Pigs in a Blanket

We stopped in at the Weston Quilt shop prior to T's party yesterday. Greg played with the dogs again. T went in search of a potty and I shopped for fabric for binding and backing the DOTS quilt. The backing is pumpkin and spice from Deb Strain and the binding will be the green with the tiny floral. It's already in the hands of Greg's new-found quilter - she's new and she's easy on our budget and swears she's only doing ours for practice as she doesn't want to go the business route. HA! I've already got 5 finished quilts and 5 more to go before Christmas and she's the only quilter within a 2 hr radius that isn't booked until SPRING! And no - I'm not telling anyone her name/number.

Here's a sneak peak at my current project.

It's been driving me crazy today. More on it's history later...

Grandopening Giveway's

2 sites for you to visit today my fellow bloggers. Each of the following are opening brand new shops and are celebrating with a heck ? hecks? 2 hecks of a giveaway: click click click!!!

http://web.me.com/thedizzydaizy/The_Dizzy_Daizy/Shop_Talk/Entries/2009/9/24_Grand_Opening!!!.html#

http://my-fabric-obsession.blogspot.com/ - The Flannel Queen

I'm praying that my cut and paste method works here as my eyes are a little hung over today. more from smoke allergy than beer though. My good friend T. retired from "street walking" - a 30 yr job as a meter reader for the electric company. She rented the top of our favorite irish pub and invited everyone she knew. I got to play the part of "bouncer" and only let the pary goers into the reserved balcony. The place was packed to hear Flannigan's Right Hook - a band out of Kansas City. And NO one washappy to hear me say "reserved". Greg had to growl at a few people for me. The Pub is 6 stories underground inside old brewing storage cellers. It's a very cool place if you are ever near enough to visit Weston Mo. The next 2 weekends would be ideal as Oct 3/4 is APPLE FEST and OCT 9/10/11 is IRISH FEST. Want to know more? visit www.westonirish.com OH! be sure to get to the pub early and take the TOUR! You not only get to learn the history and brewing process but get to see the SECRET CELLER and get FREE samples of the 4 made on site brews.

Hey DOC, I'm seeing SPOTS!

Sorry that the quality of this pic is poor - image was taken at dusk. I've been working on this all week. It's my first attempt at applique. Everyone else in the class is doing some intricate several peices thing like flowers and stems. I went for big round dots. My rounds still have flat spots but what the hell - it's done right? Applique wasn't near as hard as I thought. Greg quipped "Hey this is like duct tape for Quilts" I loved that so much I had him sent it to the heat n bond company. Don't you think that'd be a catchy ad during the super bowl? I can just see a million men turning to the crafty wife and saying: "you should get some of that." I'd had this whole plan for how to lay out the quilt top only to get excited and just grabbed at random. Greg kept saying my seams were off - but when you get close you realize it's the background fabric coming together weird. I'm not sure how I feel about that. These aren't really my colors so it's hard for me to fully like it. The friend I'm making it for really likes green and orange. Every time we've done crafty things, she's done some really cool circle pattern. When I looked up her baby registry there was this neat little play mat in browns, blues and greens that were all circles. I though PERFECT - I'm going to do that dot to dot pattern from the American Quilts magazine. I started grabbing green and orange fat qrts from everywhere and then HATED them together. Then I saw the background fabric and knew this was what I needed - I could just never get that blue worked in or find a fabric that had those colors. The pattern doesn't have a border but I'm wondering if it needs one? Maybe a dark brown would calm it all down a little? Gold might work too? The big circles have a swirly gold line in them. The whole thing kind of leaves my brain out of focus.

Party * Cabin

WILD hootenanny at the lake or in the woods? Nope, sorry to disappoint those looking for a tale of debauchery and drunkenness - that's next weekend. Last night was the birthday party for our Quilt Leader, Patty. At the suggestion of Patty's SIL, we hijacked the regular quilt meeting and surprised her with an evening of gratitude and celebration. The SIL was able to sneak away some photos and Greg and I put together a video memoir (there were tears and laughter - hallmarks of a job well done). Another member brought games and prizes. Greg, our only male member won the quilt term unscramble. And I'm unashamed to admit that three of us were trying to cheat off of his page. He got a FQ, a pink seam ripper and fusible web as his prize! How cool is that? I 2nd placed (no prize) in the how many quilt block designs can you name. Margret, who has quilted forever, won.

*Margret and Award Winning Quilt*

She also won grand champion at our county fair with her block of the month quilt. She hand quilted it too. As gifts for Patty, each Quirky Quilter (our group's chosen name) made a signature block to express our personality to give her.
*This is my Block w/ Quilt related Poem*
We are leaving the finishing of the project to her. There were some beauties!

CJ, who is also a wood worker even constructed a quilt block out of wood pieces that she color stained and framed. It was amazing!

*Patty pictured with wood block*

If anyone is near Jamesport MO - she will be doing the after thanksgiving show there and plans to have more made to sell. I am astounded at the multiple talents of this group!


Today was the BOM in Holton (that pay $5 for the first block and as long as you show up with completed block you never pay again club) LOVE IT! It's nearly as good as a freebie. Okay so mine cost me $10 because it was really hard to get out of bed for that first one. Darn near didn't make it today too - we were a smidgen late but they took pity on us and let us in. We are on block number four of the IN THE CABIN set. All log cabin variations. There's supposed to be enough to make two mini paper pieced blocks from each one but I must not be cutting mine right or goofing up too much because I've only been able to make one of the 3" paper pieced versions. I'll confess - that was enough.

I think some of these look really odd as stand alone blocks!


On the way home, we'd planned to stop again at This Ol' House. A woman in her 80's runs it and she use to teach quilting on the radio - can you imagine? She did the very first BOM in this area that way and sells a booklet with the patterns that she designed. They all feature landmarks/history in our County. Turns out that at some point since we were last there about 3 weeks ago and today, she decided to retire and just took her sign down and closed! I was so disappointed! She had some of the coolest fabrics at reasonable prices, not to mention the HISTORY lesson you got while there! I do admit that I'm really curious as to where the building full of fabric is being sent off too? But she did call it "an old woman's playhouse" so perhaps it's not going anywhere. We made a side trip to one town over to check out a place we'd heard about that was a local quilt shop. We had been a little confused it seems. "The doll house" was not the quilt shop = it was a randomly open doll museum and the quilt shop was the one that we'd just been too that had closed. So back to home we went for quilting, napping and computerizing.

Odds and Ends

I've been working on the problem with my walking foot and have discovered that the main issue is operator error. *raises hand* that would be me. The foot works fine when used the way it's supposed to. When I try to cheat - it jams up and comes apart. Now you'd think this would make me not cheat. Nope, I found another foot that got the job done. It's not pretty but it's finished! This is probably why my last machines motor locked up? But we aren't going to think about that right now.

So here's some odd's I've made up with end pieces laying around.

Sewing Machine Cover for my machine. Every day I came home from work I noticed these little brown spots on my machine. I kept accusing Greg of spilling soda on it. Then I accused the cats. Finally figured out that Greg had been leaving the window open for the cats to romp and the flies were hanging out on my machine. That's right - it was fly puke. So there's been a bottle of rubbing alcohol next to my machine for the past month and every day I've cleaned and sanitized my machine because I couldn't stand the thought of touching it until I was sure all traces were gone. I finally found an online free pattern and made this cover last night. The handle is actually a piece off the backback straps I made. I was kinda impressed that my machine was able to sew it all together as I folded the ends under so it was like 9 thickness - that's 3 layers of batting. I did get a few error messages, made the walking foot fall apart and finished it with the above mentioned J foot. Not pretty but together and functional.

I had to wait for Greg's PIF to be received before I could show any of these. The pattern comes from Bags, Pillows and Pincushions and was called Big and Bold. I keep modifying the pattern each time I make one. The pattern has you make one long strip to go around but then you lose the corners. 4 cuts/seams make this much easier. It also has interfacing on each piece - this was nice to sew but I noticed my pins getting stuck in the cushion - or I'd have to stab twice to get them in there. I don't have lighterweight interfacing yet - that might have helped. But they seem just to work just fine without the interfacing too. I've also discovered that I'm incapable of doing a blind stitch. I think I'll look for invisible thread next.

Mini Pincushion on Greg's machine. He's a KU fan and I couldn't bring myself to try to do a jayhawk. I'm more of a K-State person. I did make a john deere one for my friend. I end used one of my christmas stamps of a reindeer to get the deer outline on top. These are made from felt and a bottle cap. I found the pattern online but I don't remember where. SO Sorry if I stole this from you. It has a velcro dot on the bottom so that it can be stuck wherever it's handy. I need to get bigger dots for this to really work well as I noticed Greg has nearly torn the bottom off of his. I'm not sure I'm happy with the look of the felt but I bought several sheets for making these and Now I feel stuck. The last one I made I stuffed with steel wool rather than poly-fil. Also discoverd that they were very light weight and so added a one inch washer inside the bottle cap. It could use more if not being stuck down.

My friend sold me her little deep freezer a couple of weeks ago and I've been a little nuts about it. I've wanted one for a few years and now that we are doing Angel Food every month, it's become a real need. I had a bag of potatoes that needed to be used up and I'd planned on making scalloped potatoes. Do you know how much a can of cheese soup costs? Well I found a LARGE can of Cheese for like $8 and thought it was a good deal. So I've made scalloped potatoes, mac n cheese with veggies, broccoli cheesy rice and hash brown casserole. I even ate a plate of nachos. The freezers just about full with "first timers" (not leftovers) and the can o'cheese is finally gone. Today went downtown for the qtrly flea market and found out I had the wrong date - it's next Sunday. So we went on to the orchards at Weston and picked up a PECK of apples and a qtr peck of peaches. The apples didn't look like that much in the sack. I've now got 3 full size pies and a 1/2 dz mini pies and I haven't even touched the peaches yet. I've given pies to my friends already and there's still an abundance it seems. I'm going to try freezing them but I'm afraid they'll be crushed in the throng. I've still got most of a pineapple upside down cake in the fridge that although scrumptious was WAY WAY too SWEET to eat after a couple of bites. Been re-reading the Stephanie Plum novels by Janet Evanovich - and her favorite is pineapple upside down cake. After reading about it so much, had decided to try it. She also recommends: donuts, cluck in a bucket (Burgers and Chicken) and butterscotch tastee cakes. I've not found the last one - it's a jersey thing. She eats peanut butter and olive sandwiches daily - so far that one hasn't tempted me. LOL. So the weekend hasn't left a lot of time for quilting activities not to mention the frustrations caused by the troublesome walking foot. I'm in that lull between needing to finish up the projects ready to be quilted and the new quilt tops waiting to be pieced. It's a predicament on which direction to go.

Branching Out

Greg and his PIF projects have inspired me to branch out a little bit. So as I was getting ready to box up and mail off the finished baby quilt for my cousin, I decided that the Big Brother needed a gift too. I think this is his birthday month too. It's hard to find quilting gifts for a 5 yr old boy (at least things I'm capable of making). I didn't really have any kid fabric either and as Walmart is the only fabric department within 45 miles - and you can't get any service there after 10pm (sometimes not before either) - I was stuck with what I had in my stash. Earlier this year I bought some train fabric thinking I'd back my dad's quilt in it. Bought 2 yards. Y'all are laughing now, right? I once had the gall to scoff at the quilt shop owner in Hiawatha when she told me I'd need more than a single yard for a quilt top. HA! 3 yrs later I'm doing internet searches to try to track down the discontinued print for another 2 yards. I told you I didn't have a clue as to what I was doing. So obviously the train fabric is still in the trunk waiting and I know that the Big Brother really likes Thomas the Tank. I figure what the hey - I'll go for it and attempted to make a backpack. I've no idea how big the arm straps should be for a 5 yr old but I'm sure his grandma can fix it if I'm too far off. I think if I make more of these I'll just do a single body strap/ sling type thing. And maybe round those corners on the flap?

Baby Quilt complete

Well, I waited about an hour until I was no longer so mad about breaking the walking foot. I gave it one last snap-on and go.... and then finished the darn thing by hand. It has a few issues but this was my first full binding on my own. There's another quilt on my dresser that I've got one side done and then figured that was enough. I'm hoping my cousin doesn't mind too terribly. I think it's easier to put an imperfect quilt to use - at least that's the theory I'm going with until I get better at doing these things. LOL.

ARG!

I can't believe it. I have about a foot left to sew on my red/black/white baby quilt to finish up the binding and I BROKE the darn walking foot. Works fine when I'm repairing and trying it on several layers of folded fabric. As soon as it touches the quilt, I get about 3 stitches and the bottom either falls off or jams up into the upper feet. Grrrrrrrrrr.

Freebies

Hooray for Freebies! Lee is giving away 5 free FQs in honor of her 1000 visiter. Leave her a comment for a chance to win! http://quiltsbylee.blogspot.com/2009/09/my-first-giveaway.html