07:08:00.000-05:00

This guy is all better.

Yeah, I know, doesn’t he look pathetic? He’s moved into a new mobile home. Nothing fancy, but plenty of windows and a good storm door.

For two days, he ate very little. We opened up can after can of food and he turned up his nose at it. He would only eat kitty treats. Boy, did he have us snowed. Yesterday, after turning his nose up at his food dish again, he didn’t get any treats. An hour later when we weren’t looking , he decided the food dish was ok. By the end of the day, the food dish was empty.

He is, ahem, regular again (ewww). He’s like a teenager with a hollow leg. Coming up and kneading his paws on you at 3:30 am, wanting his breakfast. Yes, all is normal again. . .

Christmas Recipe!!

2009-12-20T08:42:00.000-05:00

Take one dumb cat who thinks it’s ok to chew on fake Christmas garland.
Said dumb cat then vomits on the carpet.
Dumb cat then hides all day sleeping in odd places, not wanting to socialize.
Dumb cat won’t eat or drink, even after stupid humans open several packages of food and treats to entice him.
Stupid humans go out and buy a thermometer and actually manage to get a "normal" temperature reading (you don’t want to know how).
Worry a lot about your sick fur baby.
Wake up to stupid cat chewing on the garland again.
Take down Christmas garland at 4:00 am
Head for 24 hour vet clinic at 5:30 am on Sunday
Vet’s office first words “you realize we are on emergency hours”
Translation: We are going to charge you ridiculous prices to look at your cat. We know you are desperately worried at this hour and will pay any price.
Go wake up the vet who sleeps at said office just for “emergencies”.
X-Rays, office visit, antibiotics for a slightly elevated temperature, anti-nausea medicine, hydrate cat with fluids $275. But the follow up vet visit is free (I know, it just warms the heart)
Thank God there was no obstructions or surgery needed. Stupid cat!
Cute cat picture: Priceless

I guess that’s my Christmas present. . .

Pinwheel quilt

2009-12-15T20:40:00.001-05:00

It’s been a while since I’ve sewed. My sewing room was such a mess and I couldn’t think about sewing until I cleaned some of it up. It is amazing how much better I felt with everything organized. So, I started to sew. I got the top border done on my pinwheel quilt. Here are some pictures. I set some buttons on the flowers, but I’m going to wait to sew them on until the quilting is done.

The red flower on top of the blue is loose, and will be held on by just the button. I made the the smaller flowers, like the red one, out of actual 30's prints. I took a dresden plate block that was partially done and cut it up. The blue and green flowers are repros.

Red didn’t want me to show you the border yet…

When I was cleaning, I found this piece of smocking that I did in a sewing class, playing with the fancy stitches on a Janome machine.

With the blue and yellow colors, It would be cute in a little girl’s Easter dress. I love the veriegated thread. It is about 7” wide and 5-1/2” tall. I don’t think I’ll ever do anything with it, though. If anyone out there thinks they’d like to have this and would make something of it, send me an email.

I’d better get busy again tonight. I’ve pledged to myself to finish this quilt for the New Year’s UFO Challenge on Finn’s blog. Not much time left til then, eh?

Rambling…

2009-12-09T20:59:00.000-05:00

I’m sooo thankful that we managed to dodge most of the big storm moving throughout most of the country. We got a few inches of snow that promptly went away with warmer temps and rain. We are getting the really high winds, though. I asked DH if he has the generator all ready to go in case we lose power and he said we’re all set.

Of course, this would be nice too, with a good book…

Checking the blogs, I can’t believe how many giveaways are going on in blogland. Click here for a link to one I just had to enter (on 5 different blogs) to win a new HP computer. It’s a touch screen computer and it really looks neat.

I found the cutest baby quilt called Hugs and Kisses from Quilt Patterns from Seattle She has a download for a free pattern on her website. She has a lot of free quilt patterns. I love the scrappy maple leaf quilt and the autumn in the southwest quilt.

DH sent me this email yesterday.
Elvis, When he was really "The King" - Martina McBride was digitally dropped in to this track in 2008.
Amazing, simply amazing how good this is, I hope you enjoy this as much as I did. It’s a pretty cool video…Click on link below.
http://release.theplatform.com/content.select?pid=5mCzgDf_lCZ3uKBDkKLY2_dqmD4_S0yF&UserName=Unknown
Elvis - Born January 08, 1935. Died August 16, 1977
Martina - Born July29, 1966 -

Well, it’s off to bed, or as my father used to say, it’s time to go to the blanket show.

Not much quilting lately…

2009-12-08T07:05:00.000-05:00

I seem to go in streaks when it comes to quilting. Last year, I started making jewelry. It is very similar to quilting in that the more “stash” you have, the easier it is to make pretty jewelry. It "requires" hours of stalking the bead section at Joann’s, Hobby Lobby, and Michaels, fondling the baubles and beads. The good news is that it is not quite as expensive as quilting (as long as you stay away from Swarovski crystals…then it can get more expensive). It costs less than $50 to get started in this craft.

I found a little bead store not too far away that had Sunday classes. I decided to check them out one day. While it was a nice little store, I was disappointed to hear that their instructor listed in their online class schedule had recently moved, so there were no classes. And, the store was very warm that day with no air conditioning. I got discouraged and visited Joann’s where I bought a little cheapo, how-to make jewelry kit and taught myself how to do it. It really is very easy. I made several necklaces, bracelets, and earrings over the past year.

As I was growing up, I would receive charms for my charm bracelet for special occasions. But over the years, the charm bracelet had become old and tarnished. Charm bracelets seem to have come back into fashion recently. While I think charm bracelets are cute, they aren’t very practical for wearing to work when you are working on a computer most of the day. So recently, I decided to dump the ugly, tarnished bracelet and put my charms on a necklace.

First, I had to find a sturdy chain that would hold the charms and not break. Hobby Lobby helped with that one. Then, I simply used my pliers to open some new, shiny sterling silver rings to attach the charms to the necklace. I felt it needed some updating, so I added some colorful, handmade bead charms.

There’s the bible I received for my confirmation, and the Christmas angel charm. If you look inside the bible charm, you can see the Lord’s Prayer…

The high school banner, the graduation cap, the violin (that I played for several years), and the charm from the trip to the Grand Ole Opry

Here’s the entire necklace. You can see the heart charm with my December birthstone at the bottom of the necklace.

I still did not use all of my charms on this necklace, so I could easily make another one. All of the colors you see are the bead charms I made. I'm pleased with how it turned out. I love being able to wear these charms again after all these years.

Thanks for stopping by.

It’s beginning to look like Christmas…

2009-12-06T18:50:00.000-05:00

It’s been a while since I’ve posted. Work has been busy, thank goodness. I’d rather be busy than bored, and we are going into our slow season where we do all the things we tend to procrastinate about (read..don’t really want to do) during the busy season.

Well, I got into the Christmas mood this weekend and got the house decorated. It’s always fun to pull out old favorites from the Christmas boxes. With the 2 cats and no kids, I don’t put up a tree. Mr. Red loves to climb to high places, and a tree would not last very long in this household. Now Buster, on the other hand, didn’t really care what what going on. He’d rather sleep and look cute…

We’ll have to see what Red does to the mantle that was just decorated with my village houses

Once upon a time, when I had better eyes and more patience, I was very much into needlework with embellishment. I made several felt wall hangings with lots of beads and sequins. I guess you could say these were my early appliqué quilts that I made when I was in my teens and early 20’s. I still have a UFO from those days, LOL. Wonder if I’ll ever finish it?

I gave this one to my grandparents over 30 years ago, and got it back after they passed away. It’s getting a little frayed around the edges, but I still love it anyway.

I made this one not long after I got married and kept it as one of our first Christmas decorations. It’s my favorite one.

And I made this Christmas card holder as well.

I’m pretty sure I made a few others and gave them away to family as Christmas gifts, but I don’t have any pictures. As you can see, I’ve been having a little fun tonight playing with making collages in Picasa.

How’s your holiday decorating coming along?

Take care,

Funny Movie!

2009-11-29T19:10:00.001-05:00

DH and I rarely go to the movies. Most of the time, the weather is so nice that we don't want to be inside a movie theater. But today, we went to the movies. Gee, it has been a long time since we've been to the movies. When did they start running previews and advertisements a full 20 minutes after the movie is supposed to start??? Yes, some of the movie previews were very interesting, but after a while you start to wonder if they are ever going to start the movie that you PAID for!

Anyway, go see the move OLD DOGS. It was hilarious. It was one of those movies that you can see again and again and still laugh at all of the jokes.

Happy Thanksgiving!

2009-11-25T19:38:00.001-05:00

Reflecting on Thanksgiving, I am reminded of how lucky I am to be blessed with a great life and good health for my family, and to be able to enjoy my quilting and other hobbies. I thank all the men and women currently serving our country, especially those who are not as lucky as I am to be home sharing Thanksgiving with my family. I'm grateful for the veterans who have served our country. I'm grateful for my blogging friends.

I was having fun looking for Thanksgiving quotes online, and thought I would share some with you. Some of these quotes put a smile on my face!

(I love this picture!)

Coexistence: what the farmer does with the turkey - until Thanksgiving. ~Mike Connolly

There is a calmness to a life lived in Gratitude, a quiet joy.
-- Ralph H. Blum

There is always, always, always something to be thankful for.
-- Author Unknown

As we express our gratitude, we must never forget that the highest appreciation is not to utter words, but to live by them. ~John Fitzgerald Kennedy

What we're really talking about is a wonderful day set aside on the fourth Thursday of November when no one diets. I mean, why else would they call it Thanksgiving? ~Erma Bombeck, "No One Diets on Thanksgiving," 26 November 1981

For each new morning with its light,
For rest and shelter of the night,
For health and food, for love and friends,
For everything Thy goodness sends.
~Ralph Waldo Emerson

Thanksgiving dinners take eighteen hours to prepare. They are consumed in twelve minutes. Half-times take twelve minutes. This is not coincidence. ~Erma Bombeck

Ah! on Thanksgiving day....
When the care-wearied man seeks his mother once more,
And the worn matron smiles where the girl smiled before.
What moistens the lips and what brightens the eye?
What calls back the past, like the rich pumpkin pie?
~John Greenleaf Whittier

Let us remember that, as much has been given us, much will be expected from us, and that true homage comes from the heart as well as from the lips, and shows itself in deeds. ~Theodore Roosevelt

Thanksgiving is the holiday of peace, the celebration of work and the simple life... a true folk-festival that speaks the poetry of the turn of the seasons, the beauty of seedtime and harvest, the ripe product of the year - and the deep, deep connection of all these things with God. ~Ray Stannard Baker (David Grayson)

Thanksgiving, man. Not a good day to be my pants. ~Kevin James

Thanksgiving is an emotional holiday. People travel thousands of miles to be with people they only see once a year. And then discover once a year is way too often. ~Johnny Carson

Hem your blessings with thankfulness so they don't unravel. ~Author Unknown

The funny thing about Thanksgiving, or any huge meal, is that you spend 12 hours shopping for it and then chopping and cooking and braising and blanching. Then it takes 20 minutes to eat it and everybody sort of sits around in a food coma, and then it takes four hours to clean it up. ~Ted Allen

The thing I'm most thankful for right now is elastic waistbands. ~Author Unknown

May your stuffing be tasty
May your turkey plump,
May your potatoes and gravy
Have nary a lump.
May your yams be delicious
And your pies take the prize,
And may your Thanksgiving dinner
Stay off your thighs!
~Author Unknown

It’s funny. I was going to blog about the rough day I had but I started looking at these quotes, and didn’t feel like blogging about it anymore. With a long weekend ahead, I do believe I’ll be quilting. You take care and hope your Thanksgiving is a great one!

Favorite Fabric Friday

2009-11-20T06:30:00.000-05:00

This is a fun little fat quarter I picked up just because it was all cats. Who doesn’t like cat fabric? ‘Nuff said.

Hope you have a Fabulous Friday!

Karen

Kalamazoo Quilt Show #3

2009-11-19T07:04:00.000-05:00

I found this post that I had done but never posted. No matter, it’s never to late to show quilts from a quilt show.

This 3-D baby quilt was adorable.

Nice fall quilt.

I like the background and border.

Interesting use of hand dyed fabrics

Very pretty.

Love the ric-rac.

I like the use of ties in this Bowtie pattern, especially the border.

Bought the Convergence book, it’s on my list

I like the fish

Hope you enjoyed the show. Unfortunately, I don’t see any more shows on the calendar until late winter, so I guess I’ll have to get back to those UFO’s. Got a deadline to finish them by January 1st.

Karen

Spring Ahead/Fall Back

2009-11-15T19:20:00.001-05:00

So, I’ve been teasing you with Favorite Fabric Friday pictures from my quilt so I thought I would post pictures of the entire quilt. I made this quilt in 2004 when I first started quilting. This is a reversible quilt that was made using the quilt as you go method. I loved this method because as you sew the strips down, you are creating both sides of the quilt as well as the quilting and sashing. When you are finished with the quilt, all you have to do is sew down one side of the sashing, do the binding, and you’re done.

I had signed up for a class at the LQS, and knew I wanted to make a blue and yellow quilt. I spent hours looking for the right blue and yellow fabric that would go with the first fabric I fell in love with as shown here

I spent all that time looking for the blue and yellow fabric that I kind of forgot about getting fabric for the other side. I arrived for class 1/2 hour early and started picking out fabrics for the other side.

I found this focus floral fabric.

I quickly found several fall color fabrics to go with it. This was the days before I had any stash and had to buy fabric for each quilt I made (those were the days, eh?) After I got the quilt made, then I had a dilemma in that I had such different fabrics for the front and back that it was difficult to find a binding that would match both sides. I ended up with a green binding and even that was difficult to match the green color.

Here is the back of the quilt.

Here is the front of the quilt. It looks much better up close than it does in the picture.

This shows both sides

Funny how I spent all of that time looking for blue and yellow fabrics, and now I find that the back side with the fall colors is my favorite side. Which side do you like?

I named the quilt Spring Ahead/Fall Back for the daylight savings time change. I’ve been thinking about this because the recent time change has been kicking my butt. I am still waking up an hour earlier than I need to even though I go to bed at a reasonable hour. Coming home in the dark doesn’t make it any easier, and work has been a bit busy. So I’m seem to be exhausted during the week. Thank goodness for the weekends when I can catch up with a few naps here and there. OMG, I must be getting old…

Hope everyone had a good weekend. Another (mostly) great weather weekend here in Michigan. I can’t believe it is still so warm in the middle of November.

Karen

Favorite Fabric Friday

2009-11-13T19:54:00.001-05:00

When I first started quilting, I wanted to make a blue & yellow quilt.

I fell in love with this fabric.

It is such a lovely bouquet of flowers that it makes me think of spring every time I look at it. Red decided that he wanted in on the act as I was taking the picture, so I let him play.

Here he is with a piece of bias string fabric. He loves to play with this so I had to give him his own “toy” so he wouldn’t mess with my sewing.

I think he’s humiliated having been caught in such a stupid pose.

This weekend, I’ll have better light to get pictures of the entire quilt to show those of you who have asked to see it.

Hope everyone has a great weekend!

Karen

What a Wonderful Day!

2009-11-08T15:54:00.001-05:00

I was feeling a little down this morning because DH had to work today. Then I decided that sunny skies, a pleasant breeze and 65 degree weather meant it was too nice to stay indoors. This weather won’t last too much longer before the dreaded snow and ice gets here. So, I called my mother and asked if she was dressed and would she be ready to go somewhere in 15 minutes? She asked where we were going, and I told her I wasn’t going to tell her. I said, “just be ready for me to pick you up”.

We went here (check out that blue sky)

For some of this (click to enlarge if you can’t read the sign)

The cider was sweet and the doughnuts were warm

and full of cinnamon…yum

The town was picturesque, the water flowing over the rapids with the white church steeple showing through the trees. People were out enjoying cider by the stream.

Apple pie, anyone?

How about some sweet, crunchy apples?

I am glad we went. My mother enjoyed herself very much. She hasn’t been getting out much lately because my dad is having a hard time walking. She definitely needed a break…

And, I scored some brownie points with DH when I brought him some cider and doughnuts to share at work. When he gets off work, I think we'll be taking a drive somewhere to enjoy the rest of the day.

Today was one of those days when you feel thankful for your health, family, freedom, and to be alive. With thoughts of veterans day later this week, a day to reflect and thank all of the service men and women, past and present, for serving their country.

How was your weekend? Great, I hope.

Karen

Favorite Fabric Friday

2009-11-06T18:44:00.000-05:00

What?? 6:00 pm and I’m the first to post Favorite Fabric Friday on http://www.myquiltblog.com/ ? Well, ok, so here’s my picture for FFF. This is from a quilt I did a few years ago, and YES, it is a completed quilt :)

I just love the fall colors of these flowers.

For once, the picture actually looks pretty close to the actual colors in the quilt.

Hope everyone has a good weekend. We are going to have some unseasonably warm weather in the 60’s this weekend, so I’ll definitely be out and about enjoying the warm weather before we have to deal with snow and cold.

Karen

Happy Halloween!!

2009-10-31T17:30:00.000-04:00

I think I’m finally over my mental block with the FMQ on my Halloween quilt. I’ve got the quilt about 3/4 quilted, and while I will finish it for the New Year’s UFO challenge, it will not be done before Halloween is over.

I’m getting a little more comfortable with the quilting. When I stipple quilt, I don’t use a pattern. Seeing that this is going to be a pumpkin wall hanging, I wanted to quilt some leaves on the quilt. I found a pattern, and traced that pattern onto freezer paper, and ironed it to a test piece of fabric and quilted away. My quilting was a bit jerky and the pattern was a little more complicated than I wanted. I didn’t think I would like picking out the paper once I was done. So, I went to plan B.

I used a chalk marker to mark the leaves and stipple loops so I would have a very loose pattern to follow. I had just finished marking part of the quilt when Red showed up. He thought it would be a good idea to roll around on the quilt and erase the marks I just made!!

Still, while chalk doesn’t stick around very long, I like being able to erase it with my fingers as I mark the pattern. So, the quilting is a combination of following the pattern, and trying to quilt without it in areas where I didn’t mark it or it was erased.

Here is the whole quilt. I plan to applique a pumpkin top and stem to it, and cut it in the shape of a pumpkin.

I’m trying to decide on which binding to use. Do you like the stripe fabric I bought a few weeks ago, or the plaid fabric that you see around the cat blocks?

If you want to see close up pictures of the cat blocks, or get the free pattern, you can click to my previous blog here.

Have a safe and Happy Halloween, and keep an eye out for the kids on the streets.
Karen

Favorite Fabric Friday

2009-10-30T07:09:00.001-04:00

This fabric is from the 30’s blocks I inherited from my grandmother. I just love the little cowboy and his lasso.

I’m still working on this quilt, trying to get it finished before the end of the year for my New Year’s UFO challenge. Here’s a picture of the quilt top so far.

My helper just can’t stay away when the camera comes out. Looking forward to seeing the other Favorite Fabric Friday entries on http://rosebudquilting.blogspot.com/

Take care,

Kalamazoo Quilt Show #2

2009-10-28T20:18:00.001-04:00

Here are some more pictures from the Kalamazoo quilt show. I love landscape quilts

These were pretty creative.

This one was a miniature, about 12-15” tall.

Of course, I had to get several pictures of a cat quilt.

Hope you enjoyed the show. I still have more pictures that I'll show later..
Karen

Kalamazoo Quilt Show

2009-10-25T21:52:00.000-04:00

I went to the Kalamazoo quilt show last weekend, and thought I’d share some of the pictures with you.

I don’t know what it is about optical illusion quilts, but I’m fascinated by them. Someday…

I like the use of color in this quilt

I really like this simple quilting pattern.

This one’s for Molly. These are 3-D stars attached to this quilt. They look like they were created by an embroidery machine. But wouldn’t this be a good way to combine crocheted stars and quilting?

This one looked like a lot of work. I like the border.

Butterflies for Cheryl…

This one was very heavily quilted. The gold colors you see are all thread painted.

Am I showing my age with my love of this one?

Gotta go. I’ll show more quilts later. Hope you enjoyed the show.

Karen

Garden Harvest!

2009-10-24T18:12:00.002-04:00

We harvested the garden last week. We did pretty well with the gourds, but lost several to the critters. The deer had some fun with the pumpkins as well. As some of you will recall, there is a story that goes along with these pumpkins. Every few years, I go all out and decorate my house with pumpkins, straw, corn, gourds, etc. Two years ago, I bought several pumpkins and a black cat to decorate with. I love the goofy look and mismatched eyes on this cat.

In our yard, we have a little “garbage” pile where we throw our leaves, sticks, and other yard waste. Last year, DH came to me in August and said “remember that $100 you spent on pumpkins last year”? (I did not spend $100 on pumpkins). After Halloween, he put the pumpkins in the yard waste pile and the pumpkins made it through a hard Michigan winter and grew new plants without any help on our part. We got 5 pumpkins out of those plants. So, we threw them in the yard waste pile again last year. This year, same result only they were HUGE pumpkins. They have to be 24-26 inches tall, and are very heavy.

Here are my pumpkins this year.

The gourds that I planted came out pretty cool too.

I just love coming home and seeing this arrangement on my porch. This year, we’re going to throw the pumpkins and the gourds into the yard waste pile. We’ll see what happens next year.

Karen

Favorite Fabric Friday

2009-10-23T07:10:00.000-04:00

I went shopping last week at a lovely little store, The Quilter’s Garden. It’s been ages since I had gone into their store, and I’d forgotten what a great quilt shop it is. I saw this batik fabric, and it was a fall color, and it was a very cool gradation, and well, I bought a yard without thinking twice about it. Don't even think about asking for a fat quarter, Cheryl.

As always, the picture doesn’t do it justice. It really is more shades from orange to brown to yellow yellow. Wouldn’t this make a great border or binding fabric? Looking forward to seeing the other Favorite Fabric Friday blogs at http://www.myquiltblog.com/

I am so excited. I got a squishy in the mail yesterday from the Halloween lovely fabric panel giveaway that Shirley did for a giveaway to celebrate her signing up for Blogtoberfest. She also included some extra scraps to go with it. Thank you Shirley. I can't wait to play with this. Interesting that your Blogtoberfest giveaway took 9 days to travel from British Columbia to Michigan, and that it arrived yesterday of all days, eh Shirley? It must be a sign...

Karen

Pumpkin Patch Shop Hop

2009-10-19T20:52:00.000-04:00

The quilt shops in my area are having a shop hop at the end of this week. These shops usually have a progressive quilt that you can collect the fabric and patterns at each stop. This year, each shop designed their own borders to go with the quilt. I found it quite fascinating the different looks that each quilt has with the various borders and block placement.

There are the quilts from Pieceful Traditions and Guildcrafters Quilt Shop.

Quilts from The Quilt Patch and Jennifer’s Quilt Shop

From The Material Girls and Monarch Quilts

And from The Stitchery and Sew What

For a closer look at the quilts, you can go here. If you are interested in the shop hop (SE Michigan), you can visit their website here. Work is a little busy right now, so I won't be joining the shop hop this year. Nor do I NEED to add another UFO to my list. But I will try to go to some of the shops that are close by on Saturday just to see what sales might be going on. Can't miss the sales, right?

Which one do you like best?

Take care,
Karen

Favorite Fabric Friday

2009-10-16T06:37:00.000-04:00

At one time in my life, many, many, many years ago, I fell in love with a beautiful purple fabric. I was taking my first sewing lesson, at a Singer store in the mall. I remember it was during the summer, because the mall was nice and cool during the summer heat. I was a shy kid who read a lot of books, and I think my mother must have decided that I needed to get out of the house for a while. So, she signed me up for a class that I took over the summer break.

I found this fabric swatch in an old sewing box that I haven’t used in a long time.

Ha, ha, ha, isn’t is lovely? I think it is polyester. For my project, I made a maxi dress. I think this must have been the early 70’s. And now for a bigger laugh, I found this Polaroid picture!

I remember there was a fashion show in the mall where we modeled our garments. The back of the picture says I was the “deb” winner. I remember I won electric scissors, which I still have.
Funny how our choice of favorite fabric changes over the years... LOL.

Looking forward to everyone’s Favorite Fabric Friday entries on http://www.myquiltblog.com/.

Karen

Quilt Show

2009-10-15T06:38:00.000-04:00

As promised, here are some more pictures from the Durand Quilt show. I love the bright colors in these two quilts.

I like they way this quilt was appliquéd.

I love 3-D effects, like the scarf on this Christmas quilt.

This hankie quilt was kind of neat.

I love the double colored prairie points, and the sailboat (barely visible) at the bottom on this quilt.

These pictures do not do justice to this Baltimore Album quilt. There were several of these quilts on display as I think there had been some kind of guild challenge. This one had a yellow background, and there was another one with a lime green background. They were all spectacular.

A New York Beauty quilt. Someday, I’ll finish my own UFO…

If you want to see all the quilts from the show, you can click here. Hope you enjoyed the show. There is a quilt show in Kalamazoo this weekend.

October 17-18, 2009
Quilt Kalamazoo! by Kalamazoo Log Cabin Quilters
2900 Lake St., Kalamazoo County Fairgrounds, Kalamazoo, MI

It is a bit of a drive for me, so I’m debating whether I will be going or not. DH had some minor surgery yesterday, so we’ll see if he is up for the drive this weekend. The fall colors are so beautiful, and the weather is supposed to be nice this weekend. So I think a nice fall drive would be nice. If not, there is one a little closer to home that I can go to.

October 16-17, 2009
Come Sail Away! Western Wayne County Quilt Guild's Show
Wayne County Community College District Western Campus, 9555 Haggerty Road, Belleville, MI
Contact: Roxann Baker, Guild President, roxb51@aol.com

And last, but certainly not least, today is my 32nd wedding anniversary. Yep, 32 years ago in the finest polyester wedding dress you can find :) on Sweetest Day, my DH and I were married. I was going to post a photo, but that was the days before digitial, and I have no idea where all of those pictures are.

Take care,
Karen

Durand Quilt Show

2009-10-14T07:54:00.000-04:00

I’m finally getting around to post about the Durand quilt show from a few weeks ago. This is a quilt show that was held in a church is in a rural area of Michigan. There is always so much talent at this show. Durand has lots of railroad tracks running through town, and until the last few years, the quilt show was held at the local train depot. The train depot is a beautiful, old building with lots of oak trim.

This one made me smile

This one was made up of men’s ties

There were several Halloween quilts

The quilting from the back side of this quilt was awesome.

I love Hawaiian quilts.

Cool signature quilt from the early 40’s

For the sewing machine collectors…

I will post more pictures tomorrow. Hope you enjoyed the show.

Karen

50th Anniversary Quilt

2009-10-09T07:17:00.001-04:00

The quilt that I’m the most proud of is my parent’s 50th anniversary quilt. Some of you may recall that I previously blogged about this, but since the blog was lost, I wanted to recreate the post about my favorite quilt for Bloggers Quilt Festival.

I started planning the quilt about 5 months prior to their anniversary. My parents knew we were planning on giving them a party, but they didn’t know anything about the quilt. I wanted to do a signature quilt with blocks from all of their friends and family. But as I contemplated sending out fabric blocks and permanent pens, I thought there must be a better way. So, I drew several different size boxes on a piece of paper. I sent out the paper to their friends and family with instructions to write a message inside one of the boxes with a good felt tip pen. When I got the papers back, I cut out the messages using fancy scalloped scissors. I wanted to use the messages in the border, but didn’t have time to appliqué them. So, I took several messages and laid them on the scanner. I laid a background border of several strip pieced blocks on top of the messages. Then I scanned and printed the image onto Printed Treasures fabric on my inkjet printer. Since I used several of the background fabrics in the body of my quilt, it tied together very nicely. Here is how the border turned out.

View Full Album

The images are 8 x 11 size sheets of fabric that I only had to sew together in sections. On the body of the quilt, I started with the garden twist pattern for the middle of the quilt. I put their wedding pictures and their parent’s pictures in the garden lattice and surrounded them with lace.

I found a beautiful fabric called Violet Postcards by Debbie Beaves. Since violets are my Mom’s favorite flower, and the postcards had a lot of beautiful sayings and poems, I thought it was the perfect fabric for an anniversary quilt. Here is the postcard fabric (the color looks like it is blue, but it is really purple.)

View Full Album

I had a lot of fun searching for fabrics to match. After I pieced the middle of the quilt, I made up the rest of the quilt as I went along. I created tulip flowers with wedding pictures of myself and my 4 siblings along with grandchildren pictures. I named the quilt, Our Secret Garden for the “hidden” pictures in their “tulip garden”. If you look closely, that’s my wedding picture in the bottom red flower.

For the corners of the quilt, I cut up my grandmother’s doilies.

For the back of the quilt, I printed a copy of the anniversary invitation to put in the corners along with the quilt label which reads

“Our Secret Garden”

One look, One smile,

One touch, One embrace,

One kiss, One love…

Two people, Two minds,

Two souls, Two destinies…

One road, One journey,

A few seeds

Many flowers now grow in our “Secret Garden”

I used a pink flower panel for the back, with a pale pink marbled border, and a prairie point edge.

I appliquéd their last initial

And this is a full view of the quilt

It was fun presenting the quilt at their party because everyone was in on it except my parents. There were lots of tears, and my mother has dragged this quilt everywhere to show her friends.

I hope you enjoyed reading about this quilt as much as I enjoyed creating it and posting about it. It was a nice trip down memory lane. Thank you for visiting my blog. I’m off to check out the other blogs for the Bloggers Quilt Festival. Thanks Amy for hosting the festival.

Karen

Favorite Fabric Friday #3

2009-10-09T06:00:00.001-04:00

My favorite fabric to show this week is a print that I picked up on a shop hop. The shop hop quilt was a fall maple leaf quilt, and I wanted a leaf print for the back. I thought this fabric would be perfect to use as a guide when quilting. I’d just turn it over and quilt from the backside around the leaf patterns. It is a perfect fall print.

I look forward to seeing everyone’s FFF pics.
Karen

Almost Cold Turkey

2009-10-05T21:15:00.000-04:00

Well, I did it. Lately, my DH hardly ever watches TV anymore. He spends a lot more time on the internet, and since I started blogging, I don't watch TV as much as I used to. I started thinking about the $60/month I pay for "expanded cable" TV that I could save or buy other things I'd rather have. And the cable company justs keeps increasing the bill and doesn't really give you anything more for your money.

So, I told the cable company goodbye. Well, almost goodbye. We live far away from the city so that an antenna does not give us very good TV reception. And, with the TV's that are not digital, we'd have to buy both the digital converter as well as an antenna. So, since I still like to watch the occasional TV show and local news, we cut back to the cheapest cable available ($22/month). Just the local channels and PBS. Of course the cable company doesn't like it when you pick this option. You have to pay them a $25 fee to come to your house and put a "restrictor" on your cable so you can only see the local channels. They turned it off last Friday. So far, I'm ok with the decision. We'll have to see what happens when I get tired of watching network TV...

I'm curious, what does everyone else pay for cable TV?

Karen

UFO Challenge

2009-10-03T19:52:00.000-04:00

I’ve decided to join the UFO Challenge on Finns blog. I’ve committed to finishing 2 UFO’s by the end of the year, which given my slow rate of quilting, can be accomplished. I’ve got many more UFO’s, but I told myself if I finished these 2 quilts, I can start a new chenille quilt project that I’ve been wanting to do.

My Halloween quilt is the first quilt that I need to get finished (like now would be a good time to finish it!) I’ve got a few more quilt lines to transfer for the FMQ, than I can start quilting. I want to do more than just stippling on this quilt, so I found a border with leaves and vines. My goal this weekend is to get the FMQ started. Then I will have to bind it, put a sleeve on it, make the pumpkin top appliqué and attach it, and I will be done.

Here is a picture of the quilt so far. If you want to see a close up of each cat, you can click here to my previous blog with those pictures.

The other quilt I want to finish is the pinwheel quilt. When I say finish on this one, I mean have the top and back done to send to a long armer. I don’t want to wrestle quilting this quilt with the fragile 30’s fabrics around on my sewing machine. This quilt is made up of 30’s blocks my grandmother made. You can read more about the background of this quilt here.

I’ve got the border attached, but I’ve got to rip out one side because of a tension problem with the sewing machine. I’ve also got the appliqué top border almost finished, but I don’t have a picture yet.

I’m actually excited to get these UFO’s done.

Karen

Favorite Fabric Friday #2

2009-10-02T18:29:00.001-04:00

I enjoyed looking at the paisley fabrics last week, and thought I would share my one and only paisley in my stash. I went to a quilt show in Hadley, Michigan last year. They have a wonderful little quilt shop called Elaines Quilty Shop. I saw this fabric and fell in love with it. I didn’t know what I was going to do with it. I’ve been thinking of making a purse with it. I actually cut pieces for a purse in another fabric thinking I’d practice on that fabric before I cut into this one. I don’t know why quilters have a hard time cutting into a piece of fabric we’ve fallen in love with. I think I bought 2 yards, which is a lot for me when I don’t have a specific project in mind.

I just love the royal blue and aqua colors in this fabric. I’m enjoying the other FFF blogs. Such beautiful fabrics. Check out www.myquiltblog.com for more blogs.

I’ve decided to join Auntie Em in the UFO finish challenge. I’ll blog more about that this weekend.

There are 3 quilt shows this weekend. I’ll probably get to the one in Durand, and we’ll have to see on the other two. So, I’m going to have some fun this weekend.

Hope your weekend is a good one.

Karen

Blogging Made Easier

2009-09-26T10:05:00.006-04:00

I’ve been using blogger now for about 3 months. I don’t know about anyone else, but I’ve struggled many times with inserting and formatting pictures in blogger. I have no problem if I use the “none” layout for the picture. But sometimes, I want to put two pictures side by side or move them to the right or left, and it just doesn’t come out the way I want it to. When I think I have everything the way I want it to look, the post still doesn’t look like it does in the preview mode. You’ve all seen it where the words are squeezed and wrapped down the side of the picture. I’ve seen this on other blogs too.

I also struggle with placement of the pictures on blogger. Blogger seems to always put my pictures uploads at the top of the post instead of where I want them to go. Moving the pictures is a drag…

So, I set out to find a way to make it easier, and I found this program, Windows Live Writer. Wow, what a difference. I downloaded this free program, and it is so much easier to blog. When you install it, you give it your blog account information and it goes out and grabs your template, colors and stuff.

1. You create your blog offline in this program, and then choose to upload to blogger as a draft or to publish the blog.

2. You can upload to multiple blogs. But I haven’t been able to get it to work with myquiltblog yet. I think it is because it is a more unusual interface for a blog. I can still copy and paste to my quilt blog, though.

3. Pictures are so much easier. When you store pictures on Blogger instead of somewhere else, it uses Picasa to store the pictures. You can also download Picasa 3.5 to your computer to store and edit your pictures offline. Since Picasa already plays nice with Blogger, pictures seem to be easy. You can download Picasa here.

4. Writing blogs in Windows Live Writer is pretty much a WYSIWYG, (what you see is what you get) experience. It has several icons for easy formatting of text and images. It is very intuitive and easy to use.

5. As you are working on your blog, there is a preview button that lets you see how it will look on your blog. Because it loads the templates from your blog, it looks exactly like your blog will look when published. No more “fake preview” that doesn’t look like it does when published with all of your pictures and widgets displayed.

And now, here is a sample of what you can do.

Not only can I do things to a picture like add a border, drop shadow, or as I’ve done on this picture used the “reflection” choice, you choose the text alignment as well. Look, ma, no awkward word wrapping in this picture! This picture is from the MQN quilt show a few weeks ago.

Add a photo border, tilt the picture to the right or left, and add words to the picture… I don’t know if you can tell or not, but the quilter in the picture used feathers as an integral part of the quilt design.

You can add a picture album with lots of pictures or multiple pictures on one page. The album has lots of different settings to choose from.

View Full Album

A break for a minute since this is a quilt blog. Look at the quilting on this quilt. Isn’t it fabulous?

Michigan aerial map

Adding a map is one of the choices. I’m just playing now…

You can also add videos, hyperlinks, tables, etc.

Since this has been such a long blog, I’ll leave you with one more photo album from the MQN quilt show.

View Full Album

I hope this helps those who are struggling like I was. Did I mention there are a lot more fonts available in this program?

Karen

Favorite Fabric Friday

2009-09-25T07:14:00.001-04:00

I don’t usually buy fabric without a specific project in mind. However, in this case, the fabric looked like orange and pink sherbet, and looked so delicious, I had to buy it.

I had just laid out this fabric and look who showed up…

I swear, he watches my every move.

The orange cream cooler version

I wanted to give you a sneak peek at my pinwheel applique, but my guard dog thought it was too much to show

Looking forward to seeing everyone’s Favorite Fabric Friday entries on myquiltblog.

Karen

MQN Quilt Show

2009-09-22T06:55:00.002-04:00

This quilt show was fabulous. So many beautiful, well designed quilts, that it is hard to pick only a few to blog about. Here are some of my favorites:

As I was taking this picture, the quilter walked up to me and said “thank you”. I told her it was a beautiful quilt. There were some other quilts that were similar, but this quilt was the only one with the inscription “We plant the seeds but He provides the harvest”

I like the way this quilt extends into the borders. Then you look at a close up and the quilting is really neat.

The only cat quilt at the show

This one looks like it was a lot of work, but I love the bright colors and the rainbow effect

Titled A Sled Dogs Dream

“In my head, I’m somewhere warm”

These quilts fascinate me, and I’d like to do one someday.

What an interesting twist on a double wedding ring quilt. This was a wall quilt size.

I’ll post more later.

Karen

Marshall Quilt Show Pics

2009-09-20T10:27:00.009-04:00

Here are some of the pictures from the Marshall quilt show last week. It was a beautiful show, as always. My favorite, of course, was this Halloween cat quilt

Another Halloween quilt caught my eye...

This quilt was interesting. I had a hard time seeing the cottages unless I stood further back from the quilt. I could really see the outlines through the viewfinder of my camera.

This quilt spoke to me in it's simplicity, and the quilt on the right was nice and bright

Marshall had their annual home tour and other celebrations in conjunction with the quilt show. Across from the Quilts at the Marshall House (a wonderful quilt shop, I might add) was the Civil War reenactment. These guys looked a little warm in those clothes...

If you'd like to see more pictures, you can go to my Flickr pages here.

I looked a little closer at the policies that Flickr has for storing photos. I can load as many photos as I want up to my monthly limit without charge. But I will only see the last 200 photos that were loaded. The earlier photos do not go away or get deleted, and will still show on my blogging posts. Since I have the photos saved, and they stay on my blog posts, I don't need to go back to reference old photos I've already posted. It is a good place for quilt show photos.

I spent part of yesterday marking my Halloween quilt for the FMQ. I can do this FMQ, and yes, I can finish this before Halloween. . .

Take care, and have a great rest of the weekend.

Karen

Morning Glories!

2009-09-19T21:00:00.001-04:00

When DH planted morning glory seeds at the beginning of the summer, we had no expectations. We'd never tried planting from seeds before, so we figured we would just water regularly, and see what happens. OMG! The morning glories are beautiful. I find myself checking the deck each morning before I go to work to see the flowers. Here are some pictures.

The large sunflower seeds finally bloomed. Does anyone know if we can collect seeds to plant for next year, and how that works?

And we have a watermelon! Imagine that!! The pumpkin is from the self-seeding in the composte pile from last year, and it is entirely God's doing. We didn't do anything to the pumpkin patch except watch it grow. There are 4 large beauties, just like this one. The pumpkins we did plant didn't do much...

I never knew how much fun it was to watch these things grow!!

Take care,
Karen

I am a computer problem magnet!

2009-09-18T06:10:00.001-04:00

Is there a sign on my back that says "kick me"? Why do people think it's funny to make up a stupid program to give other people trouble with their computers? I just got my computer back, for what, one week? And bam! A computer virus. I was on a quilting blog site looking at quilts when I got it. For 3 days I tried everything to get my menu bar back again. Kind of hard to do anything when you can't get to the start bar or desktop. Finally, I gave in and DH reformatted my hard drive, again. . . Oh well, I'll just have to start over. At least I still have all my backups from the last computer problem.

I missed a lot of blogs while I was down. I'll have to catch up with everyone this weekend. The good news is I was able to save the quilt pics from last week's quilt shows, so I'll get those posted.

Question for everyone--what program do you use for online picture hosting? I was using Flickr, and found out when I was trying to save the quilt show pics that I've reached my "free" limit, and now they want me to start paying because I was at my 200 picture limit. Are there any good "free" sites out there that will let you load more than a few pictures before they start charging?

Looking forward to the weekend. The weather here in Michigan is classic fall weather. Beautiful days, cool nights, low humidity. Had to turn the furnace on last night for the first time, and even then, I was still a little cold. Should be a good weekend for enjoying the outdoors.

Have a good one.
Karen

Quilt Shows Galore!

2009-09-10T20:25:00.001-04:00

It's been a sparse summer for quilt shows. But Fall is almost here and there are many quilt shows in the area. I'm going to try to hit 2 shows this weekend, in Lansing and in Marshall. The quilters at both shows are so talented. Fortunately, both shows run all weekend. For those in the area, here are some of the upcoming shows this month.

Been there before, prefer the Marshall show (same weekend)
September 10-12, 2009
Flint Festival of Quilts
Michigan Quilt Artists Invitational at the Greater Flint Arts Council
Genesee District Library
Court Street Village
Whaley Historical House
Longway Planetarium
Stockton House at the Grove
14th Annual African American Quilter's Guild Show at the Flint Public Library

Big show, I will be going.
September 10-13, 2009
Show Your Colors, MQN Showcase 2009
The Lansing Center, 333 E. Michigan Ave., Lansing, MI

Lovely show, I will be going
September 12-13, 2009
A Quilter's Harvest Cal-Co Quilter's Guild Show
Marshall Activities Center, 15325 W. Michigan Ave., Marshall, MI
Contact: handquilter53@yahoo.com

Show very small, but the quilt shop in town is wonderful! They usually have their Fall Fest at the same time, which has some interesting things to see. Quaint little town.
September 25-26, 2009
Hadley 5th Annual Quilt Show by the Wednesday Night Gathering of Quilters
Hadley Old Town Hall, 3551 Hadley Road, Metamora, MI
Contact: Elaine Quilty Shop, 810-797-2242

I've never been to this show, wondering if it is worth it?
September 25-27, 2009
The American Sewing Expo
The Rock Financial Showplace, Novi, MI

Lovely little show
October 2-3, 2009
Keepers of Quilting Traditions, 10th Annual Durand Quilt Show
United Methodist Church, Newburg Road, Durand, MI

October 2-3, 2009
Festival of Quilts and Crafts
Dearborn First United Methodist Church, 22124 Garrison, Dearborn, MI
Contact: Claudia Nickel at cjnickel@wowway.com or Saranne Good at saranneg@comcast.net

October 2-3, 2009
Fall into Quilts, Town Hall Quilt Guild Show
First Congregational Church, 5449 Clarkston Rd., Clarkston, MI
Contact: Coleen Merte, 248-303-8410, cmerte@comcast.net

I'll try to remember to take my camera so I can post pics. Can't believe the weekend is almost here. I love these short work weeks!

Karen

Llamafest, Anyone?

2009-09-09T20:45:00.004-04:00

The Labor Day weekend was beautiful here in Michigan, and it was even better when I was able to make it a 4 day weekend. I was checking out some web sites to see if there were any quilt shows, and ran across a posting that said they were having a llamafest at Michigan State last weekend. OK, I'm game. It was free, not too far to drive, and I've always wanted to see these creatures up close. We were headed to Lansing anyway, so DH and I decided to check it out. It was interesting to see the many varieties of llamas.

They had several varieties that were two-tone, spotted.

These little guys were kind of cute.

This guy was kind of cute with his buck tooth sticking out...

And for who love fiber arts, there were several vendors with llama hair for spinning, and beautiful knitted,weaved and other lovely goodies for sale. DH was with me though, so there was no buying going on.

Monday was kind of rainy, so I spent a good part of the day working on my pinwheel quilt. I got 2 side borders put on, and almost all of the applique done on the top border. I have a few more flowers to applique, and I have to figure out the bottom border. After I stitched the first border on, I discovered that the thread was kind of pulling on the fabric. I realized that the tension dial on my machine was wrong. I thought I could ease the thread through the fabric, and iron it smooth. Rip out an entire border? I don't think so. But the quilt has been hanging in my sewing room, and that border is nagging at me. If it doesn't look good now, it probably won't look any better when it is quilted. The perfectionist in me thinks I may have to rip it...

Hope your holiday was wonderful.
Karen

I'm Back in Business!!

2009-09-04T11:58:00.007-04:00

I got my computer back, and it is running much faster. Now I just need to spend lots of time reinstalling software and copying my files from the backup. But the weather is going to be georgous this weekend, so I will be spending my time enjoying it while it lasts.

I got the following email this week, and thought it was perfect timing to post for those of us who have been going through computer issues lately. I have no idea who wrote the email or if it is true. Item #4 is what I just had done this computer...

For all of us who feel only the deepest love and affection for the way computers have enhanced our lives, read on.

At a recent computer expo (COMDEX), Bill Gates reportedly compared the computer industry with the auto industry and stated, 'If GM had kept up with technology like the computer industry has, we would all be driving $25 cars that got 1,000 miles to the gallon.'

In response to Bill's comments, General Motors issued a press release stating: If GM had developed technology like Microsoft, we would all be driving cars with the following characteristics:

1. For no reason whatsoever, your car would crash........Twice a day.

2. Every time they repainted the lines in the road, you would have to buy a new car.

3. Occasionally your car would die on the freeway for no reason. You would have to pull to the side of the road, close all of the windows, shut off the car, restart it, and reopen the windows before you could continue. For some reason you would simply accept this.

4. Occasionally, executing a maneuver such as a left turn would cause your car to shut down and refuse to restart, in which case you would have to reinstall the engine.

5. Macintosh would make a car that was powered by the sun, was reliable, five times as fast and twice as easy to drive - but would run on only five percent of the roads.

6. The oil, water temperature, and alternator warning lights would all be replaced by a single 'This Car Has Performed An Illegal Operation' warning light.

7. The airbag system would ask 'Are you sure?' before deploying.

8. Occasionally, for no reason whatsoever, your car would lock you out and refuse to let you in until you simultaneously lifted the door handle, turned the key and grabbed hold of the radio antenna.

9. Every time a new car was introduced car buyers would have to learn how to drive all over again because none of the controls would operate in the same manner as the old car.

10. You'd have to press the 'Start' button to turn the engine off.

PS - I'd like to add that when all else fails, you could call 'customer service' in some foreign country and be instructed in some foreign language how to fix your car yourself!!!!

Hope everyone has a wonderful holiday weekend. I was able to start mine early and have a nice long 4-day weekend.

Karen

Computer gone

2009-08-31T17:50:00.003-04:00

My DH finally took my computer away today to get it fixed. I managed to steal a few minutes on his computer, but he is looking at me with the evil eye like he wants his computer back. Didn't get much quilting done this weekend as I was sick with a cold, and it knocked me out pretty much all weekend.

I'll have to catch with eveyone when I can. Take care,
Karen

Vacation from Hell, part 2

2009-08-26T20:28:00.004-04:00

Continued from part 1. Click here if you didn't see the first part.

The strangers whose car we got into were very nice, and they dropped us off at the winery. We called a tow truck to tow the van. Not an easy task with the trailer attached. After forever, they came and towed our van to town, and dropped us off at a hotel. They promised they would take the van to a nearby repair shop who would look at it on Saturday. Now, we're stuck in a hotel with no transportation. Oh, and did I tell you that my DH decided we no longer needed the AAA roadside insurance that would have paid for the tow truck and also have given us a significant discount on the hotel?

Saturday morning I was able to spend some time walking around the town, looking at the shops. DH wanted to stick around the repair shop to see what was up with the van. Oh, and Calico Cat, this proves that my DH can act just like your husband. The difference is when we were at the Biltmore, he thought that cooling off the van engine would help, so we went on the tour. The repair shop was unable to diagnose the problem (and they closed at noon), so we were told they would tow it AGAIN $$ on Monday to a dealer. We were really stuck there now.

DH was so upset, he started making calls to friends and family back home to tell them of our troubles. He decided to use an old phone credit card for the calls since our cell phones didn't work in that area. He used that credit card the entire time he was there. We were shocked when we got the $600 phone bill a month later.

After telling my boss that I was not going to be back on Monday, he said he needed me back to work and was willing to pay to put me on a plane. Our company had just been acquired, and they needed the budget done! It was the first of many new experiences with a big corporation. Who am I kidding? When you've been married as long as I have, you know when to retreat... So, on Sunday, I got into a cab BY MYSELF (first time was a little nerve wracking), and went to the airport to fly home. I flew into a different airport than where I flew out of so I didn't have my car, and my mom had to come get me and drive me to another airport 100 miles away to get my car...

DH stayed behind, incurring hotel costs for several days. Finally, after days of the dealer "fixing the problem" only to break down shortly after leaving the dealer, while at the same time charging us lots of money for each new part that had been "fixed", DH convinced his very good friend to drive down with a trailer to tow the van (and our trailer) home to Michigan. That trip over the mountains would put a strain on any vehicle let alone towing a trailer with a van AND trailer on it, but they finally made it home. Good friends like that are a treasure!

When I got home, the stray cat we had taken in seemed kind of tired. But being an outdoor stray, he was constantly getting into fights with other animals, and I didn't think too much of it. DH was very attached to that cat, and worried himself sick about the cat. When he got home, he found some lumps on the cat and took him to the vet. After extensive, and yes expensive tests, they told us the cat had cancer. So, a week before Christmas, we had to put him down. We were both heartbroken, and DH blamed himself for being gone while the cat was sick.

The local dealer was finally able to diagnose and fix the electrical problem on the van, and it only cost a mere $1800.

And that, my friends, is why we have not gone vacation in over ten years due to the vacation from HELL! It took us a while to recover financially, and emotionally...

After listening to that long recital, I promise a more quilty post next time.

Take care,
Karen

Vacation from Hell

2009-08-25T17:52:00.013-04:00

First, let me say that the mini-vacation went great. Some relaxation, lots of shopping, and gawking at beautiful beach houses along the shores of Lake Michigan. No pictures and no quilt shops though. Gives me hope for future vacations...

Some of you have asked about the vacation from hell, so here's the (very long) story:

10 years ago, in search of more work during the cold Michigan winter, my DH went to Florida with a friend to help build home additions. The plan was that I would fly down for a vacation in early December, and we would drive back to Michigan for Christmas and he would return to Florida after Christmas. We had been married over 20 years by then and had never been apart for that long. I flew to Florida and we had a nice vacation visiting Mickey Mouse and relatives and just hanging out and relaxing. Except, if you want to stay married, NEVER EVER, attempt to live a week with your spouse in a 19 ft trailer. It's just not normal. After a week, I had to get back to work on Monday, so we started the long drive back to Michigan.

Since my DH was staying in Florida while I had to take care of EVERYTHING at home while he was gone during the LONG, COLD WINTER, he agreed to my request to see the Biltmore Estate all decked out for Christmas. Can you say "guilty conscience" anyone? Anyway, on the map, it looked like only a short detour from I-75 to Asheville, NC. I didn't factor in that the detour was over the mountains and took a little longer than expected.

Our first clue was when we stopped for gas, and had a hard time starting the van again. Ahh, we thought, it is just not built for travel through the mountains, and we were also towing a small utility trailer. The van was chugging, slowly, through the mountains, misfiring and making lots of engine noises. And our cell phones don't work very well in the mountains. We finally got to the Biltmore Estate around mid-day on Friday. If you've ever been to the Biltmore, you know that from the entrance to the house is a long, winding road through beautiful grounds. It is a 3 mile long stretch of road and the van started sputtering. We finally pulled into the parking lot and the van died. Nothing we could do, so we went and enjoyed the house tour.

When we came out, it was starting to get dark, and thank heavens, the van started again! So, we started on the 2 mile trek to the next stop, a store and winery. Part way there, the van died. In the middle of NOWHERE. We have no idea how long it is to the next stop. We have NO cell phones. The road is deserted. It is getting dark. Every 5 or 10 minutes, a car passes by, but nobody stops. Finally, after a LONG 20-30 minutes or so while frantically trying to get a cell signal, someone stops and offers us a ride to the winery. GULP, we take a leap of faith and get in the strangers' car.

At times like this, I wish I was a drinker...

Whew, this is a long story. To be continued...click here

Going on Vacation

2009-08-23T19:57:00.003-04:00

Have you ever had a bad vacation experience?

Well, I have. It has been 10 years since my husband and I went on our last vacation. That was the vacation from hell...and I didn't think he'd ever go on vacation again. In the time since then, we've only gone on day trips that were close to home. Last month, he had to take a short business trip to Indiana, and I went with him. We stumbled across this cute little town on the shore of Lake Michigan called St. Joseph. It was a beautiful, sunny day with lots of sailboats out on the lake. The town was a bit crowded however, because they were having a festival. You could have blown me away when he said he wanted to come back and spend the day and stay overnight. I made plans so fast it would make your head spin. It's only for two days, but we have to start with baby steps before we can walk faster...

I'm so excited. We're off tomorrow to St. Joseph, and we're also visiting Saugatuk (lots of small shops & galleries) on Tuesday. Oh wait, I have to go check out the net to see if there are any quilt shops along the way...Do they make a GPS with quilt shop listings???

See you later.
Karen

Mystery Solved

2009-08-21T15:31:00.005-04:00

One of the keys to a good marriage, at least in our house, is two bathrooms. I have mine, and he has his. This morning, my husband went to his bathroom to use the shower, and had this to say:

Him: Dear, have you been in my bathroom today?

Me: Anticipating some sort of accusation since there are only two people in this house, No...

Him: You need to see this.

Me: Thinking why do I want to get up to see something in the bathroom? I reluctantly go the bathroom and see

The scale in the middle of the doorway.

What the ??

Me: I didn't move that scale. What are you thinking, I'm trying to tell you something? hmmm

Him: Oh, here's the cause as he lifts the tiny dead tree frog out of the corner where the scale usually sits.

Redford: (or Buster, we don't know) Dude, that was fun!!

Me: How in the world were they strong enough to move that scale??

Garden update

2009-08-18T19:35:00.002-04:00

Those of you who followed myquiltblog may remember the story of the pumpkins that we threw out in the compost pile two years ago, and they self-seeded into pumpkin plants the next year. Well, we did it again last year, and here is the result. We have several pumpkins!

This pumpkin is pretty large. All we need now is for it to change colors. But I don't want it to be ready too early...

This year, we intentionally planted several varieties of pumpkins and gourds. The result is mixed. There are several plants with flowers, but I don't know if they'll have time enough to grow. We'll see.

We also planted these morning glories. No flowers yet, but it sure is interesting to see the way the plants grow and attach itself to the arbor that we placed behind the pot.

We have several tall sunflower plants, and the big yellow flowers are not ready yet. But the darker-colored sunflowers are lookin' good!

Take care,

Karen

Fabric is a cat magnet

2009-08-15T15:57:00.012-04:00

I decided to take the fabric from the Shop Hop quilt and add it to my stash.

Gee, that felt good!

The minute I started laying out these fabrics, Red showed up. He likes to be in the middle everything!

This one's for Becky. This is the fabric I was considering for the back of my pinwheel quilt. It saw it with a cream background and a green background. Although I really like this fabric, it seemed to be too pastel for the pinwheel quilt. I thought that quilt needed more primary colors.

It is from Windham Fabrics and it is called Sunbonnet Sue. You can find it here.

This is the fabric I decided to use for the back of the pinwheel quilt. I think it goes well with the 30's prints. I feel a need to get this quilt done and sent to a longarmer. I will make a double border with the blue and red fabrics.

This fabric is produced by Henry Glass & Co. and is called Playtime with Bill and Sue. It is sold as a panel, and I bought a double panel for the backing. You can find the fabric here. Well, I think I'm off to put together the backing.

Karen

Cruisin...

2009-08-14T16:52:00.005-04:00

This is the weekend for the Woodward Dream Cruise. The Woodward Dream Cruise is the world's largest one-day celebration of classic cars that attracts more than 40,000 muscle cars, street rods, custom, collector and special interest vehicles. The cars drive up and down Wooward Avenue just outside of Detroit. Woodward Avenue was often used as a drag strip in the 50's and 60's. They are expecting over 1 million people to line the 16-mile route on Saturday to see the show. They also have many "side" shows where groups of car enthusiasts gather in certain parking lots along the route. We are expecting warm humid weather, high 80's, low 90's but no rain. It should be a good show, but I think I'll just watch the highlights on the local channel later this evening. This is a small sample of what happens at the show. I'm happy to say I just mastered the art of adding YouTube of last year's dream cruise to my blog.

You can read more about it on the official dream cruise site.
Enjoy
Karen