One Down, Two to Go

I finished the Birthday Quilt, but I don't have a photo tonight. I'll post one tomorrow. Hand sewing binding on is tedious. I don't know what possessed me. I could have gotten away with machine stitching it. It's not as if a 15-year-old would notice.

In the meantime, I set the alarm for 6:00 a.m. this morning so I could get to the early bird sale at the quilt shop in Mt. Airy. 25% off your purchase of fabric between 7 and 8 a.m. While I am trying to save some of my $$$ for Houston, a girl has to sew for the rest of the summer, so I set out on a mission to buy backing and sashing for fabric I already have. Above you can see the fan fabric I bought to go with the Japanese fabrics I bought at my first quilt show. This will be a table runner.

This is going to be shabby chic. I bought these half yards at this quilt shop months ago because I was drawn to the yellow, sage and ever so slight teal/powder blue prints. Today I bought the leafy green background and a peachy border. This will most likely be a gift for someone who's into the whole romantic/shabby chic decorating thing. Or maybe it will be a gift for my friend Anna. A subtle little throw to toss over their brown leather furniture.

At my second quilt show I found these great batik fat quarters. They were practically giving them away. If you zoom in, you'll see that each one has some kind of dots in the pattern, so I was pretty excited to find the right shade of blue batik with dots in it to back this one.

Yesterday was the big batting sale at Capital Quilts. (I stocked up) While I was there I noticed they were cutting fat quarters from this line. I really liked the colors and the prints, so I snagged a set.

After the tedious hours of hand stitching binding, I got to do a fun project. My online quilt group is doing a 5-week project that will result in a 40" square. The center square is to be set on point and include anything that you want to fuse to it. I did circles. Circles are hot (did you hear how I sounded like Paris when I said 'hot'?). Anyway, once I fused them I decided to blanket stitch around the light color ones, and now I'm thinking of cutting my square a bit smaller and adding a border out of the polka dot fabric. I'd almost like to make a whole quilt like this. I don't know what comes next. We get our instructions once weekly. Oh, and the fabric I'm using is Moda Zippity Do Dah.

And while I hate to admit that I am not perfect, above is my finished guild 'badge'. Don't laugh about the embroidery. One of these days I'll have a machine and I'll tear that out and replace it with something that looks good. In the meantime it will have to do. That's our guild pin on the actual block, and the two pins on the ribbon are the only quilt shows I've been to so far. I'm also in an Australian on-line group, and I traded someone in that group U.S. fat quarters in exchange for one of their pins. (I'm starting to feel like I'm at the Olympics! (with the pin trading going on). ) Can't wait until that arrives and I can add it to the block.

Well, I've been up just about 18 hours so far today, I think I'm going to have a little (okay, not so little) glass of Hypnotiq and snuggle under a quilt and watch Saturday Night Live.

More photos tomorrow of the finished Birthday Quilt.

Nighty night!

Is it the Weekend Yet?

Here I sit, brokenhearted
in my office--no quilting started
Watching the clock, the hours tick by
Ever so s-l-o-w-l-y....heavy sigh

Okay, enough waxing poetic. I need to get out of here and run over to Capital Quilts to see if I can find some lime green fabric to use on Jen's guestroom quilt. I finished up some more black and white blocks last night and I'd like to finish this quilt top tomorrow (Sorry Margaret...afraid we might be bringing store-bought cookies to the Easter dinner on Sunday).

Let's see if I can get a decent photo of the block sets on my cell phone so I can post them...

Alrighty then. What I did was choose a predominantly black with white print and a predominantly white with black print and used them with solid black or white to make a traditional pieced block.

I took the two prints and made a same size block of alternating strips. I made another slightly larger strip block, cut the strips in the opposite direction and sewed them together to make a 'checkerboard' block of the two prints.

Each two 'opposite' prints yielded 4 different blocks, for a total of 16 at the moment.

I'm thinking that somehow I should also make a block that mixes the white print with the solid white and the black print with the solid black, and I was thinking diagonal strips. That would give me 2 more blocks for each 'set' of prints. I also have a few other prints I can use to add a couple more block patterns--depends on how this lays out size-wise.

I'm off to find some graph paper.