Design Wall Monday

I had Friday and today off work for Easter break. Yay!

 

On my wall today is Bonnie Hunter's 2013 Leader/Ender Challenge.

Yes, I know 2013 is over, but I am still working on it.

 

 

 

I have started putting rows together. So far, so good!

 

On the quilting frame I have Twisted Batiks.

 

 

 

I have one row quilted. I had planned to get this quilted this weekend, but...

my son is home for the weekend. He has a different time table than my husband and I. He likes to stay up late and sleep in. So I haven't been quilting since the frame is near his room and would wake him up. So I worked on Bonnie's challenge instead.

 

I am also working on Old Crow.

My husband really liked this pattern, but I didn't have any reproduction fabrics

in my stash. I am adding fabrics as I find them, a little at a time.

In order to not have duplicates I made this little thing to carry with me.

 

 

I've seen products like this for sale recently,

but I had all the items on hand so I made one.

 

Recent finish

I recently finished this little quilt for a co-worker.

 

 

 It started out like this. Parts and pieces left from a bigger quilt.

 

 

Then I saw the monkey print.

I thought the front needed a monkey to tie the monkey print to the rest of the quilt.

I had originally thought I would use it for a border on the front,

but the blues don't play well together.

So I put it on the back.

It is quilted with an all-over leafy design with variegated green, gray, blue thread.

I thought it turned out well, and the mom-to-be seems to like it too!

 

Now, I need to work on getting my clutter under control.

I have a room in my house - the finished attic - where anything that doesn't fit on the main part of the house goes.

A large part of my fabric stash, photos waiting to be put into albums, crafty supplies, out of season clothes, and lots of other stuff.

I seem to have a hard time letting go of things, especially things that I think might be useful to SOME one. ;)

But, that room has become so cluttered that I can't find things I know I have and it is hard to move around in. Ugh.

So, I decided to try to spend a little time every day up there, but it is very overwhelming for me that I am not making much progress so far.

The other problem is lighting. There is one outlet on one wall, one outlet on the opposite wall and one window on the short wall. I have to work up there during daylight hours which is hard to do when I am working. Summer will be here soon so hopefully I will be able to get up there more.

 

What I am working on today...

I am on Spring Break this week and had plans to do so many things. Ha, what was I thinking. I never get most of the things get to most of the things on my list.

In July Bonnie Hunter posted her Summer 2013 Leader & Ender Challenge. I have lots of scraps that I feel guilty about so I decided to play along. I worked on it here and there- cutting a little, then sewing a little. I like to have all the pieced cut for a project so this week I decided to cut all the pieces. I want the quilt to finish around 85x95 so I need 224 blocks. I have been cutting, off and on, for 4 days! I have about 200 more 2 1/2" light squares to cut. Then I need to mark the light triangles for the HST units.

BH Summer 2013 L&E - cutting

BH Summer 2013L&E - more cutting

BH Summer 2013 L&E on the design wall

I put some of the blocks up on the design wall to see how it looked. I am pretty happy with it. Hopefully I will be able to quilt it this summer.

I did get some fabric shopping done this week.

So I hope to get borders on this baby quilt before Spring Break is over.

 

I am still not able to add pictures to blog posts on Firefox. I am using Internet Explorer and it does some weird things to my blog posts.

Design Wall Monday

I haven't posted for a while. But, I am on Spring Break this week so today I have time.

I had posted earlier that my Mother-in-law is currently in a nursing home. One day she had an appointment so I took a quilt to wrap around her. She has had a stroke that has caused paralyses of her left side so putting a coat on her is difficult. The quilt ended up staying with her at the nursing home. It is her favorite colors - black and white with a little red. Her pillow sham didn't match the quilt so I made one to match.
I used some motifs on my embroidery machine to quilt it.



The kindergarteners recently learned letter Q.

Part of my job duties is a Shared Reading/bathroom break. Each class comes with me for 20 minutes for a bathroom break and I read to them during this time. I try to read books that reinforce what they are learning in class. Well, of course, I had to read books about quilts during letter Q week!
One of the books I read was The Handkerchief Quilt by Carol Crane. It is about a school that needs repairs due to broken water pipes during a freeze in the winter. The community makes a quilt to raise the needed funds. The quilt they make is Cathedral Windows.

I made this little piece to show the students what a Cathedral Windows quilt would look like. I also took in some of my other quilts. We talked about shapes and colors (math lessons in kindergarten) that are used in quilts too.
They all seemed very interested and loved looking at and feeling the quilts and the tools used for quilt making.

I am also working on this little quilt. The blocks are left from another quilt.
A co-worker is expecting a boy the end of April and I think these blocks will be just right for a baby quilt. I hope to get this finished this week.

 

First, I need to clean off the quilting machine. Seems that no matter how hard I try I just cannot keep things from piling up on here.

Well, I guess I better get busy!