Addendum

Yesterday, I talked about it being "three-quilt night" season. I went on to talk about the third quilt I throw onto the bed each night for an extra layer of warmth. 

But why ignore the other two quilts? Let's look at them today. I will soon be changing these out for Christmas quilts, so we'll take a quick peek.

Long Road Home always gets pulled out for fall. The colors have an autumn vibe, and gosh, it is such a treat to see it every day. I machine pieced the top, and really wanted to follow the pattern's suggestion of using light fabrics for the solid blocks. But, even more than replicating the pattern, I wanted to use stash fabrics, and I am so glad I did. This quilt became an excellent scrap quilt, and like the quilt in yesterday's post, I frequently find myself studying all the variety of prints. It has a lot of my favorite fabrics.

I hand quilted Long Road Home because I needed something to demonstrate at History Day in 2012. Gosh, a whole decade ago! The quilting would be easy - straight grid lines. Perfect for demonstrating purposes; I would be able to quilt and visit at the same time.

I took this to History Day for the next two years, 2013 and 2014. Geesh. In searching through old posts, I found that I finished the quilting in May of 2015. It languished in the frame for a very long time.

The second quilt is not necessarily a fall quilt, by any stretch, but it was handy, so I layered it on.
 

This is English Elegance. It feels more appropriate for springtime than fall - oh well. I hand pieced the quilt top a whole lotta' years ago - in the early 2000s, I estimate. Possibly in the late 2000s, I asked my grandmother to quilt it for me, which she did, bless her. The complete history on English Elegance is in this post, so I won't go into all the details today. 

And then, of course, we have 6-Point Star to top things off - the three quilts currently keeping us warm and toasty on these cold November nights.  

Come December, I will change out these for my Christmas quilts. Those are always fun to revisit each year. Are you good about changing out the quilts on your beds? Do you actually use your quilts?  

Happy Quilting, Friends!

Seeing Stars

 Here in Ohio we have definitely moved into three quilt territory. That is, three quilts on the bed at night! Brrrr! After a really warm fall, we have taken a very sharp turn into frigid.

So, that third quilt I am adding to the bed each night is this beauty finished about 6 years ago, Six-Pointed Stars. I took a long time making this quilt, and it has come to be one of my favorites.

Each morning when I am making the bed, this quilt is folded and spread across the foot of the bed. Making the bed is never a chore for me, as I love looking at a bed covered in quilts, and I love studying this quilt in particular as I fold it.

Since this quilt has been around awhile, I have a really long history with some of these star blocks. And I love seeing the variety of combinations - star points and star centers, that is. It is fun revisiting this quilt each day. No star uses the same set of fabrics and some combinations are really pleasing to look at.

I thought you might just like to see some close-ups of a few of the stars. So sit back and scroll, baby, scroll. For any of you who have quilted for awhile (more than 30 years!) you may recognize some old fabrics in these.

If I didn't have a gazillion other quilts I want to make, I would totally stitch up another one like this. It was entirely hand-pieced, and I remember packing up little baggies of fabric that I carefully cut with templates. It was an easy project to take on the road. I am sure I made my first stars for this quilt while at track and cross country meets, on road trips to my in-laws' house, and possibly a few vacations. 

Because the entire top was pieced by hand, it was an easy decision to quilt it by hand, too. That took me awhile. All told, it wouldn't be too wild a guess to say that I spent a good 15 years working on this quilt. I know that I finished it in 2016 because I entered it into our county fair that year.

This week looks to be devoted to family - we are visiting our daughter and new grand daughter today, and on Thanksgiving we are hosting the family feast. I will have to devote Wednesday to all manner of food prep and house prep.

I hope you are enjoying this week and maybe you can do a bit of sewing for me! Or, if you are busy elsewhere like I am, then just enjoy the work you have done on some of your favorite finished quilts!

Happy Quilting, Friends!

September Nears Its End

As we are about to wrap up another month, it occurs to me that I ought to remind readers who did not follow through with the Quilter's Meet and Greet from early in September, that the giveaways are still open for entering. I still need to check out a handful of the participants, so as soon as I post this, I am heading over to Benita's blog to finish visiting all the featured quilters. Here is a link to my post on Meet and Greet day.

In that post, I shared a picture of one quilt that I'd entirely made by hand. I now have that quilt on our bed, so I figured this would be a good time to let you take a look.

Our bed is queen-sized, and the quilt just barely touched the sides. It is plenty long enough, but I should have added a couple more columns of stars to widen it a bit. Oh, well. I still love it. The star colors, while they weren't intended to be fall-ish, do look more fitting for this time of year that the summery quilt just removed.

Long-arm room update: DH and I painted the room in about 2 hours earlier this afternoon. It is white-white-white. Very bright and pure-looking. I hope he will steam-vac the carpet later this evening. Then before and after classes tomorrow, I will try to get the long-arm dismantled, moved from the basement up two flights of stairs, and finally rebuilt in its new home. Eeeeeeee! This will be so exciting!

Happy Quilting, Friends!

Blogger's Quilt Festival

Again this year I am participating in Amy Ellis' Blogger's Quilt Festival. I entered one quilt last year just to get my feet wet, and see how it worked. It didn't require too much effort on my part, so I upped the ante this year by entering three quilts. Amy Ellis is a fellow blogger who has branched out into designing and publishing - she is much more driven than I, that's for sure. Her blog alone makes me tired! *Not that hard to do, actually.*

Regular readers here will surely recognize all three quilts for I have written about them often. First, you can look for my little Pincushion Stars in the mini quilts category. It earned a big ol' ribbon at the Ross County Fair, so we will see what a wider audience thinks of it.

In the hand quilted category, I have entered Six-Point Stars. It has gotten lots of positive remarks from you kind folks who leave comments. I sure feel the love!

Finally, I am entering Elisa's quilt in the original design category. Now I have a confession: I mistakenly entered it in the modern quilt category; it was total brain-fart on my part, but it's there, and I don't know how to remove it. This means, then, that I will get to see how it stacks up in this category, as well.

So what I ask of you is to go visit the festival site and vote for all the quilts you like. Of course, if you are so inclined, a vote for yours truly would definitely be appreciated. I think you will find lots of quilting inspiration and ideas. The world of quilting varies widely; seeing all the quilts in this festival will definitely make that readily apparent.

Enjoy and be inspired!

Happy Quilting, Friends!

Finished That 6-Point Star Quilt!

I did it! I have finished the 6-point star.

Finally.

To briefly recap this quilt's journey: In 1998-99, when DS was in high school and going to track and cross country meets, I needed a hand-stitching project to fill car time and down time. I selected as many random fabrics as I could from my stash, cut the parts, packed them with needle, thread and scissors into a zip-lock bag. Off I went! These stars saw a lot of running action around the state of Ohio.  After I had a goodly number of stars, I decided I'd better get to creating a quilt top.

So I did.

Then I stopped. I couldn't figure out how to even out the edges. The quilt found its way to a bin in the sewing room for about 10-12 years. I finally did what I thought was impossible: I whacked off the points of those outer stars. It didn't hurt at much as I thought it would. *grin*  This post shows those whacked off points.

In November of last year, I put the quilt into the quilt frame. Since it had been entirely hand pieced, it seemed only a matter of course that it would have to be hand quilted, as well. 

As I do a lot of things, my work occurred in spurts. I'd go like mad at it for a few weeks, then I would barely touch it. I even took the frame down through the Christmas holidays and hid it in the sewing room.

I am very relieved to have a finish. It's like an old friend, I've spent so much time with it in recent weeks. Make that months. Or years. We go way back, I guess you could say. 

Today, I will be helping out at the Ross County Fair as quilts are entered. It will be a long afternoon, and I will even enter a few of my own this year. 

I did go to the Circleville Quilt Show yesterday, and it was spectacular! I took quite a few pictures, and I will be getting those organized and edited ASAP. Stay tuned.

Happy Quilting, Friends!

Binding For An Old Friend

This story can be told in pictures.

Binding prepared for quilt. Cut at 2.25" - for future reference, because that is always a tricky decision for me.

The quilt has been trimmed; a few wonky sections will be tricky. There were many, many biases in this quilt.

Attaching was a breeze. I have mentioned in previous posts about this quilt that it is entirely hand pieced and hand quilted. So attaching the binding by machine was a big decision. I just couldn't see myself doing it by hand, so under the machine it went.

This is my first opportunity to use my little clips. I like them!

The binding is the same fabric as the backing; I just used the cut-away pieces to cut my strips. Now I am ready for a long afternoon of sewing the binding. Notice that safety pin? That is my reminder that one section of that star didn't get quilted. I will come back to fix that after the binding is on.

Tomorrow I will have pictures of a finish! Come on back for the big reveal!

Happy Quilting, Friends!

So, So Close

I have removed the 6-point star quilt from the quilt frame and have done just about all I can in the oval frame. The very outer edges, like 1-2 inches, are all that are left to be quilted. This is what is known as the home stretch, I do believe.

It has been a very long haul on this quilt and as I take these final stitches, I find myself thinking about the binding I will use. Just about anything will do, I suppose.

Happy Quilting, Friends!

This Awaits

I go on and on quite a bit about gorgeous fabrics. Generally, the current quilt is the most beautiful ever. So I've gone from any of the French General fabrics to Roman Holiday to Kaffe Fassett and so on. My current love is Lorraine by American Jane/Moda and Lorraine's older complementary line, Savonnerie by the same designer.

I gaze at this lusciousness every day I'm in the sewing room, as it adorns my design wall. Some of the rows are sewn together, some are not. I think a bit of rearranging will occur before it all comes together, but what a feast for the eyes in the meantime!

Lorraine must wait in the wings until I finish 2 more urgent projects. First, I am machine quilting Elisa's quilt and having the most devilish time of it. I'd rather not admit to how much unsewing I've done lately. This coming week I will get it right!

PMA!!
Positive Mental Attitude!

The second is my hand quilting on the 6-point star quilt. I am so, so close to being finished. Mostly just the edges remain to be quilted; I am so anxious to remove it from the frame do the binding.

Have a great Sunday, folks, and stay cool, if you can!

Happy Quilting, Friends!

Hand Quilting

It has been a slow and lazy Sunday here at the homestead. We had baseball on television - Tribe vs. Orioles (Tribe lost) - this afternoon, so I took the opportunity to get in some good quality quilting time.

Even with a ballgame on, I still find my mind wandering as I stitch; and these particular stitches reminded me of dimples. I like dimply quilts, and I am fortunate to own several. Grandma hand quilted quite a few that are upstairs in the closet or the cupboard. Some she pieced for me; some she pieced for others; some I pieced, but she hand quilted nearly everything.

This particular quilt I am currently working on has not had a single machine touch it, unless you count an iron. I hand pieced the entire quilt top, beginning way back in the late 1990s when I needed hand projects for road trips to cross country and track meets. After I had all the stars made, I decided to attach them to one another with the muslin diamonds. That gave me more hand work to do. Over time, I had a quilt top on my hands, and I had no idea of how to finish it because of the uneven edges. That's when it went into a decade-long hibernation. In late 2014, I decided to bite the bullet and make the remaining bits to finish off the quilt top; I remember the excruciating decision to c-c-c-cut some star points off just to have a squared-up quilt. (It was not as hard as I imagined.)

I began hand quilting last November; I put it away over Christmas and brought it out again this spring. I decided that I could quilt while watching Final Four, MLB and NBA. I have been relatively productive, and I find myself now having to deal with edges.

I wonder if you can figure out what I've got going on there on the right-hand side of the quilt? It's a trick learned from Grandma when she quilted at her old quilting frame. I adapted it to my Q-Snap frame. Come on back tomorrow and I will explain.

Happy Quilting, Friends!

Hand Quilting Update

Lest you think I have not been tending to the hand quilting project I took downstairs about a week ago, let me assure you that I have been working steadily on it. I have the calloused fingers to show for it, too.

Last time I wrote about resuming this project, I mentioned that I was close to moving to a new section, as that current section was nearly entirely quilted. I have now done that, and surprisingly, I find that I am tooling right along on this new section. Yesterday, for example, I loaded 10 needles and quilted all of them! Now, this was not done all in one sitting, but when I set a goal of a certain number of needles to quilt, then I find that I stay on task better.

 One block quilted. I don't mark my quilting lines, so some lines are a bit crooked and some are not as "on" the quarter-inch line as I would like, but when it's all finished, no one will notice or care.

 My tools. I went shopping for a new thimble earlier in the week, but couldn't find this kind in the stores I visited. I did buy those rubber needle grippers (the pink and blue things). These help me pull the needle out when I've loaded on too many stitches.

Today I am meeting a high school classmate for lunch in Chillicothe. She and her husband live in Pennsylvania and will be in town for an archaeological seminar at our Hopewell Mound site. It will be wonderful to linger over a bowl of hot potato soup and a steaming cuppa' jo and catch up with her!

Happy Quilting, Friends!

Returning to A Lingering UFO

We quilters do let some UFOs linger for quite a long while, don't we? I recently read a blog in which the quilter referred to "aging" her quilt, as one does with fine wines. I guess there are a number of ways of looking at those UFOs.

Gotta' be quick today, Peeps. I  have cards here tonight, and I still have to get finishing touches ready. You can be satisfied to simply feast your eyes on this, can't you?

Tomorrow we meet at Sheryll's for a Frankfort Girls get-together. Hopefully there will be some fun stuff to share. TTFN!!

Happy Quilting, Friends!