Sewing, Vegetables, Cortisone

Sewing, Vegetables and Cortisone - my week in a nutshell. Let’s back up to last Saturday and I’ll bring you along with pictures.

Our August Quilts for Kids meeting was held at a new-to-me shop in Riverton called Forget-me-Not Quilts. I brought in all the quilts donations quilts finished to date, including the three quilts that Julie K and I made for the Wrap Ukraine with Quilts drive. Forget-me-Not Quilts is a collection point, so those three are safely on their way (see the Community Quilts tab at the top of my blog if you need a refresher on those).  I brought my bag of multi-colored strings to sew on. My friend G made a quilt from a kit containing fabric and string blocks that I had previously assembled and donated.

It turned out so cute! Our chapter of QFK is always looking for fabric donations to make quilt kits. I figure I can help out twofold by (1) reducing their string and strip scrap stash by sewing string blocks and then (2) preparing kits for members to sew. I also assemble Zipper blocks and kits with strips and fabrics from my stash or donations. My goal is to donate at least 60-75 string blocks per month (we use them in sets of 15) and at least 3-5 Zipper quilt kits (including backings) per month. That’s in addition to personal quilts I sew for donation or family. 

This last week, starting on Saturday and finishing on Tuesday, I sewed these four 15-block sets of strings. I safety pin them together in sets.

On Sunday we had a family dinner with my son Ryan and DIL Kim. It’s her birthday this month, and we wanted to go out to celebrate. Also, DGD Lauren will be moving up to college in Logan in a couple weeks, so we added her and boyfriend Graham to the celebrations.

On Tuesday, it was Weight Watchers (no weight change, which was great after eating out three times last week and being very careful), and then a trip to my doctor for cortisone shots in my knees (bursitis). I can move again!  We spent a couple mornings out in the yard this week, beating back weeds and harvesting vegetables. The peppers, carrots, green beans and cucumbers are all going strong. The tomatoes have been ripening, too, so we’re loving our turkey bacon BLTs once or twice per week. I have started sharing vegetables again at my WW meetings, and a couple others are starting to bring some garden bounty too! It’s like a free Farmers Market.

And speaking of WW, my friend Ruby invited Bruce and I over last week one evening. You may remember that Ruby was the one that gave me that glorious roll of $400/yard Italian fabric.....  I’ve bought cork to go along with it to make us a couple purses, but I’m still searching for some classy backing fabric.

Well anyway, Ruby used to do sewing for Denton House (very exclusive) and her daughter has taken over the business. But Ruby had lots of fancy fabrics to give away, and gave them to a neighbor who runs a ceramic gifts manufacturing business. In trade, this friend gave Ruby hundreds - and I mean several hundreds (at least five large produce boxes full) of ceramic mushrooms. They are “seconds”, but you’d be hard-pressed to tell. So, Ruby wanted me to have first pick of the mushrooms before she took them to her knitting group or to Weight Watchers to give them out to others. She practically MADE me take a whole boxful so that I could share them with my DIL Kim, Cousin Kim and Cousin Carrie. And neighbors and friends (T - I have some for you). And to use in our own garden. Here’s a picture of a small fraction - these are just the ones that I have left to put out in the back garden and the flower pots.

Another cute Pile of Stuff! OMG, I love color!!!

So, it was a fun week, and I did manage to finally settle down and get some serious sewing done. The first thing I did was baste and finish the purple, pink and green elephant quilt.

As usual, it finished at 40x48” and was quilted in loopy swirls. The only semi-suitable fabric I had for the back was a too-warm pink, but I paired it with some gray and called it good.

I had planned to get all the rest of my orange elephants sewn this week, but I only did two more pair. Here they are. I’ve had some more orange scraps make their way into my stash (rejects from quilt kits I’m sewing up, more on that in a moment), so I will probably have another couple pair to show next week. But for now, here are these ladies:

Last week I showed you a peek of some fabric strips/scraps that I was trying to make some sense out of. You know, from the cast-off donations into a worthy kid quilt. This is the top that I finished, that now moves into the basting pile. It is straight, but looks a bit wonky slapped up on the design board. It will get trimmed after quilting to square it up!

And then I dug into some of the scraps that Ruby gave me a couple weeks ago from her estate saling. In one of the boxes was a quilt top that was quite large but it looked like someone had cut a big semicircle out of one corner. Think of a bite out of a cookie. Anyway, I trimmed it down into the usable part and the remaining size was good for Quilts for Kids. Then I threw it in the wash - which they don’t like us to do as our Board prefers to handle final washings themselves before donationing. But I didn’t know its provenance, and wanted work with clean fabric.

I found a relatively basic brown backing with tiny red and blue squares that will work with it, but I had to insert a row of rectangle blocks down the back to make it wide enough. Now, let me show you the quilt. I’m just calling it The Ugly Quilt. It is seven blocks across and six blocks down.

The fabric is only about 10 years old and the quilt has never been finished. The fabric you see to the right of the quilt (hanging on the hanger) is the backing. I didn’t have identical fabrics in my stash, but I pulled some pieces that were similar in color and type - a blue with white polka dots, a red quatrefoil-like print, solid brown, mint green. they work just fine. The plan is to also baste and quilt the heck out of this thing and see if it becomes Worthy.

And the other quilt top I’m working on now is another “kit quilt” assembled from more of the scraps from Ruby. Some of you may recognize some of these fabrics as being from the Mendocino line by Heather Ross about 8-10 years ago.  There are other fabric chunks in there too that coordinate nicely.

I’ve come up with a very basic design that will fit the scraps. I saw it somewhere online (probably Pinterest, but there is no viable link). But that reveal will have to wait until next week. 

And with that, I’m off to get started on my day. No plans, although a Barnes and Noble date sounds good. I surely don’t want to go to a Farmer’s Market and have to process more vegetables!

Have a great week!

Linking to Scrappy Saturday for the Rainbow Scrap Challenge. 

A Predictable Week

Predictably, it has been hot as Hades. Predictably, if it rains (and it did, twice this week) it’s just enough to wet everything down and mess up the clean car. And predictably, you can find me in my sewing studio every afternoon, sewing away on my weekly goals. Bruce is either reading or playing in his workshop, and the cats are taking their afternoon naps (not to be confused with their morning naps or their evening naps or . . .)

This week I played some more with my purple scraps, turning out 6 Bear Paw blocks. It’s purple month for the Rainbow Scrap Challenge. 

The bigger one will finish at 9” and the other five will finish at 6”.  I decided it was time for all the Bear Paw blocks to have a family reunion on the design board. My secret objective, of course, was to see what “family members” needed to be constructed, and in what sizes and colors.

This not a final layout by any stretch of the imagination. I want the quilt to end up roughly 42x48”, so I’ll be needing several orange blocks, a bright blue to replace the lighter blue just right of center, and some more red. And I may replace those dull pink 3” blocks and the dark greens. A couple months, at least, to go on this.  In fact, several blocks may get replaced with brighter colors. Or, I may just expand the size. Who knows?!?

I also made a row of crumb tumblers (alternated with simple cut purple tumblers) for my Rainbow Tumblers quilt. I didn’t get a picture of it before sewing it to the dark blue row.  Sorry about the vertical picture; it will be a row, not a column in the quilt! 

On Wednesday, I spent a lot of time basting quilts - three of them, in fact. Of those those 3, I can show you one now. This is one of my purple quilts, from scraps I kitted up at the beginning of the year. The picture is just the flimsy.

The blocks measure 8”, so this will finish at 40x48”. I hope to get this quilted along with three others in the coming week so that I can show them to you before the end of the month. 

But I do have a finish to share - my Hearts for Ukraine quilt. Finally!

This fun quilt was a Bonnie Hunter free pattern. I changed the border so I could use up most of a blue and yellow jelly roll I’ve had in my stash for a couple years. The quilt finished at 54x62”. I quilted it with loops and hearts, except for the border which utilized the pieced squares as guides for crosshatches and loops. 

The backing is a chambray from a gently used cotton sheet. Below is a closer shot of the border and binding.

Of course, no quilt is really complete until it’s been inspected by one of the feline overlords. Here you can see Darla, carefully attending to her work. 

And how exciting to capture the *exact* moment that she purrnounced it worthy!!

Since I still have so many purple scraps, I thought this would be a good month/week to test out some new blocks for RSC2023. I’ve had my eye on several blocks, and keep potential ideas in a personal file on Pinterest. 

This first block is Overlapped Nine Patch, from Lynn Dykstra of KleinMeisjeQuilts. I believe Cathy L of Sane and Crazy is making these as well. I love these blocks. The top one doesn’t have enough contrast between the fabrics. But in the grand scheme of an entire quilt, it hardly matters. Lots of quilt makers do that intentionally.  However, I’ve decided this will not be an RSC project for me, but eventually a personal quilt down the road.

The second block, Little Bricks, was designed by Sylvia at Treadlestitches and introduced earlier this year during the Hand2Help drive. I had it saved in my idea file, but when I saw the cute blocks that Jenny  made, it moved its block to the top of my list. Here are my four.

Starting now, this is another RSC project that will continue through next year.

But wait, there’s more!

I pieced two elephants this week. Only one is shown below in the closeup. These wild print elephants serve as Color Coordinators (an official position!) for the elephant quilts I’ve been making.

Here are the blocks slapped up on the design wall. I haven’t sewn the sashing yet, but the elephants and borders are cut. 

This is one of the quilts I’m hoping to get sewn, pin basted, quilted, etc. before month end. So, I’ll be predictably in my sewing room for the foreseeable future!  Have a great week!

Purple-ing Along

The summer has settled into a nice routine. As expected, it’s been hot and dry. We had some rain on Thursday (.03 inch), which was a nice soaking for the garden and yard, but nothing of note beyond that. Then yesterday was muggy and humid - 38%. You midwesterners and easterners will probably laugh at that, but believe me, the heat is easy when it’s dry. We keep our thermostat at 79 in the summer and are never uncomfortable.

What a heartwarming and humbling week it was in the sewing and quilting department. (Yes, there was  more wonderful stuff going on, but my blog focuses primarily on my quilting. Not solely, but mostly). 

I received a package from Preeti as I was one of two lucky winners in her recent giveaway. Preeti is an Island Batik Ambassador (and believe me, with her creativity, they are lucky to have her!). My prize was four gorgeous half yard cuts of these lovely winter batiks from designer Kathy Engle. 

(Photo from Preeti’s blog)

My plan is to use these to sew up some lovely winter pillowcases later this fall. Thank you so much Preeti (and Island Batik!)

And just as I was done drooling swooning admiring those fabrics, a box arrived from my Rainbow Scrap Challenge friend Julie K (QuiltsandCostumes), who is a very talented quilter and a generous soul. She had offered to send me some fabric to match the purple, pink and red bullseye log cabin blocks in my last post. Then she wrote and asked if I was interested in a kids quilt that still needed to be put together. Well, sure I was! When the box arrived, it contained the aforementioned fabric and quilt top/backing/binding, but also two other quilt tops! Color me amazed at Julie’s generosity (and perfect piecing)!! Thanks you sooooo much!

Here’s the kid quilt top - it’s an adorable robot-themed fabric in a stack-n-whack design.

I’ll take more (and hopefully better) pictures when I quilt this one up. It will go to Quilts for Kids, of course. Here is one of the two blue and yellow quilt tops that Julie sent. It’s the smaller one of the two. I pieced a backing and got it pin basted this week. 

Just beautiful! I didn’t get a picture of the larger quilt, but I will. I ordered some backing this week because I had nothing left that was remotely satisfactory. Those two yellow and blue quilts, along with my Hearts for Ukraine quilt (which is next up for quilting), will all end up going to Ukraine. We have a local quilt shop that is a collection point for Hello Cottons, which is running a program called “Wrap Ukraine With Quilts”.  It will happen before month-end.

It occurs to me that I need to begin documenting these “Community Quilts”. You know, the tops that other people donate and I finish up. So, beginning with my next post - which will be on Wednesday - I’ll be adding a tab to my blog header for Community Quilts. Wednesday’s post will feature the first three quilt finishes that I’ve completed for Jo’s County Junction (with plenty more waiting in line). Julie’s quilts will go there when finished, too, as well as any other miscellaneous quilts from our QFK chapter that I quilt now and then as a favor (we mostly have long-armers for that, but sometimes the backing isn’t large enough to be loaded onto a long-arm machine). 

Now, what did I actually finish this week? How about a purple frog quilt?! This ¾ yard scrap of purple frog fabric was part of a lot of various critter fabric chunks I bought from Wanda Hanson, quilter extraordinare, when she had her last destash. 

If you click on the picture to enlarge it, you can see that this rather darkish fabric also has orange, blue, brown in it. I decided to use those colors to liven it up a bit and use up some more of those dang selvage half hexies. (At least their numbers are dwindling. in fact, I may have only some selvage columns left. But I digress.)

Purple frogs measures 36x45” and was quilted with a basic stipple using a variegated purple thread. The backing is two smallish leftover chunks of a Kaffe checkerboard and a metallic ombre purple. I’m out of labels for Quilts for Kids, as I mentioned before, so I’ll make a trip to our President (Sandy)’s house to pick up a couple dozen more labels and drop off 146 (yes, I counted) string blocks from the last couple months. The string blocks (whether made in solid colors or mixed prints) are used in lots of 15 in quilt kits for members to sew up. 

And I did get some purple blocks made this week. Thirteen bow tie blocks at 4.5”:

And nine more elephants. When added to the two elephant blocks I made a couple weeks ago (using that beautiful streaked paisley print), they make a herd of eleven. 

I will be assembling another elephant quilt top this week, as soon as I finish sewing one more ellie out of a print fabric that combines the greens and pinks together. Stay tuned!

Speaking of elephants, we renewed our adoption of two elephants from the Sheldrick Wildlife Trust. I was able to visit the Sheldrick elephant nursery (twice!) when I was in Nairobi, Kenya in 2018. Ever since then, we’ve maintained ties with them by “adopting” two elephants every year. (And my annual calendar is always from them as well!) This year, we renewed our adoption of Larro -our third year with her -a female “mini-matriarch” who recently graduated from the nursery to the Ithumba Springs Reintegration unit. We also adopted a young bull (less than 2 years old), who was recently orphaned through human-wildlife conflict in a drought-stricken area. His name is Choka.  I invite you to check out the site and read some of the amazing stories of their animal rescues (that also included rhinos, giraffes, etc). 

Aaaaand finally, it was our 19th anniversary this week. We had a lovely dinner at one of our favorite restaurants and skipped the cards and flowers, as we always do. Bruce is in the process of being fitted for a new arm. The forearm of his current prosthetic and the elbow socket will be re-used. But the upper arm will be new, better-fitting after the two years of body/arm changes) and more streamlined now that he’s no longer a “beginner”. And it’s all covered by Medicare. Life is good, and we are so grateful.

Linking up to Scrappy Saturday for the Rainbow Scrap Challenge.

The Elephants and the Squirrel

Hello! No, I’m not going to tell you an Aesop’s Fable. But I bet we could make up a good one with elephants and a squirrel, don’t you think?. But these elephants and the squirrel are made from fabric, and the moral of their story is that I’m crazy for sewing and quilting. But you knew that already.

We had a strange day on Wednesday. It was about 8:30 in the morning and it was drizzling outside. We were sitting in the living room drinking our coffee when we heard a thunderous BOOM! The power flicked off and a car alarm a couple houses down the street started honking. Long story short, an electrical transformer blew, taking the top part of a telephone pole with it. It occurred two houses down from us. The boom was so powerful, it set off that car alarm! Murray City responded quickly, but we knew we’d be without power for most of the day as they said the had to replace the transformer and the pole. Anyway, there went my sewing plans, but at least I had a good book to read. As it turned out, the city had it all repaired and the power was restored by 11:45 a.m.! YAY!!

So, the first thing I did this week was to sort my tons of green scraps. The Rainbow Scrap Challenge color for May is dark green (hunter, forest) and sage. Sage isn’t that dark necessarily, but leans more to the gray side (as opposed to olive, which has more yellow).

Two Antique Tile blocks

 I’ve found that many of my blocks (strings, crumbs) benefit from a combination of dark and light or bright greens together. So, in addition to doing dark versions of my usual RSC blocks, you may see me adding in some brighter “kicker” greens into those. Heaven knows I probably could sew with green scraps for three or four months straight and not get through them all! 

I spent one whole afternoon just cutting scraps into pieces for elephants, framed 4-patches, bear paws, antique tiles, bullseye courthouse steps, etc etc. Then the elephant sewing began! 

First came the swirly elephants with polka dot ears. One has vertical swirls and the other has horizontal swirls. Must be a gender difference (wink). 

Next, the stately older elephants ambled in. How can we tell they’re older? Well, obviously, they’re made of Civil War (reproduction) prints! 

And then bringing up the rear for this week is this lovely young lady. She doesn’t know if she’s coming or going, because her scrap directionality is a bit mixed up. But that’s what happens when you have to work with a limited size scrap! The herd doesn’t mind!

These five elephants represent only one third of the dark green herd. 

Why so many? I’ll explain my plan in more detail next post. I have a wonderful green and blue foliage print that I’ll be using for two green and blue elephant quilts. I’ll also be making some trees to go along with the needed 12 elephants for each of these two quilts. Then some of the other ellie quilts will need greens, too, but those will be made when we do the light and bright greens. 

The Hearts for Ukraine quilt top got its final borders this week. Here it is up on the design board.

It measures 54x65” and is perfectly square. I promise. It looks wonky because it’s pinned at the top and just hanging below because my design board isn’t long enough. And heck, I can’t even pin it straight! Or take a straight picture. It is what it is!

I’ve prepared a backing, and now it is ready to be sandwiched and quilted. That’s now two larger quilts (the other is my Zipper quilt) to fit in somewhere between the four little green quilts for QFK that I’ve pulled scrap “kits” for. Oh, and then there’s the Squirrel project.

My friend Virginia from Quilts for Kids had me over this week to pick out some scraps from her horde! Seriously, as a Board member she is constantly sewing quilts and making kits for the masses, so she is a “front-line” processor of donation fabric and scraps and purchased yardage. I’m lucky to be able to use her as a resource when I have to match something or when I need more wild fabric to cut up for the Zipper kits.or when I just need a fresh scrap fix…

So in the above flimsy, she had given me the floral fabric and the multi-colored checked fabric. I was going to cut them up for Zipper blocks, but they looked so good together. So I pulled out some matching yellow, green and orange fabrics and ended up having enough of them all together to make another little quilt top! SQUIRREL!! 

These colors aren’t showing true on my camera or monitor, but trust me - this is one happy little quilt! Or it will be when I get the two borders sewn on!

Next week we’re finally getting a spinner knob installed on the steering wheel of our RAV4 so that Bruce can drive. You may remember that he had to have his right arm amputated two years ago. Spinner knobs are only legal (at least in this state) on vehicles driven by amputees. I’m not very excited about this because Bruce has always been a Mr. Magoo-type driver. Seriously, he’s fine if he’s taken his ADD medicine. That’s the only condition I laid down.

I’m not sure if I’ll be here to join in next week with a Saturday post. My son Ryan and I are flying to Seattle on Thursday and won’t be back until Sunday night. My daughter Megan is having surgery, and we’ll be there helping out her and Ted for several days. I’ll try to get a post ready before I leave, but we’ll just have to see. 

Have a great week!

(Elephant) Trunk Show!

The elephants are having a Trunk Show, and you’re invited!! Try to contain your excitement, LOL!!

Our hosts for this exciting event are the Pink Elephants, who are proudly sponsored by Pink April for the Rainbow Scrap Challenge. Let’s meet them first…

Three of them you met last week, but they’ve been joined by four other friends who were, um, shall we say browsing in the bush?!? It is what elephants do. And now they’ll join their other multicolored friends on the design board for a good ol’ elephant trunk show!

Oh my goodness, they are so cute I can’t even stand it! Other than one red elephant I gave to my friend Ruby (who is also making some for a quilt for her sister), these are all the elephants I’ve made since my first two (green) prototypes last fall. Or summer. Whatever. The pattern is Stomping Ground by Wendy Sheppard.

So how many will I be making? I don’t know, but there will be several dozen more over the next six or eight months, I’m sure. They will be arranged and spaced out by colors into kid quilts using fun fabrics to tie the selected colors together. I want lots of options and combos. Here are a few fabric possibilities from my stash.

I’ve pretty much decided against the brown one at the bottom, and my favorite is the gray at the top with magenta, aqua, orange and lime dots. (And wouldn’t that make cute elephants?) But I have plenty time to decide. Plus we’ll actually be having our Utah Shop Hop again this year, so I’ve got an opportunity to pick up some fun mixer prints and (hopefully) some cute elephant backings. So be watching for more “trunk shows” later in the year!

Before I continue with my weekly pink blocks, I want to show you the hardwood floor we uncovered in the master bedroom. The previous owners had carpeted over it in the early nineties. We know it was them because we’re only the second family to live in this home built in 1963. Unfortunately, they repainted the bedroom white at the time and didn’t use drop cloths. Some of the paint splattered on the floor. Luckily, some of it was covered by the new wider and thicker baseboards, but our contractor Jeff and Bruce himself did a lot of scraping. Other than just a little cleaning, oiling and filling some carpet tack holes, there was nothing else necessary.

Yes, the bedroom is small, but it will fit a California King, and we have been shopping for a split adjustable bed. 

I have lots more from the remodeling projects (laundry room, linen closet) to share, but I’m going to do those in a separate post mid-week. Next year’s project will include all new six-panel interior doors. There’s always something more to do, isn’t there?

So, back to pink. This week I got in lots of quality sewing time thanks to spring showers and inclement weather.

Twelve Bullseye Log Cabin blocks

Thirty 6.5” string blocks

And two finishes for Quilts for Kids.  This first one I’m calling Ukrainian Cats simply because of the yellow and blue. The combination of yellow, blue and black scraps and selvage blocks was inspired by the backing fabric, a gift from my friend Sally. 

You may recall that I used this same fabric in a different color way for a backing in one of my January quilts. Thanks, Sally! These backings have been both fun and inspirational. 

Ukraine Cats finished at approximately 38x48”

I also got last week’s framed four-patch block flimsy quilted and bound. I would rather do little donation quilts in just pinks than to “taint” a gender-neutral rainbow quilt with them if I can. (Because - macho dads). I do mix in pink on larger RSC quilts now and then, or if I’m keeping it for gifting. Most of the men I know don’t have a problem with it!

This cutie quilt finished at 40x48”

I’ve got two more pink flimsies waiting for quilting, one flimsy being sewn together this weekend, and two more pink “kits” of gathered pink scraps to assemble into something resembling cohesive quilts!

And I think that just about covers it for now. Be sure to visit Scrappy Saturday to see all the creative quilty goodness that’s been sewn up this week.

Yello-phants

What a busy and fun week it was! The temperature got up to 70 F degrees on Thursday, which was a fluke. Friday was cloudy and cooler and we’re expecting snow - or rain - this weekend. We need the moisture and I would much prefer that to unseasonable temperatures!

I’m going to back up to last Saturday and hit the week’s highlights from there. At our monthly Quilts for Kids workshop, the program was changed from working with scraps and bits of fabric (crumb piecing) to working with strips. That made sense, actually, since we can then use the resulting scraps in a future crumb workshop. We’ll be doing crumbs in May. But on Saturday, we sewed like the wind and a dozen of us got through one 18-gallon tub of strips in 3 hours and churned out lots of string blocks. Typically we make quilt kits that members can “check out” (like a library) and then sew and return. These string kits will consist of 15 strip blocks and 15 solid blocks, 6.5” unfinished each, plus enough fabric for two small borders. We made enough strip/string blocks for 20 kits!

165 string blocks = 2 piles of 3.5” each!

That workshop had me all fired up for sewing strings, so on Sunday and Monday, I pieced 75 string blocks, then pulled out 90 more multi-colored string blocks from my cache. I’ve been making them for months and months. So, 165 more blocks are going to our Board to make the kits!!

I have plenty of strips and strings to work with, and that was supplemented by my friend Claudia in Washington who sent a boxful of kid fabrics for backings, as well as chunks and strips. It’s so much fun to have a fresh infusion of kids fabrics, especially when some of what I have is dark or adult-ish. Thank you, Claudia!

Claudia - you might recognize those monkeys!!

Tuesday brought March and the start of a new color for the Rainbow Scrap Challenge. This month we are working with our yellows and golds. How perfect is that? So many of us have the Ukraine people in our hearts and minds, and the interwebs are springing up with yellow and blue (Ukranian flag colors) quilting ideas to ease our hearts and possibly provide potential fundraising opportunities. I plan to join in later this month as some of these organized efforts begin. How about you?

But first I tackled my yellow elephants. Yellophants!!

I got all six of them made this week. Notice the pineapple ears. Chevron ears. So much fun! These blocks will finish at 10”, and are from Wendy Shepard’s pattern, Stomping Ground. 

Next up were the Antique Tile blocks. I’m doing two of these for 10 months and will assemble all 20 blocks at year-end into a quilt that measures 48x60” (or larger with sashing).

On Wednesday, Bruce and I went to a newish quilt shop and we dropped off Swimmingly for quilting.  The picture at the right is just to refresh your memory. The picture makes it look bowed, but it’s not in real life!

Before taking it to the quilter, and thanks to the pep talk by my friend Roseanne, I gave myself some grace and didn’t throw in the towel on it. Instead, I added a small black stop border around the entire perimeter of the quilt (not shown in the picture) to preserve the points. At the quilt shop, we picked out a nautical-themed pantograph. Bruce had a ball checking out their long arm quilting machines and talking to the ladies. 

We’ll have it back in a couple weeks, which will give me plenty of time to add the black binding and finish it before the Stay at Home Round Robin finished quilt parade. I’m trying to think of a venue that might be good to use for some glamour shots of the finished quilt. But we’re landlocked here, and I don’t see (sea?) a visit to the coast in my immediate future. There’s always the Great Salt Lake, but..... um, probably not. 

On the same day we went to the quilt shop, we actually spent the afternoon at South Towne Mall in Sandy, where we went clothes shopping (pants for both of us, plus a belt for Bruce and personals for me) and had a coffee treat and split a pretzel. And then we stopped for a nice dinner on the way home. Wow. It was so nice to be out and about in public again and doing some normal things. And I sure got in a lot of steps!

The other thing I did this week was pull three personal (“personal” meaning made by me) “kits” of scraps to make Quilts for Kids quilts this month. The first turned out not to have as much yellow in it as I thought, but I added the middle yellow chunk and it will work fine for this month. Here is what I’ve cobbled together.

This top helps me use up the aqua selvage half-hexie blocks and lots of random pastel strips in pink, yellow and aqua. It measures 40x46”, perfect for a little toddler girl. I plan to quilt it this coming week along with one or two or three other quilts from Jo’s Country Junction Community Quilts program. All finished quilts will go to the Salt Lake Quilts for Kids group, and be documented here and eventually on Jo’s blog. 

I think that just about wraps it up for this week. Tonight we’re going to my son Ryan and DDIL Kim’s house for dinner and to celebrate Ryan’s and my birthday. It’s a little early for both, but for working couples like Ryan and Kim, weekends are it. Ryan is doing the cooking (he loves it and he’s the best chef in the family!) and I’m baking the cakes. Yes, that’s cakeS, plural. Ryan and I like the plain yellow cake with buttercream frosting and Kim and Bruce like chocolate (which will be made into cupcakes). And they’ll get all the leftovers, so I won’t feel guilty having just one piece!!