Antique quilting

My mother would be 87 years old if she were still with us. This little stuffed pig is the only toy we have that belonged to her as a child. I also have a little wooden rocker that was hers that her father made. Otherwise, there are no surviving toys from her childhood.

No one knows anymore who made it for her. I wish I had asked her that before she died over 20 years ago.

It is made of unbleached muslin, with an embroidered face. It has cotton gingham overalls with tiny little white buttons. The ears and arms are attached with stitches that are pretty fragile now. And the center of the eye is missing on one side. I have to wonder if there were buttons in those eyes long ago.

It's a treasure.

UFO progress

This is NOT the best photo, but I needed to capture some progress. These are the blue stars that I won over a year ago during the previous Saturday Sampler.These blue stars were the bonus blocks. I've tried out a couple of different ideas, but just never quite made up my mind about what I wanted to do with them.

Yesterday I pulled out some white that was in my stash for the sashing strips. I pulled out a blue snowflake fabric to make cornerstones. This will give a bit of a floating impressions. I'm also toying with the idea of putting a top and bottom border on this quilt using more of the snowflake fabric. And I need to dig out more white from my stash for the setting triangles.

I still have 2 blocks left and my plan is to make a pieced back and use those in the back. Or I may make them into a pillow sham to go with the quilt.

Block swap

My block swap partner Becca sent me this very sharp looking block from Spokane, Washington. It is the card trick pattern. It is going to fit in perfectly with the red, white, and black sampler that I've been working on for a long time. It was a UFO that was lost - and then found again.

The sampler has random blocks of different sizes and shapes with a narrow solid black sashing between them. I started it several years ago, and just keep adding a couple of blocks when I can. Because some of the blocks are fairly small, and some of the blocks are large, the quilt top will be very asymetrical (sp?) when I get it done.

Anyway - this block is going to fit perfectly in that project. Thanks Becca!

More fat quarter stars

Here are my FQS blocks 8 and 9 done in the Ellie II fabric.

Block 8 is called the Easy Spinning Star. It looks complicated but went together very easy. The key for me was laying it all out before starting to sew. The original had about 5 different fabrics in it but I chose to stick with 3 colors. I really love this block.

Block 9 is a "twin star" block called Make Mine a Double. The original pattern called for the background fabric in the centers of both stars, but I used one of my fat quarter fabrics. It turned out OK - but doesn't WOW me! I have the same fabric with a white background and I keep thinking now that I should have made the center lighter so the stars show up better. Maybe I will still make that change before putting the quilt top together. I have time to decide since there are at least 3 more blocks to go.

Custom quilting

It's great to have a super long-arm quilter to bring quilt to when I don't have the time or skills to do what I want.

Carly designed these darling quilting motifs for daughter Laura's baby quilt. The back of the quilt is this lavendar Minkee and it's covered with these cute monkeys and elephants that were designed to go with the fabric on the front. The color in my photos are not the best as it is so grey outside that even the natural light isn't good.

What can I say besides Thank You ? Just this - Wow!!!

More hexies

I've actually been sewing but just too lazy to get pictures downloaded from my camera.

Sunday afternoon's project while watching football was to make 3 more 1/2" hexies for my selvage basket project. These could become very addictive.

Just a little snow day sewing

We woke up to fresh snow and no school locally. Normally I would just work from home on a day like this, because my office is in our neighborhood elementary school building. By 10:00 am the snow has stopped and our street has been plowed.

However - I am WAY over my contracted days already, had no scheduled school visits or webinars or conference calls - so I decided it was the perfect oppportunity to take some ME time. How's that for rationale? I'm lucky that my schedule is flexible enough to do this occasionally.

I used some time this morning to get up-to-date on my fat quarter stars blocks in 1 of my 2 fabric choices. Here is block 8 done in Kate Spain's Terrain. It looks complicated but wasn't too bad. The tough part was laying it out so the star spins.

Block 9 follows and this one is really different from the others because it has the 2 stars kind of snuggled together. The designer is celebrating her twin babies due soon with this block.

And finally I have to show off the 9 blocks done so far in the Far Quarter Stars quilt-along. See the button on my sidebar to check it out.

Can't wait for each new block that is posted every other Tuesday!