A VISIT WITH TWO BLOGGERS

Yesterday I met two bloggers for shopping and lunch!  One is "---Love" from I Just Love quilts and the other is Jennifer from Purple Hearts Ori"jenn"als.  I had already met Love a couple other times and she suggested we all get together.  We met at Lone Star House of Quilts in Arlington, TX.  I have been attending the Jo's Little Women class there and I needed to get a few pieces of fabric for our assignment for Feb. & March.  Love wanted to get some reproductions for the first time and, of course, Jennifer needed some fabric also.  I hope you'll check out their web site and and facebook page.  It's a great shop!

There is a huge magnolia tree in the front yard that I love.

Alice is the owner of the shop and they specialize in reproduction fabrics.

The entry into the shop:  Above - to the left of the door;  Below - straight ahead.  Promises of things to come!

Another display below in the room where they keep Jo Morton fabrics.

Below is a quilt that Love brought to share with us.  It was made in 1902 by her  great-grandmother and is in really good shape!  What a treasure!  

After shopping, we went out to lunch and had a great time visiting and getting to know each other better.

Last, but not least, here is my Civil War block for the week.  A nice easy one!

I forgot to mention in my last post that you can find a video demonstration of the blocks we made for donation quilts if you google "ten minute quilt block."  I got my new quilting foot in the mail yesterday, so I'm planning to try quilting again.  I hope that fixes the problem.  Have a great week everyone!

LUCKY AGAIN!

I was fortunate enough to win a giveaway from Wendy at Snippets of a Quilter and I received a package yesterday with this lovely table runner in it.

There is wool applique on both ends of the runner.

I also got a FQ of this western cowgirl fabric, an Old Glory pattern and a note pad for my purse.

I put the runner on a dresser and think it looks very nice, brightening up the bedroom!  Thanks, Wendy!

This morning I basted three donation quilts.  Here they are piled on a chair waiting to be quilted.  I'm going to go ahead and start on one of the smaller ones and see how it goes.  I ordered a new quilting foot and hopefully it will arrive soon.  I'm pretty sure my problem is coming from my old quilting foot, so we'll see what happens.  

I'm hoping to get these quilted before we go visit the grandkids in three weeks.

WEEKEND QUILTING

The weekly Civil War Block comes out on Saturday, and since this was an easy one, I made it right away.

My guild had a workshop Saturday to make donation quilts that will go to the critically ill children at Dallas Children's Hospital ICU.  Below are blocks made by one of our members.  She is making a larger quilt for a teenager.  I made 2 baby quilts using this same pattern with novelty fabric.  I took pictures, but they were blurry, so I'll post them another day.  Each block has 5 squares of equal size and by sewing them together in a certain way, you get the diamond in the middle.  It looks really nice and is very easy and quick, especially when we used 10" squares.

Now I have 3 donation quilts (those 2 plus a string quilt) to baste and quilt.  I hope to get at least a couple of them finished during this next month.

I spent a couple days quilting on my basket quilt, but I'm having some problems with the stitches skipping.  I cleaned the machine, changed the needle and still have the problem.  I think I need a new free motion quilting foot as mine has a rough edge on it that might be catching the thread, so I'm going to go by a sewing machine store in Arlington tomorrow when I go to my Jo Morton class and get a new foot.  I'm sure my machine needs servicing too, but I'm going to put that off and take it to be serviced while we're gone.  The only other thing I can think of for the skipped stitches is the basting glue.  I noticed that there is a little bit of stickiness on the needle from time to time.  I didn't have that problem on the other quilts that I spray basted, though.

Here is my "mini-design wall" with some of my Thread Head Quilt Along blocks.  The Ohio stars in the top 3 rows are ones that I just finished this morning.  My design wall is sandwiched between the door and a cabinet, so it doesn't hold many blocks.

Below are close-ups of 4 of the Ohio Star blocks.  I love easy blocks!  These went together very nicely.  It's a good think JoAnne had us cut 4 1/4" squares for the hourglass part because even that made it a little scant for 3 1/2". 

We're getting our taxes done on Wednesday, so I need to go over the figures to make sure I have everything ready.  Ugh!  Good luck with yours....

VINTAGE POTHOLDERS AND A FINISH

Last year Karen from Log Cabin Quilter sent me some vintage potholders.  I posted a couple pictures, but am finally getting around to a couple more.  I found this small wood rake at a garage sale for 10 cents and took all the lace and ribbon off of it, DH painted it black and I hung it on the side of my china cabinet.  

This is the side view of my china cabinet.

This is the view from the front.  These are some of the cutest little potholder dresses that I have ever seen.

It seems that after Christmas, when the mad rush is over, I like to work on some Christmas items.  A couple years ago I bought the Art to Heart book "I Believe" by Nancy Halvorsen, and I hadn't made anything from it.  I was looking through it one day and decided to make some tree ornaments for the grandchildren.  They don't read my blog (or if the older ones ever do, they haven't told me), so I'm posting the pictures.

The Santa ornament is for Jonah.

The singing cats are for our 15 year old grandson - he is musically inclined.

The girls (2 of them) will each get an angel.

And the baby Jesus is for Eli.  It feels good to have these done for next Christmas.

A week ago or so I spray basted this basket quilt in two sections and I've been thinking about how to quilt it.  I didn't want to do an over-all pattern.  Today I decided to get with the program and get started.  I did a vine with leaves in the sashing, but that picture didn't download for some reason.  I'll post it next time.

I'm using Aurifil thread and really like it.  It's the first spool I have ever tried and I'll definitely get more!

HAPPY VALENTINE'S DAY!

I thought I'd share some of the antique valentines that were in my Mother's collection.  (She never threw a card away).   These are about 100 years old.  Aren't they sweet?

Valentine's day makes me think of my grandmother, who was born 135 years ago today.  

Hope your day is sweet!

MORE BLOCKS AND A STUDIOUS GRANDSON

It's been a while since I blogged - I have been keeping very busy not only just making these blocks, but I finished a strip quilt top and I'm waiting to get some batting to be able to quilt that.  

We kept warm and stayed inside for all the bad weather, snow and ice.  If you saw any news coverage of the weather around the Super Bowl, you know how much snow and ice we had because we live about 10 miles from Cowboy Stadium.

I was very happy to see this log cabin block was the Civil War block for this week - it's the easiest one so far!

Last weeks civil war block was a lot harder, but I got it done!  I plan to keep up on these each week while I'm home.  Hopefully, I can do them when we're out of town too or I will get behind fast.

These next six blocks are for my Thread Head quilt-along. 

We got this cute picture of Jonah by email this week.  As you can see he's studying up on being a 2-year-old!  I'm sure his parents appreciate that.

Thanks for all your comments!

TWO FINISHES!

I got up at 5:00 AM and made two of these blocks for my churn dash/star quilt - patterns from Thread Head.  

I'm so excited to have my flag quilt finished!  From the first time I saw it on Lori's blog at least a year ago, I knew I wanted to make it.  I can't remember when I started it, but when I saw Lori's quilt in person last June, I was determined.  I have it hanging on my quilt rack, although it really doesn't quite fit - it's a little scrunched on the rod.  I'll think of a better place to hang it.  

I don't know if you can see how I quilted it or not.  The meandering quilting on the blue square is done with variegated thread, so the dark part doesn't really show up.  It looks like it's not quilted very much because all you can see is the lighter blue thread.

I probably shouldn't have used a directional fabric for the field of blue, because when it is hanging, it's going sideways!  Oh, well.  I am very happy to have it finished.

This is the donation quilt finished.

I don't know what got into me this afternoon.  We've been hunkering down in the cold and icy weather, but I decided to do some cleaning!  The dust in my sewing room was at least an inch thick!  It's a lot better now, but I still haven't finished because I decided to vacuum out my closet too.  Oh, my gosh, it was bad too.  I even found some stuff to get rid of.  Woo Hoo!  Maybe I'll continue some more cleaning tomorrow - or maybe not.

Hope you are all keeping warm!