I turn my back for FIVE minutes...

He always manages to pop the hoop as he settles into his magical cat-nest.

And miles to bind before I sleep

The quilting is finished!  The quilting is finished!

Straight lines for the win!

With some moderate changes of direction in the cornerstones.

And just plain lines for the borders, spaced 1" apart.  (I marked one with chalk pencil.  Then I got smarter and got some painter's tape.  Much easier, faster, and straighter!)

Round and round I went.

I found the most glorious perfect print possible to use for the binding.

It echoes the blues in the body of the quilt and the cornerstones, and pulls blue out to the edge.  I love it!

Now I'm trudging along with the hand stitching part of the festivities, which I always enjoy.  Binding is peaceful work!

Next photo will be the finished quilt.

Back to my stitching!

It begins...

My machine is de-linted, my needle is new, and my bobbins are full.

Here goes nothin'!

You little hoop popper, you!

I set my hooped quilt down for a bit while I answered a call of nature.

I came back to this:

Considering there were three threaded needles parked in it, it's a wonder he didn't stab himself...

If it's not one thing, it's another...

So yesterday I was sewing along, minding my own business, trying to piece a couple of the 365 Challenge blocks, when suddenly my sewing machine made a 'chunk' sound.
'Uh oh,' I thought.  'That didn't sound good.'
I pressed down on the pedal to resume sewing.  Though the needle was going up and down just fine, the feed dogs were not moving.
'You have one job...' I said to them.
Figuring there might be lint caught in the mechanism somewhere, I started taking things apart.  When I unscrewed and removed the bottom part -

 something fell out.

It's a plastic gear that was the thing that turned the thing that made the feed dogs go.
Now this is the machine I bought back in 1987, and it wasn't an expensive machine even way back then.  The chances of even being able to repair it are slim, even if the cost wouldn't be more than the machine is worth.
I was very sad.
Then I had a thought.
What's the one thing you have to do first in order to start free motion quilting?
Lower the feed dogs, right?
My feed dogs are as low as they're going to get.  Pretty much dogless at this point.
I swapped places with my two machines  - putting the 'new' machine up on the table where I'm going to be quilting, and bringing my 'old' machine (the Singer I bought back in 1971) down to my piecing desk.
I'd been trying to practice FMQ with the old Singer, using a new darning foot, but I'd been having all kinds of troubles with skipped stitches.  And I mean really skipped - not one or two stitches, but for inches at a time.  I put the darning foot on the 'new' machine and took it for a test drive.
No skipping.
This is going to be great.

I think Making the Best of Things may be my superpower...

I promised you quilt show pics

I almost forgot!
Though I have to admit, I took a lot fewer pictures than I thought I did.  Part of it was camnesia - too busy gasping at all the beauty to snap a photo - and part was because it was a small museum with a lot of quilts on display, so the aisles were narrow and it was hard to stand back far enough to get a good shot.
Here are just a few of the things we saw, anyway.  (And some of these pics are mostly for me - notes to refer to later, as it were.  That's what blogs are for, right?)

I'm always a sucker for a good nine patch -

and the nine patches appliqued in the border of that one really made me smile.
And more nine patches, this time as a star.

And a really pretty nine patch quilt that made me fall in love with nine patches all over again.

Let's take a closer look, okay?
Here's the label.

That's a file card sized label clipped to the quilt with a clothespin.  Consider for a moment how wide a clothespin is, then compare that to the size of the nine-patch squares...
And here's a close-up of that label.  Omigosh! is right!

 I especially like what she named her quilt - "Never Again"...

I backed up as far as I could to get that last shot and still couldn't catch the whole thing.  Big quilt, tiny pieces, gorgeous color.
I can feel another of those crazy itches I get in the back of my brain.  I've certainly got lots of tiny scraps...

As a not-so-crazy alternative, here's a pretty setting for four patches.  I'm avidly collecting four patch ideas since they've been my leader/enders for most of the last year.

And here's a pretty 25 patch - I love the applique.

One huge quilt that really knocked my socks off (Seriously.  I had to sit down on the floor and put them back on and everything.) was this huge sampler quilt done in Civil War repros.
It was so big I could only catch parts of it at a time.  Here's the center -

and here's (most of) the upper left quadrant.  This one was in a particularly narrow aisle, and the lighting wasn't the best, so I'm disappointed at not being able to get a photo of the whole thing.

It was one flat-out gorgeous sampler.  I lost track of how many blocks were used in it.  There was a general symmetry used, but blocks varied in pattern within the same size range.

On a more modern note, I loved this quilt - the colors and pattern both.  And hey!  Another excuse to use the tri-recs rulers!

Most of the show was comprised of guild quilts ('guild quilts' was really hard to type, for some reason;  like the written equivalent of a tongue-twister...), but there was a section of antique quilts as well.  There were several glorious crazy quilts which resisted my best efforts to photograph them, and a large redwork quilt from 1889 that was almost as wily.

My sister-in-law does lovely redwork, and has done a couple of quilts in it, so we spent quite a lot of time ooohing and aaahing over this one.

It looked like each block was designed by the maker, since there were a variety of styles and fonts used in it.  The stitches were TINY.   Tiny tiny tiny.  SIL pointed out one small line to me and said that she would have made it using about three stitches, but the maker of the block had used at least ten.

But the show wasn't all quilts and giggles.  Because it was set up in the historical society museum, there were other displays tucked away here and there.  Way in the back we found this wonderful motorcycle.

Check out those handlebars.

And the seat isn't where you'd expect it to be.

The venue for the show is the Tioga County Historical Society Museum and the quilt show is called 'Quilts by the River', running through the end of April.  If you're in the upstate NY area, be sure to check it out!

I'm feeling better, but my computer isn't...

My hard drive is dying, which is the root of all my computer woes.  I'm dithering whether to replace the hard drive (and update Windows from XP which I've been happily running all these years) (and given my history with installing hard drives (ack! hardware!) this might not be the best option) (definitely not the easiest option) or if I should just bite the bullet and buy a new computer.
Argh.

So here's a couple of quick photos, in case Old Faithful here craps out on me.
The last of the February 365 Challenge blocks, before starting the center medallion that wraps up the month.

A couple of Chantal's Pinwheels in purple.

And an applique quilt I saw and coveted at a quilt show I went to with my sister-in-law yesterday.  (I want to make it with a dark background, though, I think...)

 I've got tons of pics from the show, but I want to get this posted.  If I'm still operational later, I'll throw together a brief tour of the show - there were some beauties!
For now, I'll just be over here in the corner, swearing quietly at hard drives.
Argh.


Linking with SoScrappy's ScrapHappy Saturday.  Rather quickly, I might add...

Not a completely unproductive day

Years ago, my grandmother (who, along with my other grandmother, taught me most of what I know about quilting) would participate every year in a town fundraising effort involving making and raffling a quilt.  Unfortunately the number of quilting ladies had dwindled over the years - time and attrition and all that.
Which is how I found myself sitting in the Grange Hall this afternoon, discussing quilt blocks and quiltmaking with a bunch of women who had also been roped in by my sister-in-law and (chiefly) her sister-in-law.  (I'll freely admit that 90% of the reason I showed up was so that I wouldn't get volunteered for anything in absentia...) 
There are only a few of us who are actual quilters, but everyone seems game to try, so this should be interesting.  I'll keep you posted.  Especially if it gets really interesting...

Meeting over, I headed to my studio to get a bit of work done before I ran out of steam completely.
I think I've finally got all the pieces for Allietare cut and corralled. 

That means I can put all the reds, blacks, and golds back into their respective spots, and it frees up the bin that I'd been keeping 2" Allietare strips in.  I can certainly put the bin to good use, given the ridiculous number of projects I've somehow got going.

Speaking of ridiculous projects, I got three more blocks done for the 365 Challenge.

These are the blocks for Feb 18th thru 21st. 
So, if I can make 3 blocks every 6 or 7 days, I should be caught up in...  um...  well...

Can someone give me a hand with the math here?  I think my brain has frozen.



linking with Oh, Scrap at Quilting is More Fun than Housework.  Come see all the scrappy goodness!

It's not just all rainbows around here

In all the talk lately about side projects, I haven't said much about my main project - the Twinkle Star quilt that I'm making for my daughter and son-in-law.

I've been diligently making blocks and sashing stars and stacking them up out of harm's way.  Today, I pulled them out to see what I had, since I hadn't really been keeping track of which colors I'd used and in what quantity.
I started laying them out, including the sashing pieces I've got cut, trying to get an idea what I had.

I promised myself when I started that I was just going to drop them in place and not fuss too much with colors being next to each other.
That lasted about five minutes, of course.  I had to physically drag myself away from juggling greens and golds, and maybe that red would be better over here, so I could go get the camera.

I hadn't had it out for awhile, and I'd been a little nervous that maybe it wasn't as pretty as I remembered it, and what if I wouldn't like it anymore when I saw it all spread out.

I think it's going to be okay. 

Oh, and piglets, too, of course

Okay, time to start getting organized - Rainbow Scrap Challenge choices have to be made.

Chantal's pinwheels are a definite.  (Does this block have a name?  Anybody?)

And these stars.

And the kaleidoscopes, of course.  Gotta justify getting that ruler, after all.  8)

(And, yeah, that's my shadow in the lower left of that picture.  I waited too long to take photos and missed most of the natural light.  Go, me!)

And I've also got four other choices that are maybe-babies.

The plan at this point is to do the main blocks (stars, pinwheels, kaleidoscopes, and piglets) first, then work on the maybes if I have time left at the end of the month.  If all else fails, those four can carry over to next year.
Or the year after.
Hey, look at me - already with plans in place for 2017!
Uh-hunh.


Linking to So Scrappy's ScrapHappy Saturday.  There's all kinds of excitement starting off our year!

Onward to Clue 5

Clue 5 came out day after Christmas, but I was busily playing with visiting family, so no sewing until today.  This week's clue was all sewing and no cutting, using the fruits of our previous labors.

I got 35 done out of the 98 I need.  They go together fairly quickly, so it won't take long to wrap this unit up.  (Now I'll just have to go back and catch up with clue 4, which I'm abysmally behind on.)
I even got a start on the flippy cornered rectangles.  Here you can see the clear advantage of using a geometric fabric:

I didn't have to mark a sewing line on the back, since all I had to do was point and shoot, staying parallel to the lines of the print.  Nifty!

And since I like to alternate a little cutting with a little sewing (my back is much happier with me that way), I cut some 3.5" strips and some squares, getting ready for 2016.

And since I was already cutting, I just had to test whether it was feasible to cut the 3" triangles I needed out of 3.5" strips (which I keep on hand anyway) or if I was going to have to cut some dedicated 3" strips.   (You know, for that long-term long-range triangle-star-quilt-whose-name-I-keep-forgetting-to-look-up project.  The one that I'm not starting but might just cut a triangle for now and then, but only if it's no extra trouble and not distracting in any way from whatever I'm really working on.  That one.)

Yep.  Looks like it's going to work.


Linking to Bonnie Hunter's Monday Allietare Party.  Come see all our pretties!

Surfacing from the wrapping paper

I think we've finally finished celebrating the holidays.  The last gift is given, the last brunch is digested, the last relative has been hugged and kissed goodbye and wished safe journey to.
As things approach what passes for normal around here, I'll leave you a couple of pictures of some of my sewing that's no longer a secret.
Here's the beer bucket that I made for younger daughter.  (You may remember the one I made for older daughter, which inspired enough envy that I had to make another one.  I was happy to oblige.)
Younger daughter is a fan of colors bright and happy, so I picked out fabrics that would suit her.

Here's a view from the top -

and here it is with the removable lining removed.  Because removable.

 In this form it's perfect for hauling growlers, and with the lining unit in place it's a bottles transporter.  I was very pleased that she was very pleased!

And here's what I did with one of the piglet blocks that make me so happy...

A little cotton batting quilted in place and a layer of insul-bright make a happy piggly-wiggly trivet.
I used up all my piglet blocks for gifts, though, so now I'm going to have to make more to replace them.
Oh, shucky darn...


And since I used actual scraps for all these projects, I'm linking with Oh Scrap at Quilting is more fun than Housework.  Come see what we're all up to, here at the end of the year!

Cookies, guillotined geese, and that other pig

I saw these cookies the other day, and was so enchanted that I promptly copied down the recipe and checked the pantry.
The dough was made last night, but needed to chill for a couple of hours.  By the time it was ready, I was too pooped to scoop, so I didn't start rolling until this morning.
The recipe advised putting the minty kisses in the freezer, but I scoffed at the idea and just used them at room temperature.
Turns out there's a reason for the freezin'.  (Sorry, I just can't stop.  I think the solstice has affected my brain.)

My kisses got a little gooey...
So for the second batch, I froze the kisses.

Much better.
Then I wondered what else I could stuff into these cookies.

It occurs to me that the nutella will stay sticky forever, so that may not be the smartest cookie I ever made.  Tasty, though...

Still can't share most of what I've been sewing lately, but I did put in a little time on Allietare today.
A little sewing to add to the completed clue 4 guillotined geese units.

And a few more sets ready to sew.

And some more bits cut out and ready to sort into sets.

I'd been trying to get at least half of each clue done before the next clue was revealed, but this week is a fail.  Next clue isn't until Saturday, but I don't think I'll be able to squeeze in any more sewing between now and then.
So I'll leave you with this fella, which I don't think I ever showed in the completed state.  This was my dad's birthday present - a cushion for the bench where he sits to change into or out of shoes, boots, and slippers.

Yep, a pig to park one's butt on. 
Who could ask for anything more?