Musings

It's a cold day in Georgia today, like most of the east coast, so I'm enjoying the sun through the windows as I do paperwork. When the paperwork is done I'll be able to prepare for teaching the Asian Circle Quilt class on Saturday, so I'll have my hands on fabric...always a good thing.

Printer Cartridge Bargain

I'm not a huge fan of any particular retail store, but I'm tired of paying high prices for printer cartridges which continually need replacing. I found this bargain at my local Walmart and wanted to pass on the info. to other business-minded quilters... This is the # 02 pack with six (that's right, 6) printer cartridges and 150, 4" x 6" photo sheets for $35.97 !!!!! That's a deal. I hope this info helps someone.

Florida Quilts

While in Florida last week I was able to attend the Killer Bees meeting on Wednesday and the Santa Rosa Quilters Guild on Thursday. Wonderful meetings!

My friend, Betty Brooks, had this quilt with her for show-n-tell. Betty pieces only by hand and did a wonderful job on this quilt...

At the guild meeting, the program was a trunk show of inherited quilts that one of the members had. They were all amazing and mostly made by hand. Lovely! Here are three of the treasures...

This next one is called Pickle Dish pattern, and it has incredibly tiny spike pieces...

There were also several Grandmother's Flower Garden quilts...

Wonderful trunk show!

Florida Bound

Sorry, no photos for a few days. We're visiting our former stomping grounds in Navarre, Florida this week. We lived here for seven years and loved it until big, bad storms scared us enough to move.

Yesterday was the bi-weekly meeting of the Killer Bees, the wonderful Pensacola bee where I learned about quilting, friendship, southern living and manners, and life. There were eleven of us gathered around Ann's table yesterday, talking, sharing ideas, talking, show-n-tell, talking, and eating... a little piece of heaven.

By chance, today is the monthly meeting of the Santa Rosa Quilters Guild, so that's in the plans for this morning. I can't wait to see all the ladies to get updates.

Bryan (our big, strong Army son) flew into Georgia this week for some Army training. He'll be the housesitter this week while we're away. He and his buddies are more than happy to be in Athens for the weekend. UGA, in downtown Athens, has about 30K students and at least half of those are 20-something young ladies who might need an escort for weekend evenings. You get the picture.

Well, I'm off to the SRQG. I'll post photos when we get home.

Novice to Advanced Novice Machine Quilter

I've been practicing for weeks on my machine quilting and here is a sample of my first free-motion quilted lap quilt. If you can't see the stitches clearly, it's probably a good thing, but I'm happy with it.

New Project Progress

Between 3:00am and 5:30am I finished the center of this quilt top for the Beginner Quiltmaking class sample. I'll add an inner border using the multi-colored fabric, and an outer border of olive, I believe.

The tricky part of this quilt was figuring out dimensions so that each row was the same width. It turned out well, I think. In this quilt we have beginner practice for triangle-squares, 4-patches, and star-making using the square-in-the-corner method (see below)...

You know...place the yellow square in the corner, right sides together, and draw a diagonal line on the yellow piece, which will then become your sewing line. Jackie Robinson gave this tip for chain sewing blocks this way. It works very well.

Here's the Mary Ellen Hopkins tip (I love her!) on trimming only the extra yellow away, but leaving the blue so that the "true" size of the block is obvious when you sew. Of course, the next step is to press that yellow triangle toward the corner. The finished product is the star points in the first photo. If you'd like a closeup photo of the points in the stars, just leave a comment on this blog and I'll post one.

After going back to bed at 5:30 (my mid-life curse: up in the middle of the night, every night), I got up at 7:30 and spray basted this quilt together for the "Scrappy Bricks Quilt" class I'll teach in February. I'll hand this quilt over to the quilt shop tomorrow, so today will be a machine quilting day.

FYI, this is Patsy Thompson's method of spray basting a quilt on a wall. It's so much easier than doing it on the floor or on a table. The video directions for doing this are on her Fast & Free Volume 1 DVD, which is a wonderful machine quilting instructional DVD. Here's my tip: don't try to do this with wool batting. Cotton is best. The wool batting is too fluffy and won't adhere well to the backing. I've tried it twice, and (after a few swear words) I went out and bought some cotton batting last night. With the cotton batting and the backing pinned to the wall, I had the whole thing spray basted in just a few minutes. ***Follow ALL safety directions on the adhesive can. I wear a good painting mask and goggles and have a fan next to me and the garage door open.

New Project Progress

Here's an update of this latest quilt for the Beginner Quiltmaking Class. I'll be adding the remaining yellow star blocks tomorrow.

Happy New Year!