The Yellow Brick Road Was Paved With Good Intentions

We had the 'grandpup' this weekend, and he just felt like hanging out with me while I whipped out this birthday quilt yesterday. What is with dogs and layouts? If it wasn't him, it would have been one of the others, they just have to lay on top of what you're working on and then get all huffy when you want to move the block that's directly under them.

The hubs accompanied me to Web Fabric Saturday and picked up a little 6-pack of FQs that were black with bright prints. I told him to find 6 more FQs that went with it and I'd whip up a throw for our neice's birthday on the 21st. After assuring him that batiks did not go with the bright little modern prints, I was able to sway him to bright stripes and dots.

It started out being a Yellow Brick Road, but I was in a hurry and sort of screwed up....got a little carried away and just kept cutting without reading so I didn't have any strips left at the end. Fortunately, it all worked out and I was able to put together 9.5" blocks from what I had stitched. I'll name it 'Detour On The Yellow Brick Road' or something like that. It's okay.

After work I'll stop and pick up some coordinating border/binding/backing and I hope to knock this out tonight. I'm just going to use the walking foot and ditch stitch in the interest of time.

When it's done, I'll post a photo and some instructions for the screwed up pattern...which I guess is now an 'original'. Ha ha.

Baby Quilt Finished

Having lost steam, after completing this quilt top a couple of week ago, I have finally finished the project....and much to my surprise, the recipient is still a baby--so it still fits! (Patting myself on back). At any rate, the weekend before last I was kind of tied up on other projects, but I did manage to get in a little quality sewing time on 'National Quilt Day', this past Saturday. And, fortunately for me, I had stopped at the quilt shop before I started sewing this and realized that this quilt would be much more practical if I removed the batting (which meant taking out a hundred safety pins to do so and putting them back afterwards).

Put an art quilt DVD in the player, slipped on the old machine quilting gloves and was off to a lively start with a little free-motion here, some spirals there, and then it all came crashing down. I wanted to do flowers on another block throughout, so I found an appropriate marking pen, drew them out, but when I went to sew them, I would keep skipping stitches...not just one, but a bunch, so I'd have an inch of nice even little stitches and then there'd be a stitch that was an inch long. I ripped out, I rethreaded, I rebobbined, I poured a glass of wine, took a few cleansing breaths, turned the machine off and then on, shook the tension out of my shoulders and continued to do this, rip it out, do it, rip it out.

About to give up (after all, I did stitch in the ditch down the rows), I realized that without batting inside this, there was no reason that I couldn't just cheat and use 'conventional' sewing (feed dogs up, presser foot down, sew in one direction) to 'quilt' the flowers. They didn't turn out too bad. So I made some simple x's on some of the other blocks, and I was done with it.

Now I just have to figure out what went wrong before I start on the next one.

Buzzin' Along with the Baby Quilt

Well, I've been a busy bee this weekend. My neice had her baby this past week, so I thought what better way to spend Saturday than at Needles and Pins' fat quarter sale...if I make a quilt for the baby, I've got a perfectly good excuse to indulge.

6 flannel fat quarters, a Yellow Brick Road pattern, and an 'almost put my eye out--that'll teach me to wear my glasses' broken needle incident...by the end of Saturday night I had the top pieced.

Sunday I cut the border, sewed that on, cut and sewed the back and got the sandwich all pinned.

Unfortunately, there was a 38-car pile up on The Road Paved With Good Intentions, so it didn't get finished last night. Maybe tonight.

My daughter came home from Ikea yesterday with some black and white framed prints for her guestroom...."Remember Mom, the guestroom you are making the black and white quilt for", so I take it I need to jump back on that one as soon as this one is out of here.

We drove by her house yesterday and it's really coming along, so it's possible she actually has a guestroom for this quilt in the next month or so....I'd better get crackin'

Of course, the other 9 fat quarters I bought were Hoffman's new batiks, and of course, I did buy the Kiwiberry Bali Pop to go with them. I'm going to have to hide those in one of my new Ikea storage boxes--'out of sight, out of mind'--if I plan on getting anything else finished before starting something new.