MY HANDSOME MEN, ETC.

After our Easter dinner, DS Dan said he wanted a picture of the 3 generations of men since 2 of them had suits on.  DH put on a jacket and we took pictures in the front yard.  BTW, Dan played the piano at our church service and Jakob played the organ at the First Baptist Church in town.  We had a beautiful day!!  Of course, we missed the other men and women in the family that live far away.

DH Rich, DS#1 Dan and DGS#1 Jakob

I forgot to add this to my trip post.  When I saw this on the kitchen wall from a distance at our DS#3's home, it looked like a quilt.  Closer up I could see that it was lizards colored and glued onto construction paper.

Here's a closer look at it.  They all fit together without any spaces between them my 10 year old grandson made it.  I wonder if this would be hard to make as a quilt?

Yay!  I found the unicorn pattern!  I plan to make the one with the rainbow mane.

I got the new AQS magazine and love this bird wall hanging.  I'm thinking about making it, but having 2nd thoughts.  After "Skill Level" it says "Easy!"  After reading through the instructions, it doesn't look easy to me.  Plus it will take many trips to various shops (this is the good part) to find the
pieces of fabrics for it - 6" to 12" squares of 16 to 18 cuttable fabrics for the bird!!! as an example.

What do you think?  Do you think it would be fun or a chore?

I'm quilting a patriotic round robin which will be donated at the May guild meeting.  I'm about half way done.

I'm also quilting the Quirky little quilt from the Temecula quilt-along.  This was a fun little project.

Thanks for visiting!

WHAT'S BEEN HAPPENING?

We were out of town for about 10 days and I have gotten behind in my blog posting and reading.  But now we're back and we have recuperated from the long drive.  DH used to be a truck driver and he loves to drive, so we drove to Kansas City, Kansas area and back.  3 days each way.  It's about 1800 miles.  On the way, we drove through Sister, Oregon (and on the way back)  so I stopped to see if they had the Unicorn pattern that I had seen there last year.  I want to make the pillow for my DGD.

They did have it, and I bought it, but right now I don't know what I did with it!  I'm sure it must be here someplace and I will find it when I'm not looking for it.  As many of you know, it is the Stitchin' Post that started the outdoors quilt show in Sisters many years ago.  

I also bought some unicorn fabric by Tula Pink.

We went to Kansas to visit DS#3 and his family.  There are 2 boys, ages 8 and 10.  They are both on baseball teams and we saw 4 games that the 10 year old played in.  The picture below has him in it, but you can't really see what he looks like.  Out of the 4 games, they won one game.  But, they also won a game after we left and DGS pitched for part of it.

This is the decoration on my son & DIL's front door.

Three days there and three days home, we saw lots of mountains and in fact most of the trip we either could see mountains or we were traveling in them.  Some beautiful scenery such as the photo below, which was taken from the car with my cell phone.  You can't see it very clearly, but there are snow capped mountains in the distance.  We saw lots of snow capped peaks on the trip.

DH told me that I could fly if I wanted to, but I didn't see the point of spending more money to fly when he was driving.  I didn't mind most of the trip except the day that he drove over 1,000 miles (because we left late on the first day and we wanted to get there in time for a baseball game on the 3rd day).  We did make it in time, by the way.

Here are the 3 blocks for the Quirky Little Quilt Along.  I went to my HST collection, which I have divided into baggies for each different size and found some that I could use so all I had to do is sew them together.

Happy Easter!

DESIGN WALL, ETC.

I took a couple pictures of my design wall to prove that I'm working on some things.  This first one is the blocks for Temecula's Quirky Little Quilt Along.  I thought the blocks were so cute, and decided to make them.  I made the first three and the second set of 5 9-patches were from a block trade that I participated in a couple years ago.  I still haven't used them!  (Shame on me).

The top 2 blocks in this second picture are BOMs for my quilt guild (meeting this morning) and are 9 1/2" blocks.  We will keep the blocks for ourselves and then make something with them.

The string blocks, of course, are for Lori's String A-Long.  These are 6 1/2" blocks.  

Saturday, I was a vendor at Farm Fest held at the Yamhill Valley Heritage Center in McMinnville, OR (my town).  This is half of the booth.  It turned out to be pretty successful for me.  Yea!

The main event for Farm Fest is the plowing competition using horses.  In fact, it was the 53rd annual plowing competition and I wish you all could have seen it.  The horses are amazing and it was very muddy.  It had been raining a lot last week and also rained most of the morning on Saturday.  But that didn't deter anyone.  After all, this is Oregon!  You can't cancel anything due to a little or a lot of rain.

You can see the mud puddles in the pictures.

I think it probably rains for this event every year.  This was my second year to be a vendor (indoors, thankfully) and it was raining and hailing last year.

Have a wonderful week!

March String-Along Linky

I basted this string quilt a couple months ago and decided I better get busy and sat least start quilting it.  I have quilted several of this type of quilts before, but I really didn't know how I wanted to quilt it.  So I started with some swirly quilting and continued with various swirls.  I got almost half of it quilted yesterday.

I also finished quilting and binding the flag quilt.

I will be linking this up to Lori's blog.  Thanks, Lori, for giving us the incentive to get busy with all the millions of strings that are hanging around our sewing room!  I'm trying to decide what to make with strings next. 

It's a beautiful day today, but I came down with some kind of bug, so I'm staying inside.  Hope you have a wonderful spring weekend!

VERY DELINQUENT!

Yes, I have very delinquent concerning posting lately.   I have been reading some of my favorite blogs, but not wanting to spend oodles of time with it as I have been trying to get things done in the quilting room.

For one thing, I am getting ready for the first craft show of the year at the Yamhill County Heritage Museum.  The museum is only a couple miles from my home and it is a wonderful place for many fun events.  Click on the link and then click on Farm Fest & Plowing Competition.  Last year was the first time I had been to that event and it was amazing!  It was rainy, windy and cold.  I didn't think there would be many people there.  I was very wrong!  People came to see the plowing competition and there were horses and mules everywhere.  So much fun and so interesting!  I didn't get to see everything because I had to "man" the booth, but managed to get outside a few times.  You can see my post from last year here.

Here are a couple things I've made for the sale.

Kitchen towel with bunnies

Lap quilt

Last month DH and I met my BIL/SIL in Ocean Side, WA for a barbershop singing concert which we enjoyed immensely.  There was a quilt shop in the town and I got this "printed interfacing" kit to make this flag.  I saw the flag hanging in the quilt shop and was intrigued.  The owner said you just sew along the lines to make the stripes.

I didn't realize what she meant until I got home and looked at the instructions.

You sew the interfacing onto the fabric in strips and then have to turn it like a tube and then you can iron the stripes onto the white fabric.  It wasn't very easy to turn the long tubes of fabric and interfacing because the interfacing tears very easily, but I got it done.  There is one more printed interfacing so I can make another flag.

I'm quilting it now.  I also basted a couple other things, so now I have 4 more things to quilt when I'm finished with the flag.

Spring has arrived and the weather has turned very nice.  Trees and flowers are starting to bloom - well, the daffodils have been blooming for a few weeks already.

Happy Spring!

BIRD QUILT DELIVERED

The State Bird/Flower quilt is finished!  Including a label!!  So, yesterday I delivered it to my friend.  She told me that she had embroidered the blocks around 2000 and that someone had been going to make them into a quilt, but it didn't happen.

Here are some close up views of the border and more blocks.  I quilted everything the free motion way, quilting hooked feathers in the borders and in some of the blocks.

The easiest way to quilt the blocks was to stitch around the bird and flowers and then stippling in the white spaces.

For the pelican, I made waves lines because they are a water bird and sometimes I quilted feathers or circles or echoing.  I wanted to be sure everything was sewn down well because the batting was polyester.

Here she is with her quilt.  She was very happy to have it finished.  She is pretty much home bound now, so she hasn't been to church for quite a while.  I met her in my Sunday school class a few years ago.  

One more project accomplished.  I didn't work on any strip quilting this month, so I couldn't link with Humble quilts, but I will do some in March.

BIRD QUILT GETTING QUILTED AND NEW WINDOW TREATMENT!

I posted about the bird quilt here and I've been working on it quite a bit.  I just finished quilting all 50 blocks.  First I stitched along the ditch of all the sashings to stabilize it.  The friend I'm doing this for provided me with polyester batting.  Below are 3 of the blocks showing how I quilted them.  I stitched around the birds and flowers and filled in the rest in a variety of ways.

My original plan was to quilt cross hatching in each block, but then I figured that it would be very difficult to turn the quilt in order to change direction.  It works great on a smaller project, but with a large bed quilt, I didn't think I could do it.  My plan is to to quilt feathers in the setting triangles.  I started that this morning and it's going pretty well - and quite fast!

Last week I finally finished the window treatment for my sewing room - a yo yo valance!  I didn't want a full curtain because it might block out some of the sunlight that the north window provides.

My other project was to straighten my fabric closet, which I did, but still have lots of smaller pieces to sort through.   That is an ongoing problem!!  Can anyone relate to that?

WILLAMETTE VALLEY QUILT FESTIVAL, ALBANY, OREGON

Last week I went to Albany (about 40-50 miles south) Oregon to this quilt show.  It is the 2nd annual show that they have put on and it was very impressive!

Here are the best pictures that I took of the quilts that I liked the most.  I won't say much as there are quite a few of them.  Enjoy!

 

The next one received a blue ribbon and was made by Lynette Horn, a friend from my quilt guild.

This was my favorite quilt!

It was a wonderful show with lots of great vendors as well!