Getting some things finished finally....

I've recently gotten two quilts back from having them machine quilted, and am busy sewing the binding on both. Linda did a beautiful job of creating flowers and leaves on my Lilac Time quilt.
Hard to get a photo of, but here it shows one flower and the squiggle in the stripped border. I love it! I've got the binding sewn to the front, now I just have to hand sew it to the back. I already added a hanging sleeve with the binding, because I know I'm going to put this one in our next quilt show :-)
Will show the quilting on the big 9-patch as soon as I get some decent photos. I took some tonight, and they came out too dark. Will wait for daylight and try again. Flash distorts the color. I have also finished a table runner I want to take photos of.

I'm still here, and working on.....

......several things. I get distracted easily and jump around from one project to another. My two finished quilts are with the quilter right now, so I'm waiting to get them back and add the binding. In the mean time I've been doing some small projects and getting ready for a couple more! This is an idea I came up with one day......I wanted to use that blue fabric for "something" and decided to sort of make it look like it was behind a white lattice and then applique roses on it. This is what I've got so far! I fused the roses and am now blanket stitching the edges of all the roses and leaves....lots of handwork to keep me busy when I get together with other quilters. When I add the borders there will be a couple more roses on those two empty stems and probably more leaves wherever I think it needs them.
Mostly I've been making lots of pillowcases for gifts for family members and friends. I forgot to take photos of some of them. I just made a pair of pink ones for a woman having a 90th birthday. The ones shown above were for family members.....I like when I can find fun fabrics for them.

Of course I had to make one for myself, too! Cats for me.....it looks better on the pillow. Here is it too obvious that I had to chop off some cat's heads. I made my husband one with some left over car fabrics. I'm already thinking of Christmas gifts for other family members with this! You can find the patterns at "The 1 Million Pillowcases Challenge".....click here.

Our quilt guild just announced a challenge for this year to make Crazy Quilts for our next local quilt show which will have the theme: "Crazy about Quilting!" and will be in September of 2011. I will start on that soon, too......crazy quilting takes time!

Prison quilting article......

If you read quilt magazines, try to get the July issue of "The Quilter". It has a great article written by one of the men involved in the prison quilting at Wabash Valley Correctional Instutue...a maximum security prison here in Indiana. I couldn't find an on-line link for the article. My husband has met some of these guys and seen their quilts. He has been involved with the Kairos prison weekends done at this prison (a Christian 3-day program).
It is interesting reading and they make some wonderful quilts to be given to others....using kids safety scissors, no less! I guess I won't complain the next time my rotary cutter needs a new blade :-)

9-Patch/Puss in the Corner 2010.....

I finally added enough blocks and borders to my quilt to make it queen size. I had a lot of trouble choosing a border fabric, but I liked this one the minute I saw it in the Quilter's Nest quilt shop and decided it looked good with the various block colors. I can't get a good photo of it showing the colors....it is black, but with a dark brown, green, butterscotch, red, grey all mixed in. I thought it picked up a lot of the colors in the quilt and I like black fabrics.The borders are very large....9 inch, but I wanted a nice hang.
I'm just happy to be done wrestling this around....unless I decide to quilt it myself! Now I need back fabric.

.....and pillowcases! I love making matching pillowcases for my quilts or just for fun. Makes it easy to make the bed....just pull up the quilt and throw the pillows on top. If you haven't made any the patten is found here along with many variations. I intend to make a couple more pairs to match this quilt. Hopefully a pair from the black, if I have enough of it left after I cut binding.

Blogger's Quilt Festival.....Spring 2010

Someone sent me the link to Amy's very nice quilt site and this blogger festival, so I decided to enter :-) I've written about this quilt before, but am doing it again to fit the rules. You can click on any photo to see it larger.I call this wall hanging, "Not My Grandmother's Flower Garden...." (Sorry about showing it on the floor, but I can't get a good photo where it normally hangs)

The name reflects that this is not a "traditional" quilt pattern. I love to make things up, as well as do traditional quilts. This quilt was for the Raintree Quilt Guild challenge in 2006 to make a quilt involving flowers and nature. My grandmother loved flowers and had an elaborate flower garden that helped inspire my love for flowers. My favorite thing in her garden was the "gazing ball" or "garden ball".....whichever you call it! We had one in our garden as well and I loved looking at them. I decided I wanted to do a "crazy quilt" with a garden ball in the center! It was loads of fun to work on and I learned a lot making it.

I made up how to do the garden ball and its pedestal....both stuffed. The cats on the quilt are iron-on decals and the roses on the pedestal are store bought, but the rest of the flowers are my own ribbon work and embroidery. I had fun learning to make different things and do different stitches to embellish this quilt.

I put lace and beads and all sorts of stitches all over this thing! It is rather heavy :-) I had fun completing the flowers with embroidery that overlapped the sky areas or the border.

I'm not sure I like the 3-D fern border that I did...too wide....but it was another learning experience. All crazy quilts need a spider web and spider, so this is mine. The spider is a couple of buttons and some beads.

Cat hiding in the ferns.....I love cats, so there had to be a couple somewhere in the garden.

Many people might like the back of the quilt better than the front and no one even sees it! I used photos of my grandmother and my sisters and me in her garden by the garden ball and also a couple from our peony garden at home with its garden ball.

This was a very personal quilt and a labor of love! I enjoyed doing it and dedicated it to my Grandmother's memory.

I made a lot of mistakes and would change things, but that is part of quilting......learning with each project.

Updates on the quilts that I've been working on....

I've been working steadily on finishing two of the quilt tops that I started over the winter. "Steady" for me is a relative term :-) I get going in a frenzy and then come to a problem and stall for a long time and then finally get going again. This quilt came to a halt when I ran out of the black flowered fabric that is the focal fabric for the whole quilt. Thanks to a wonderful blogging friend...Rose, at Pics & Pieces.....I was able to get one more yard on the Internet. I wish it had been two yards, but at least the quilt now has borders that I like!

It took almost every inch of the yard to get this far. I have none left for binding, so I haven't determined what I will bind it with....maybe a black tone on tone? I have the other fabrics in the quilt, but don't think any of them will look good for the binding. Now I need to buy some fabric for the back and get it to a machine quilter. I do love this quilt....it is a very generous lap size or perhaps even twin. I didn't measure it.
I only had two fat quarters of that stripe fabric, but was determined to use it in the border. It matched too perfectly to be left out :-)

The other quilt that I have literally wrestled with for the past week, started out as a bunch of blocks in a workshop. I enjoyed making the blocks and thought I had plenty for a quilt....however I ended up eliminating any that had pink, red, purple, or very bright colors because they didn't look good with the pebble fabric I chose for the other blocks. I decided to use these "rail fence" blocks to set the other ones and love how it turned out. However it ended up taking a lot of blocks and still isn't quite big enough. I plan to add borders (don't know what), but it will be a bit skimpy in size unless the borders are huge! I'm turning this one into a "summer quilt" for our bed. I will not put batting in it and just back it with another piece of fabric to keep it very light weight. The more I look at those edges, the more I think I need to add one last narrow row to each side to complete the green squares around the other blocks...sigh. Sounds like a lot of fussy work, which I hate.

I know that I should just "bite the bullet" and go ahead and make more blocks and add a couple more rows in each direction, but I am so-ooooooo tired of making these blocks and with wrestling this queen size top around! This is more tiring then walking around taking photos of birds!

Maybe I'll procrastinate a bit longer and get up the energy to complete this the way it should be done.....or maybe not.

Paducah Photos....

Here is a link to my Paducah Quilt Show photos. I didn't get every quilt, but I got enough to keep you busy and amazed :-)

Click here: Paducah Photos