Rescue Quilt

Wow here it is almost a month since I posted that has never happened before! The explanation, I was working on Logan and Kelli's quilt to get it done before he leaves for Navy basic training, IT training and some other training, he will be gone for maybe 8 months I think!
I will not have all the pics for that post until Tuesday, so I will post a couple of other projects that have kept me busy.
The rescue quilt was brought to me by a Mom who had begun it for a daughter and abandoned it about 10 years ago- it had been bundled up in a bag and perhaps made several moves? And when I got it my heart quailed a little but as much as Mom wanted it done for her daughter I knew I had to take it on!

I did not take before pics but a partly quilted item is a challenge. The original quilting done on a domestic machine with a stretchy fleece backing makes for numerous potential issues for any machine but I am pleased with the result. I had to add additional backing on three sides and fortunately there was plenty of the backing. Because a few of the blocks were already partially quilted I needed to replicate that quilting as closely as possible on the rest of the quilt. I made a template to reproduce the design begun on the solid blocks, and it worked quite well.

 On the right side below you can see a line where I needed to join in additional fabric to make the backing fit, but it hardly shows in reality.

Using a ruler I simply outlined the large triangles. The backing being a stretchy fleece is heavy, so the quilt does not hang flat against the wall but looks great on a bed and the fleece is a nice cuddly feature! It's a light purple color and actually looks really pretty but the photo does not do it justice.

 Here is a better picture with the recipient with a big smile on her face- enjoy your quilt for many years young lady, you have a devoted Mom, and may you have sweet dreams under it!

A second project just completed is this delightful Grandmother's Flower Garden -it is a vintage quilt from the 30's and 40's I think, and the quilter had never finished the binding. It has been well stored and is in great condition so her daughter or granddaughter? brought it to me to complete the binding so that it can be used. It is not easy to hang a quilt with curved edges so I laid it out on the floor.

A Finish, Finally !

There seem to have been multiple roadblocks to completing this quilt, the past couple of weeks has been really busy. But it is done and now I can send it back to Texas where it belongs and the owner is anxiously awaiting it!

Leslie has red for the shams so she thought to have the wreath centers red 

but we discovered that the red kind of disappeared and the centers appeared blank. Hmmmm....

 So I decided to echo the red flower with the same grey I used for the rest of the quilt

and now you can see the centers, they look like Cabbage Roses to me.

The batting is Quilter's Dream black and thread is Superior Magnifico "Storm" on top and BL in the bobbin.

 I am happy with the grey "Storm" thread, I like quilting with Superior's Magnifico line it sews nicely, has attractive sheen without being in your face, and comes in a fabulous range of colors. This shade is perfect for quilting on black fabrics, it shows the quilting enough and makes it easy to see where you have been, very important in freehand quilting.

I Hate This Thread Color!

After dithering around back and forth with Leslie whose quilt this is, I had the plan all ready and finally decided on gold thread-but no sooner had I quilted a couple of feet of the outer border than I realized- I hate the thread color! Yikes!

It just doesn't go, not the right shade of yellow, too brassy gold. Drat!

But this lovely lime green will do I think! 

It is actually even brighter in hue than it shows, and we had talked about using it but I didn't want to make it too seasonal/Christmassy. 

Therefore I will sleep on it and if I still despise it in the morning - and I am pretty sure that I will- I will frog it and start over with the green. It is not the same brand so I hope my tension stays adjusted, these shiny threads can be finicky!

I made a couple more selvedge pot holders to take for a little hostess gift this weekend, we can all use an extra one or two, everyone seems to love them and I will never run out of selvedges!
       Earlier this week I was over at 35th Avenue Sew 'N vac and cruised around their sale table while waiting for a sales person and it was not a good idea, at least for my wallet!
I spied this-an entire set of Kaffe Fassett fabrics half price, 16 yards in all it states.

 It took me a long time and quilting a few quilts with his fabrics before I grew to like them, in the beginning I thought they were too wild and I would go blind quilting them! The first quilt I custom quilted was a queen size to the floor, a big quilt king size really. All the blocks were different, stars I think, and no matter what thread I used I could not see where I had been! By the time I got to the last wide border I gave up and pulled out a pantograph, it was making me so crazy trying to see my quilting. I know that a black light can help so I need to get one just to have on hand for difficult fabrics.
Some of his fabrics I really love especially those polka dots in several different color-ways, yummy! I am not sure that this entire quilt is my style, not likely ever to make it, but a few blocks for a wall hanging would be fun and a very happy accent on the wall. There's just too much time consuming applique` there in the full size version but I am sure I can find some other wonderful things to make with them.

As I said it took me years to appreciate the riotous colors in Kaffe's designs, but now I love them, all that brightness and craziness makes me happy! Must be my advancing years, my Mum grew to love wild colors when she was older and I have a birthday Sunday so the years are catching up with me!
Oh yeah that's a great idea, this can be my birthday present to myself LOL!

New Projects For The New Year

Linking up with Needlework Tuesday

We returned from our Boston jaunt last week and spent the next few days catching up with mail, putting up Christmas decorations, purging the storage shed in back and cleaning house-not to mention laundry!
Now it's back to the normality of the gym and quilting, and the boy whom I had really missed not seeing him for three whole weeks!
 I did make it to the gym in Boston the week after Christmas, I took the eleven year old twins and had several good workouts at the "Y", but the second week they were back in school and I did not go so it feels really good to be back into that routine!
First up on the longarm is this stunning quilt and I have been back and forth with the quilter in Texas deciding on thread color and design. There is something very dramatic always about solid colors on a black background.

It is now loaded and ready to go

The plan is for a bright green thread and a leafy wreath in each block with a flower center, leaves between the blocks and a flower on each of the cornerstones. I think it will be really pretty. 

A couple of new babies at our church necessitates a couple more baby quilts and I pieced this quickie from an assortment of small amounts of girlie fabrics I cut into 7" squares for the baby girl I met before Christmas. It will be quilted as soon as the black one is done. Meanwhile I noticed another new babe on Sunday and I must ask tomorrow at Bible study who it is so I can get another in the works. We have a lot of young families and new ones joining here and there. Our church has had a wonderful preschool for many years [there is usually a waiting list] and we often seem to have new families join after their child has become a student in the preschool. Matthew goes to the Sunday School, which he absolutely loves, also overseen by the preschool director- it's a terrific program of Christian discipleship.

Eataly in Boston!

Have you heard of Chef Mario Batali's "Eataly"? There are thirty now around the globe since the first in Turin, Italy.In the USA there are four, in NYC Flatiron and NYC Downtown, Chicago and now Boston plus one in the offing in Los Angeles. This morning niece and I checked out the newest store, 45,000 square feet in the Prudential building Boston and to put it mildly we were astonished the store is enormous and the variety of goods from A to Z is overwhelming!

We had never seen so many cheeses in one place......

nor cured and fresh meat.....

The photos in this post are a miniscule representation of the entire facility, including four restaurants with the same menu.

A small selection of the artisan breads fresh baked daily on site 

We purchased a fig bread, but it was very hard to choose just one

and this Chianti that was advertised as new to the country so we decided to try a bottle.

We ate brunch there, K had a Ciabatta sandwich with mushrooms, pickled onions and a soft cheese and I ordered a selection of three salads, chicken with walnuts and Gorgonzola, one featuring eggplant and the third a Caprese. We finished up with Macchiato latte and a coffee, and I could not resist this decadent looking hazelnut dessert to share.

If you have an opportunity to visit one of these stores it's an adventure, but try to plan it early in the day close to 9am. before the crowds arrive. When we got there around 11 am. it was very busy and the restaurants were already crowded and we left around one pm. as the crowding was getting uncomfortable! 

Update On The Accordion Quilt

This is the quilt for second grandson and wife. They were married sooner than intended because of family illness and their quilt was not done in time-I am still working on it.
The foot surgery set me back over a month then guests, Thanksgiving, guests, birthdays, and Christmas fun got in the mix and the quilt is still a WIP [Work In Progress!]
They asked for "blue", no other colors, and so that's what I went for although in hindsight I wish I had mixed in something else because I have scrambled to find a lot of dark, medium and light blues for variety. So below is what is on the design wall but I have additional blues as it has progressed.

 My iPhone 5s camera leaves a little to be desired when it comes to true color production, I understand the iPhone 6 and 7 have much better cameras but I like my compact iPhone 5!

Having done some math I think I need around 200+ blocks for a Cal.King bed and I made another twenty last evening bringing my total to 181 so I am nearly there.

We had a quiet Christmas Day, went to church then some of the family came by for homemade chicken noodle soup [it was very good especially for chilly, rainy weather and there is plenty left to enjoy]monkey bread etc and we were all alone again by 2pm, so I had time to clean up then sew for a bit.

The little Aussie lap quilt has been awaiting binding completion so I took care of that before I returned to piecing the blue quilt.

 The binding is pieced as you can see, I am very fond of pieced bindings and backings and it's a great way to use up scraps from the quilt.

With pieced backings sometimes I think the back is just as cute as the front of the quilts!

Merry Christmas And Happy Hanukkah

Blessings in this Holy season

"Blessed are You, Lord our God, King of the universe, who has sanctified us with His commandments, and commanded us to kindle the Chanukah light."

Garden Party and a Meet-Up

Here is Angela's Garden Party quilt made on a Bonnie Hunter Caribbean Cruise in 2015. It turned out really beautiful and I believe she is keeping this one!

 Folk Art flowers E-E in the body of the quilt and a little custom  flower and leaf in the sashing and border.

The thread is a bright green, the label is missing so the manufacturer is unknown it's one of those my friend Gale gave me that didn't work on her Prodigy. Batting is Quilter's Dream.

A nice group from our Fiber Artist Meet-Up came together today at my house [Matthew was here and counted nine of us!]
 I had a large recipe of lentil soup with rosemary/parmesan bread and a pumpkin dump-it cake and Susan contributed a lovely salad so we ate well!
Most of us kept busy making design boards for our blocks, one member was cross-stitching and one working on the 35th.Ave. mystery quilt- I took a couple of pics but they did not turn out well enough to show!
These design boards make setting up blocks and keeping them in place very convenient and they stack up compactly for storage or transport.

 Celeste showed us how from a tut she found by Lori at  "A Bee In Her Bonnet" blog.  Lori's are much prettier than mine, she uses fabric strips from her own fabric lines whereas my bindings are all just random left overs sewn together.

We used 1/4" thick foam-board available inexpensively at many craft, Dollar Stores and places like Wal-Mart. Scrap batting or flannel is used to cover the foam-board and scrap binding or 2.5" fabric strips to cover the edges- I think all quilters save their left over bits of binding and this is a great way to use them. I always use 2.25" double fold binding for a tight finish and that's what I had, it worked just fine. You could make whatever size design boards you want, I divided my 20x30" foam-board in two and in half again for 10x15" pieces- I might have to make a few a bit larger to accommodate 12" blocks. Different stores have the foam-board in different sizes I need to find some 15x30" or 24x30"

The design board tut can be found here and the Youtube tut here.

Kathy's Allietare

Here is another version of Bonnie Hunter's Allietare, Kathy's color choices are striking.

The Panto I chose has a swirly design, not flowery but looks to me like tumbleweeds blowing across the prairie. I like the movement it gives the quilt especially nice with these very scrappy quilts.

 The thread is Essentials Pro Turkey Red and the batting Quilter's Dream Pink, a lovely, soft draping 80%cotton/20%poly.

And yes I have been AWOL for a few weeks, life got in the way of quilting partly on account of my foot surgery but also out of town family visiting for our oldest son's 50th. birthday bash, an 80's costume party. Everything from Rock'nRoll icons to Ghost Busters,Top Gun, and of course ladies in Madonna-like costume and some like myself sporting the big shoulder pads and leg warmers!

The man himself and his BF "Top Gun" who flew out from Australia just for the event.

 Cousins from Boston and his brother and wife, it was quite a night!

 As I said, the big shoulder pads, big hair and eye popping pink, you just can't see the leg warmers!

Adjustment to the disco ball!

Official bartender!

There were a lot more people and photos, this is all I took, too busy having fun!

A night to remember with a hot local DJ doing the music.