Christmas Ornaments, Another Fabric Basket and Lillian's Quilt

I was home all day on Friday - this doesn't happen often these days since I work 2 1/2 days and volunteer at the Senior Center one day. I decided to get an "early" start on Christmas ornaments. Carol Doak recently gave her Yahoo group a new pattern for a paper-pieced ornament. I made two of them, as well as 3 others of her patterns. In this picture the new one from her is the package. They all have a two-piece backing that forms a pocket, in case you want to put a little treat, gift card, etc in it. I'm thinking I will make these for our grandkids (4), my mom and siblings (3), my great nieces and nephew (3), our kids who don't have kids (2), misc. others (???). Hmmm, good I got started this early I'd say!

Earlier this week I finished another fabric basket - this one is for Lillian, our youngest grandchild. It goes with the quilt I am making her. I am slowly doing the hand-quilting on it, but my thumbs and wrists are making the hand-quilting a challenge. I have 7 of 35 blocks quilted - here is one of them in progress, but it is hard to see the quilting stitches.

Signature Quilt for Carolyn

During the past couple of weeks I have been working on a quilted signature wall hanging for my supervisor at the hospital office where I work part-time. I finished stitching the label on about 9:30 this morning - so not much time left before it was to be presented to her at noon. Here is the front, the label and the basket that I made to go with it, now with a big daisy button and little heart on the frog's chest. I spent many hours on the quilt, especially since I got the center with the signatures on it last Wednesday night. I machine quilted around each of the star blocks, and quilted a star design inside each of the 9-patches, then hand-quilted hearts inside the 6 frog blocks. For the border I hand-quilted stars. I've not done machine quilting and hand quilting together in the same quilt before, but I felt like I could do a better job with the hearts and stars by hand. What would the quilt police say???

I am finding tonight that I have a surprising feeling about these two items. I knew all along that I would be giving these away - that is why I was making them, but I find that I am missing them more than I expected. It is like I made them so quickly, and gave them away so quickly that I didn't have time to properly say good-bye to them. Is that why it generally takes me so long to finish any one project - that I just don't want to say good-bye to them??

More of Allie's Quilts

Allie, our youngest daughter who works on an organic farm in Ancram, NY, sent me photos of her most recent quilted wall hangings. They are a set of three carrots that go along with other vegetable designs she has been making recently - see my earlier post. She has an exhibit of her quilt projects this month in the cafe area of the farm store at Hawthorne Valley Farm in Harlemville, NY. She hung the quilts last Thursday, and had sold these three before she got them all hung, with the understanding that they will remain with the rest of the exhibit until the end of the month. Now she has also sold 2 of her cow designs (Hans and Bodo) and one person has asked her to do a vegetable design of her choice for her. As you can imagine, Allie is very excited about all of this. I'm hoping she will send us some photos of the whole group of quilts.