Back Home in Virginia

Back from Michigan and working on catching up.  I am doing Barbara Brackman's block of the week and am playing catch-up, as I was separated from my stash when it started.

Here are the first three week's blocks on my design wall:

Barbara Brackman has an interesting blog with a great story each week about the women's suffragette movement, and also directions to make an 8 inch block.
It's here:  http://grandmotherschoice.blogspot.com

The block for week 4 is out of my comfort zone, but I enjoy a challenge.  Here's my beginning of it:

 As you can see, this quilt will be a feast of cheddar fabrics!

I've also been practicing my machine quilting of feathers.  I'd like to put little feathered wreaths in the white squares of the indigo and white doll quilt, as I've marked it:

Wouldn't that look great on here?

Some practice feathered wreaths are shown below, but they still need to be a little smaller than these.  

Between working on the above projects, I'm tackling the weeds in my garden beds.  Imagine me in a pith helmet with a knife the size of Crocodile Dundee's.  I am ruthlessly attacking the weeds, and feel I am rescuing the little garden plants that have been fighting against the weeds all summer by themselves while I've been gone.

Is it too soon to mention Christmas?

While I'm at the lake in the summertime, I am part of the Victorian Quilter's Guild, near Manistee, Michigan.

They make ornaments to decorate a Christmas tree, and auction off the tree to raise money for charity.  Here are my contributions to the tree for this Christmas:

The top five ornaments are 4 inches square, and I just played around with fabrics that I had at the cabin.  The requirements were to make ornaments four inches or smaller.

The bottom four are my first attempts at making house blocks as shown at this blog:  http://buildinghousesfromscraps.blogspot.com  I made the four houses in January, and they are 3 inches square.  I had debated joining in the fun of making a house a day, but I don't have enough novelty fabrics to cut into little cute little somethings to fit in each window.  So I stopped with just four houses, and they were in my sewing basket.  

Anyway, I made good use of the four houses I had, and added them to the guild's Christmas tree ornaments.  Some child will enjoy looking at them on their Christmas tree.

While I was making these ornaments, I played around with Santa Claus fabric that I bought for the ornaments, and made some slightly larger ornaments to use for a gift exchange among some internet friends.  So if you are one of these friends, pretend you didn't see them here.  

Here are the log cabin ornaments, at about 6 inches square:

They are ready to mail when the time comes, and I feel very virtuous for having a little bit of a jump on Christmas preparation.   I usually approach Christmas with a big surge right after December 1st, and at the end of the month I make a mental note to start a little sooner next year.  This year, I'm one small step into the preparation.  Yeah!!

Making a Doll Quilt Twice

Today my post is about how not to make a quilt.  I bought a cute little indigo doll quilt kit on Etsy, and when I put it together, I wasn't happy with it - although I loved the fabrics.

Here is the kit, as first assembled:

It was nice, but the blues didn't show up as I wanted them too, and it looked like one dark piece of fabric when I looked at it from a distance.

What to do....what to do....I cut up a paper napkin into little squares and laid them over some of the indigo squares, and looked at the quilt with some of the darkness gone:

Better.  Oops I see I took a nice picture of my toes!  Sorry about that!

So I picked up my trusty friend, Mr. Seamripper, and took it apart.  Luckily, the Etsy shop kit maker had included extra white fabric in case I needed it.  

Lesson learned. The next time I make even a small doll quilt, I will look at it before assembly to see if I will be happy with the finished design.   Below is the final version of the top, ready to be quilted.

Do you like it?  Please don't tell me you like the first version better.....I'm not taking it apart again.  hehehe

While at the AQS Grand Rapids quilt show, I took a class in machine quilting and am going to attempt something other than straight lines on this one.....stay tuned.

Have a nice Monday everyone!   Judy