A Fun Little Quilt

I have a wonderful friend that is so much fun. I wanted to make her a little gift. One that she could call all hers and the little art quilt above is it! As most of you know I am definitely not an art quilter. Never have been, never will be! But with that said the more I thought about the little quilt I would be creating for her the more I thought it had to be a one of a kind. One that read: crazy, and just a little out of whack. Terms we could use for each other. It is not perfect, my machine quilting is just awful, but I had fun and I know she will appreciate it. She is a quilter too and would never expect this from me.
I had a pretty productive Sunday. I also was able to get the binding machine stitched onto my maple leaf quilt. Now to stitch it down by hand then I will get a picture. I am off to the baseball field. This week is our sectional showdown. My husband’s high school team could possibly meet up with our son’s high school team at some point. It makes for a lot of fun at home.
And one more note, I heard from my oldest son last night and he has already seen moose, bison, eagles and a mother bear with her cubs. He sounded happy!
A salute to all that are serving our country and to those whom have already served!

More Sailboats

I have been swamped this week with baseball and travel for work. This holiday weekend coming up doesn’t look any better for me. I was sure hoping to get to my sewing machine but that doesn’t look like it is going to happen. To make myself feel a little better I bought myself a couple books and some fabric to make a mystery quilt. I always love a good mystery. I also picked up a couple of the new magazines that were out. In the new Fons and Porter magazine I saw this Amish sailboat quilt. I thought it fit right in with my sailboat quilts I have been talking about lately. I love the colors she used in this. It says that it was made in Indiana mid twentieth century. That is where I am at. I wonder if the sailboat pattern was just popular to the Midwest.
Thanks for the nice comments concerning my son. He is settled in his new home and loves walking out his door each morning and seeing the snowcapped Tetons.

Blooming Stars

This past weekend I was able to complete a leader ender project I had going this winter. It is from Bonnie’s site and is called Boxy Stars. I decided to call it Blooming Stars as I used all greens for my stars and for the boxes around them I used all florals. It was such an easy project and I must admit I love using up fabrics from my stash. This really put the stash to good use as even the backing fabric came from it. I had quite a bit of yardage of the green Robin Pandolph fabric that I used for the border. I have no idea why I would have purchased that as it is not a style of fabric I would normally use. It worked perfectly for the border as it has yellow flowers on it and the sashing fabric is the same shade of yellow. I have to say it was nice to complete a project without really thinking about it. I spent a Sunday afternoon in January pulling the fabrics and cutting the blocks and sashing strips then I placed them in a basket next to my machine and sewed them only as Leader, Enders. It was fun to see it come together. I have moved my liberated bars over to that basket so hopefully it will be my next finish.

Grandma's quilt

I said I would post some pictures of my Grandma’s sailboat quilt so here goes. This was a friendship quilt that her and her friends worked on before she moved from Stewardson, IL to Frankfort, IN. My Grandpa worked for the RR and they moved around a lot. One of the blocks has the year 1932 embroidered on it. She made many sailboat quilts over the years, I am sure using those same cardboard templates that I used. The remainder of sailboat quilts that I have seen from her ( I have another myself) have all been tied and not quilted. I feel so blessed to have a quilt that my Grandma made.
I want to thank everyone who comments. Those comments make my day and I thank you for taking the time to do so. With that said, I have to be the worst when it comes to leaving comments. Let me explain myself. We live very rural and at this time have no other options then dial up. You can’t imagine how long it takes for a blog page to load. I decided a long time ago that I want to visit each and everyone of your blog’s regularly. In order to do so I have to spend my computer time reading instead of commenting. It takes too long for the comments page to load. So that is my excuse and I am sticking to it! Do know that even if I don’t leave a comment I am out there surfing around gaining inspiration from each and everyone of you!

Sailboats

I am sure having fun with these fans. I was trying to remember if I had quilted anything with Baptist fans before and lo and behold I dug through my quilts and found an older sailboat quilt that I had handquilted with fans. I want to tell you the story of this quilt. My cousin Bevie was older than me, she actually had a daughter a year older then I but we were really close. We shared a lot of the same ideas and a love for everything and anything that related to fiber. When Bevie passed away from cancer her husband gave me a bunch of boxes that contained crochet and tatting samples, cardboard quilt templates, patterns, etc. After going through them I found that they had originally belonged to my Grandmother. I had inherited a sailboat friendship quilt from Grandma (I will get it out this weekend and get a picture of it) and the templates she had used were in this box. I was so excited. I decided I would re-create Grandma’s quilt using her templates but putting my own twist on it. This was the result. I once wrote some thoughts on my cousin Bevie and our relationship through quilting and they were published in a book by Ruth McHaney Danner. While I was in Paducah I saw that the book is out and about again in a smaller paperback format. It is titled What I Learned from God while Quilting. It is a nice little book full of inspirational quilting stories. Find it on Amazon.

Free Hand Fans

I am in love with fans! Thanks to Tonya and her free hand fans I feel like I can actually get some tops finished now. After getting home from Paducah I felt really motivated to accomplish something but after looking at my kid’s schedules I didn’t know when I was going to be able to fit quilting in. It would have to be a project I could carry around with me. I had wanted to try Tonya’s fans for quite awhile, plus her no hoop handquilting. I had a small valentine top that I had made my daughter a few years ago. So I pulled it out and basted it really good with thread and just started marking the fans free hand with my new Generals brand sketch and wash charcoal pencil (that I love). It was so easy and since I am definitely a primitive girl I didn’t have any problems with things not being exact. I did echo quilting in the center first and then moved to the bottom right corner and started the fans from there. Since the project was small I had no problems quilting without a hoop. I have already started a second small project and once it is complete I hope to move on to something a bit larger to see if I am still comfortable quilting without the hoop. Bonnie has a great tutorial on her site. This is so easy, if you haven’t given it a try you definitely should! Thanks Tonya!

Crazy Spider Quilt

I find that even after viewing all the gorgeous quilts in Paducah that I am still drawn to the same styles. There was nothing new that grabbed my eye that I thought, “Whoa, I have to try that”. I think my favorite display was at the Museum. They had a selection of Rose quilts and they were awesome. You could get right up on them and look at the appliqué and quilting. So inspirational! I have come home to a job all day and running kids in the evenings so my time has been extremely limited but I did find the time to pull one of my favorite books off the shelf, Minnesota Quilts, my plan was to peruse the pages looking for a great rose quilt. That ended when I got to the page with this crazy quilt on it. Isn’t it wonderful! I love how half the blocks are crazy quilted and the other half are spider web blocks. It amazes me that when looking at the old quilts we see what artists these ladies were. Here I have to see the old quilts or go through books to get inspired to do something different and these ladies didn’t have these options and were creating such masterpieces. I can’t help but look at the antique quilts and the pictures of old quilts and compare them to the quilts I see in the shows today and feel that they were way ahead of us when it came to creativity and design.

More Track Meet Quotes

Some fun new track meet quotes:

1. After running the 100 meter dash, “If I had known it was that short a race I would have ran faster”.
2. After having run in a 200 meter dash, “I gave 95% tonight and my coach told me it was my best effort”. When I asked her why she didn’t give 100% she stated, “If I gave 100% I would have been tired”.
3. After having ran in the 200 meter dash and placing 3rd!, “Wow, it must have been the shoes”.
4. After practice she came home and said, “Wow, I am really tired, all they make you do is run”.

Can you tell I am loving this track meet life. After living with the competitive spirits of my boys this is total fun!

Update: Mariah must have given 100% last night as she received a first place in the 400 meter dash!!! Can you tell I am one proud mom!

Back Home

Wow, I feel so overwhelmed from my trip to Paducah. I absolutely had the best time ever! It was so fun to meet up with Lucy and Bonnie. They are both so wonderful and I swear if you didn’t know them you would think they were sisters. Lucy had some great goodies to take back to the Netherlands with her. She also brought all of us some wonderful gifts. I will treasure each and every one of them. Dawn has shown them on her blog and given excellent descriptions.
I did soooo good on holding back this year. I bought a few fat quarters, a couple of good books at the AQS $5 booth and some yardage for Mariah a couple of lap quilts and that is about it. A few stencils and patterns and I was done. I did get this cute little tea towel which is definitely going into a quilt. I had seen it and thought it was cute but passed it up. About 15 minutes later my friend Linda G. came running to find me and said she had found a tea towel that fit me perfectly. I told her I knew exactly the one and we headed back to get it. Dawn bought me a pillowcase kit with muscle bound construction workers on the fabric. I am known for buying up silly fabric like that.
I came home to a nice surprise. My husband had our contractor (isn’t that awful that we have so much work done that I call our contractor all ours!) put a french door on the west side of my kitchen. After baseball is over Jeff is going to build a deck off of it. I can’t believe how much it opens our kitchen up and it is now so full of light. I love it. But he didn’t think to cover anything and he also didn’t clean anything up so I spent Sunday evening washing every dish and scrubbing things down. I am glad he did this while I was gone or I probably would have panicked seeing a hole cut in the side of my house.
Yesterday it was back to normal. My oldest son that attends college in Illinois called to say his car had broken down. A couple of hours later my husband called to say his Jeep had broken down and he was waiting on a tow truck. Nothing like getting back to the reality of my life after 5 days of quilted bliss.