VISIT WITH GRANDSONS

Not much sewing here, except a little by hand.  We have been spending the week with our DIL and 2 adorable grandsons (DS#3 is overseas)!  I just had to post a few pictures.  The first 2 are of Superman filling the swimming pool!

Eli in camper with his giraffe

Eli again - smiling this time.

Two little boys do keep you busy!!  Jonah spent one night sleeping in the camper!  That was the highlight of his week!

This week we will be leaving so we can attend DS#2's graduation from nursing school!  Yea!!

Two Finishes, an Almost Finish and some Planning

I have been very busy this last week.  Two projects are finished except for hand sewing the binding to the back.  First is the Temecula Quilt Co. mystery quilt from the beginning of the year.  

I copied the border quilting feathers from Joanne at Thread Head.  Her April 20 post had feathers like these on a little quilt and they are super easy to do!  

My next finish is a donation quilt for a teenage boy.  I purchased a box of fabric samples at a garage sale several years ago and one day (finally) I got the urge to do something with them.  It is all quilted and bound now and the binding just needs to be sewn down on the back.

My "almost" finish is this quilt named "Everyday Best" but I think I will call mine "Kaleidoscope."  It is basted now and waiting to be quilted.  DH helped me baste this one and another quilt (a long time UFO) this week and my next priority will be to get this one quilted.  I am really enjoying quilting on my new sewing machine!  I have had it a month already - I can't believe it!

Now to the planning part.  I made a few more blocks to use in my APQ Blogging Buddies quilt and I'm hoping that I can get this quilt put together sometime this year.  I have a plan, but I'm not sure I will stick with it or do something different.  

I'm also thinking that I might need to get someone with a long arm to baste my king size quilt for me.  It is too hard to baste a large quilt.  The two that we quilted were hard enough and I don't think I can handle a king size one.  Any other suggestions?  What do most people do?

Thanks for visiting!

LETTUCE WRAPPER

WARNING!!  No quilting in this post.

We are trying to eat more healthily these days and a book I have lists various foods along with their nutrient-density value.  The foods that rank 100 are romaine lettuce, collard greens, spinach, etc.  You get the picture.  So I have been eating a lot of romaine lettuce.  At first, after I washed and drained it, I would wrap it in paper towels and put it in a plastic bag in the refrigerator.  I discovered that the paper towels soon were wet and I would exchange them for dry ones.  I was using too many paper towels!

One day I had a lightbulb idea!  I made several fat quarter size pieces of muslin - I serged around the edges.  Using a piece of muslin for each "head" of romaine lettuce, I wrapped it up and placed it in the plastic bag as shown in the pictures.

It works like a charm!  It keeps the lettuce nice and crisp and I don't have to waste tons of paper towels.  I can wash the muslin when it needs it.

Besides a salad, this is one of the things I eat for breakfast.  Six leaves of romaine, each with a little bit of peanut butter spread on it and one banana sliced thin and placed on each leaf.  It is easy and I really like it!  (the recipe is in the book "Eat to Live" by Joel Fuhrman, MD.  It calls for raw cashew butter, so my version isn't the pristine one, but I decided to substitute peanut butter.

The muslin FQs are also good for draining other type of vegetables such as bok choy that I use for another salad.  I just lay them out on the muslin, cover with another FQ and continue until they are all covered.  They dry much better than when doing it on paper towels.  

These will last for years by washing and reusing them, so it should save quite a bit of money spent on paper towels.  Maybe there are other ways to use the muslin FQs to replace paper towels as well.  Let me know if you think of any.

PRINTING MY BLOG

A few months ago I had a problem with blogger and I couldn't get into my blog at all!  I was horrified and afraid that I had lost it all.  My friend "Love" had advised me prior to this that she had been printing her blog posts out.  I had seen the web site "Blog2Print" and decided to check it out.  

The nice thing about it is that you have a lot of options that can save money, such as positioning the pictures so they don't take up as much space, softcover or hardcover, and black & white instead of color.

I decided on a softcover book in color and ordered one for the first year of my blog.  It turned out to be 64 pages long.  I was pretty happy with the results, so I recently ordered the second year, 2009 (66 pages).  They are pictured below with a sample page from each book.  I plan on ordering them by the year every few months until I am caught up to this year and then can order from then on in January.  

I'm real happy I did it and am wondering if any of you would be interested.  If you are, I can get "points"  for referring people, so go ahead and look at their website and if you think you might want to do it, leave a comment for me and I will "refer" you through their site.  That way, if you do decide to order, I will get some points towards my other books.  

Please don't feel pressured in any way, even if you decide you want me to refer you.  I sure don't want anyone to feel obligated and I sure don't want to lose any friends over something like this.

Below are my travel projects ready for a short trip.  They are piecing projects that will be easy to work on in the camper.

Have a great weekend!

KING SIZE QUILT, ETC.

I participated in the Quilt Along that Joanne at Thread Head hosted last year.  I decided to make it into a king size quilt for our bed because I only have one king size quilt and we've been using it for about 4 years and I was getting tired of it.  If you click on the link above, you can see all the blocks as well as a picture of Joanne's finished quilt - the one that's labeled "My quilt - all finished."  I didn't make all the blocks as shown, just the ones I liked best.  Mainly Ohio Star, Sawtooth Star and Churn Dash.  I will be finishing mine with the same border as Joanne's.

Close up of the first border.

When I first retired and we were on our first trip, I took my Featherweight along.  At that time I started making blocks for "Scrappity-Do-Dah" which was a quilt pattern I received in a quilt magazine advertisement.  Since then, I have made blocks from time to time until I now have about 460 blocks - enough for a 90" x 100" quilt!  One day this week, I just wanted some mindless sewing to do so I took these out and started sewing some together.  Here are some of them.  I only made 2 blocks out of each piece of fabric, so there will be lots of different fabrics in it.

Since my blog name is Country Log Cabin and my Etsy shop is Log Cabin Mercantile, I have been wanting to make a quilt block depicting a log cabin.  I finally got around to it!  It is a cabin with a log cabin block on one side.  

This morning I was looking for a quilt pattern that I KNOW is in one of these APQ magazines, but could I find it?  No!  I don't know the name of it either.  I think I should get my magazines organized and maybe I'll find it then.

A lady working in a quilt shop once told me that she is making a wedding quilt for each of her grandchildren.  She had 7 I think and they were all pretty young.  I want to do that as well, and I think I should start pretty soon.  My oldest one is 20!  That lady hand quilted all of hers, but I doubt I will do that.  Any suggestions?

SWEET GRANDDAUGHTER AND A DONATION QUILT FINISHED

My DIL sent a couple pictures of Abigail that I couldn't resist showing you all.  

What a beautiful day at the beach!  And it's within a 10 minute drive for them.

I finished this donation quilt and took it to my guild meeting last night to be delivered to Children's Hospital.

By the time I finished it, the backing fabric had kind of grown on me.  I still have about 2 yards of it left.

I have been working on putting the blocks together for a king size quilt and the top is almost done!  I just have to sew a few more rows together and then do the border and I will be ready to sandwich it and quilt  it on my new sewing machine.  I hope it will fit.  If it doesn't, I will call my friend to see if I can quilt the middle part on her HQ machine and then I will finish it at home.

We had more rain on Sunday and I think we're supposed to get more during this week.  It's good to have a rainy spring again.

APRIL FMQ CHALLENGE

I am so happy!  The technique for transferring a quilting pattern to the quilt block worked for me.  I have a quilt that I made with these blocks and I finally got it put together.  I received the quilting pattern from the quilt shop where I took the class, and was wondering how I was going to be able to transfer it to the quilt.  Thanks for the tutorial, Don!  It worked like a charm and I now feel much better about doing the quilting.  

It's kind of hard to see the pattern on this block, so I took a picture of the back.

The pattern is quite easy because you don't have to backtrack at all and can quilt the complete block without stopping - that is if you don't make any mistakes.

Another big bonus for me, was that with my new Janome 6600 sewing machine, I was able to use two different colors of thread, light on the bottom and brown on the top.  I wanted to test this out because the fabric that I have for the backing of the quilt is light and most of the quilt top is dark.  With my old machine, I was never able to get the tension good enough to do it without it showing through.  Yea!!!

BOOK REVIEW AND DONATION QUILT

The second book in "The Daughters of Caleb Bender" series by Dale Cramer.

I received this book from Bethany House Publishers in exchange for writing a review and posting it on my blog.  I had read the first book in the series, so I was very happy to be able to review the second book.  The intriguing thing about this series is that it is inspired by actual events!  In fact, it was part of the author's family that went to Mexico to live due to persecution of the Amish in the United States during the 1920s.

I couldn't put this book down!  The story is compelling when the Bender family experiences disease, bandit attacks and death.  The fifth daughter, Miriam, wonders if she will be able to find an Amish husband in Mexico, but then several other families join them.  Will she fall in love with the son of one of those families?  I don't want to give the story away, but I do recommend it to you.

I just finished quilting a donation quilt on my new sewing machine!  It was great!

This is the backing.  Kind of wild!  I purchased this fabric at a garage sale in Illinois last summer for $1.00 - and that's for 5 yards!  The seller said it was from Africa and I was kind of afraid it would bleed a lot, but it didn't, so that is good.

I hope someone at the children's hospital likes it.