Off to Paducah!

A tisket a tasket, Dawn and Laura are headed off with there shopping baskets! Only a few hours until I meet Dawn for the first time! I can hardly stand it. We are headed to Paducah with my group of girlfriends. Dawn will fit right in. We have 14 of us going this year so we ended up having to rent both a condo and a townhouse. This will give us plenty of beds and 4 bathrooms.
I am carrying a picture of my sewing room with me. Hopefully this will help me have some control over my purchases. Wish me luck!

Sampler Quilts

I have enjoyed the sampler quilts I have seen lately on the Mavericks blogs. I love the look of sampler quilts but have never really enjoyed making them. The settings some of you come up with are “wow” settings. Mine always seem to be the typical straight sashing which in the end makes my sampler’s boring. Two of our local quilt stores have the $5 block a month. I did one of these, finished the quilt and decided not to do anymore. I didn’t mind doing the block each month. I just didn’t enjoy setting the blocks into a finished quilt in the end.
Same thing when you do a shop hop. I flew to western Florida last year to participate in their shop hop. We had so much fun and the rest of the girls collected the purple and green sampler block kits at each store but I decided not to. I didn’t want another sampler quilt that I would have to finish. I am showing a couple of pictures of samplers I have done. The blue and white one is the $5 one I did. I wasn’t overly excited about it and gave it to my neighbor for Christmas that year. The smaller one was a mystery quilt. It is done in miniature. I either followed it online or through a magazine.

Garden Party

I had great plans while I was vacationing to work on my Grandmothers Flower Garden Quilt. But this didn’t happen. I never thought I would ever be interested in making a hexagon quilt. In all honesty I have never been attracted to them and it seemed like a whole bunch of endless hand work. But here I am working away on mine.
Our guild has a fabulous retreat each year with a ton of classes that are based on that year’s theme. Last years theme was “Garden Party”. One of the classes offered was English paper piecing. I don’t know what possessed me to even go into the classroom, I think it was because they had been supplied free kits from a shop for a paper pieced pin cushion and I wanted to get the kit. I went back to my sewing machine where I was working on my batik mystery quilt and cut the hexagons from one of my batiks and before I knew it I had a flower hand pieced. I actually enjoyed the process and liked how it turned out with the batik fabric.
I am not big on batiks or bright fabrics. I had taken a class last year from Jan Krentz and had purchased a lot of different batiks for this class. I had decided to use up the leftovers in the mystery quilt but that didn’t even begin to dwindle my stash. So with that in mind I started cutting the hexagons from my batiks and basting them to the papers. It has been a relaxing project. I don’t assume I will ever finish this quilt. I don’t work on it all that often, but when I do work on it I enjoy it. They are nice to carry along to ballgames or in the car because you can fit so much into a small baggie. I think it will be more a summertime project then a winter project. I have included a photo of a few of the flowers. I think they are a lot of fun!

Pictures and Paducah update

This was the view each evening from our balcony during our vacation. I just love a sunset no matter where I am! It is so hard to come back from relaxation to normal life. I don’t feel at this point that I will ever have time to sew again, but I know better then that. It is just that overwhelming feeling you have after having been gone awhile. Middle child had a ballgame last night in 40 degree temperatures, high winds and sprinkles off and on. I was hoping it would be cancelled but no go on that. It did allow me to go to the big city and do grocery shopping. So I was able to cross one thing off my list.
I am so excited. Dawn of Quilts and Pieces (http://dquilts.blogspot.com/) is going to Paducah with me. Only 3 weeks away. We have never met but through cyber space so as you can imagine I am totally psyched about this! We will get spend 5 days together. My large group of traveling buddies have been emailing her and making her part of the group. She will fit right in!

I had to include this picture of the seagulls. It would not be Florida without them. Now, if it would only quit raining here and warm up a little. Have I said I am not a lover of spring……