Home!

 I just got back from a fabulous weekend at a quilt retreat.  I love this retreat.  Twice a year my local quilt shop runs a retreat in Gananoque, a lovely little town about 2 hours away.  We stay at the Gananoque Inn, where they take great care of us with wonderful food, a great room for sewing (and talking, and laughing), and overall lovely service.  There were  a lot of wonderful projects being worked on this weekend (of which I have no pictures - I really do have to remember to use my camera).

These are a couple of the project I made (start to finish) at the retreat this weekend. It is really nice to have a focussed time to sew, with other people to chat with and projects to see.  Very different from shutting myself up in my sewing room for a weekend.

The Christmas tree is, of course, a Christmas wall hanging.  I started with the center panel, and wanted to add some borders to make it a bit bigger (and more interesting).  The top and bottom borders were part of the panel.  The rest of pieces are 4.5" star blocks I made.  There is a light kit for this quilt which I have - so I just have to figure out how to attach them and then how to quilt it without sewing over the electrical wires.

The star is a neat project I found in a book - Diamond Chain Quilts.  Although it looks really complicated, and there are some tricky bits with set-in seams, the quilt went together really well.  There were a few moments of angst when I cut the strips and came up one strip short for the turquoise but a bit of judicious cutting allowed me to make up the needed bit and complete the quilt with what I had on hand.


One other benefit of this weekend is for my stash report.  2 finished quilts used 2 1/4 and 7 yards respectively.  That bring my stash usage for this year up to a very respectable 228 1/4 yards out.

Drop by Judy's blog to see more stash reports today.

There was  lot more activity at the quilt retreat, and I'll have more to say about that later this week, once I get some projects unpacked.

Catch up Progress

My mad catch-up weekend/week was a partial success.  I got two block of the month projects all caught up.  the stars/houses are for "Downtown". That's October and November done.  And the kimonos are for my Block Party, due next weekend.  And I almost forgot Back to Square One, which I showed the other day.

Just 2 more BOMs to go - Toes in the Sand, and Border Creek Station mystery.

Quilting in Space!

And you thought you had it tough.  Astronaut Karen Nyberg is sewing a quilt block during her time on the International Space Station.  She talks a bit about some of the challenges of quilting in space, in this clip. http://www.space.com/23436-space-quilt-astronaut-karen-nyberg.html.  Things I never would have thought of - like how do you keep your fabric flat and straight for cutting, with no gravity.  And how do you keep all your tools, and scraps, and thread bits corralled - I think I'd be in really big trouble in space, since I can never seem to put things away as I use them.


She's also inviting all quilters to make blocks to join hers in a quilt for the 40th annual International Quilt Festival in Houston next year.  Maybe it's time to plan a trip to the quilt show.

Design Wall Monday - Nov 4

My design wall has some of my block of the month projects on it today.  I determined to catch up on last month's Downtown blocks (2 houses and a star), before the class on Wednesday.   However, as I was making the houses, I cut a piece wrong.  And of course it was one of the largest pieces.  These blocks are cut pretty close in the amount of fabric provided, so I didn't have a single scrap of the black to re-cut from, in that block set.

Fortunately, I picked up November's blocks on Saturday.  So I pulled them out, hoping I could find a way to squeeze an extra piece out of it.  Fortunately, the odd shape of the roof in the second house made this possible. So I cut my new pieces of roof and continued assembling the houses.  And then managed to cut a different piece in a mirror image to what I needed.  Sigh. I suppose a smart person might have taken a break at that point, but I pulled out the grey fabric this time and did some measuring.  And yes, it seemed I could get that piece out of the fabric for November also, by frugally using the leftover snippets from October's block.

Of course now, having stolen fabric from November, I felt that I had to make those houses, just to be sure I didn't mess up my calculations.  So, I pushed on and now have 4 houses and one star complete.  Just one more star to go and I'm not only caught up, but a bit ahead of the game.

Drop by Judy's blog to see what's on other design walls this week.

Stash Report - Nov 3

I finished a quilt this week and attached the binding, so I have a good chunk of usage to report.  I decided to make a small alteration to this pattern.  I left the top and bottom points, rather than cutting the quilt square.  I thought this would add a bit more interest.  It's also good practice for binding inside corners (which isn't going quite as well as I had hoped).

I also managed to catch up on the Back to Square One Mystery.  It is now officially too big to put on my design wall, so all I have is a picture of one corner.  I can't remember how big Judy said it would be, but it's already 80" square so I think we must be almost done.

Used this week for Living in Harmony:

quilt - 9.5 yards
backing - 4 yards
binding - .5 yards

Total used this week - 14 yards.

Total this year: 219 yards out

Drop by Judy's blog to see more stash reports today.

Drop by Judy's "Back to Square One" link up for December, to see more of these beautiful quilts.

Lessons

The good news is - this quilt is quilted! Now I just need to get it bound before next weekend. It's a sample for a class I'm teaching, and the store owner was asking about it when I stopped in today.  I promised to have it done for next weekend.

This is another quilt done with my new swirls template. I am really liking the way this one looks on the two quilts I've done so far.

And what did I learn today?  When you break a needle, it is best to re-thread the machine from scratch. Otherwise, you may spend the next 30 minutes trying to figure out why the machine won't stitch right, and keeps skipping stitches, and the thread keeps breaking.  I just hope I didn't mess up the timing - I was on the last row of this quilt when it broke, so I struggled through (after re-threading). But I need to load up a quick sampler and see if things are working right again.

Back to Square One Mystery

After spending all week catching up on the Sept & October clues for the Back to Square One Mystery, I was thrilled to see that this months clue consists of "sew the borders together and attach them". That might even happen before the last minute this month.

Here's what my quilt looks like after the October clue  - not enough room for all the border blocks, so just a few are on the wall.  And apparently I guessed wrong, so I'll have to remember to switch the orientation of the log cabins before I sew them together. 

Drop by Judy's blog today to see all the wonder mystery quilts.