As usual, I didn't get a very early start on this little project for my guild meeting, but I thought I had it ready to add the binding by last Saturday night - guild meeting is not until Thursday afternoon, so I thought I was doing great. I had used the blue marker to mark the border for my hand-quilting, and after finishing that quilting I had wet the border pretty thoroughly to get rid of the blue ink. Then I discovered that the pink batik fabric I'd used for the petals of the flower and in the border had run through to the backing in one corner! I tried to rinse it out, after taking out the quilting in the offending corner, but of course that didn't help anything. So, what to do??? I had already decided that I liked it well enough to do another one for us, but hadn't figured I'd need to do it this quickly!
So Sunday morning found me starting another one. I figured if I did the piecing and applique on Sunday I could do the quilting on Monday and Tuesday and the binding and hanging sleeve on Wednesday then I'd be OK. The background of the 2nd one is a little different from the first one, and I substituted a lighter pink for the petals but otherwise it is pretty much the same. I looked several places for buttons but didn't find any that I liked better than what I already had.
Here is the finished one that I took to the guild meeting
and here is a close-up of the top of it
I still need to finish the one I am keeping - re-do the corner of the border and then add the binding and hanging sleeve. I found some butterfly and bug buttons on Hip Girl Boutique that I ordered to add to mine. They should be here in a few days so I'll see how they do.
Next on my quilting agenda is to trim the Blooming Nine-Patch
I got back from my quilter last month put the binding on it. I also need to finish the hand-quilting on granddaughter Emily's quilt.
I am almost finished with the center section. Then I'll be ready to do the border. I plan to do the same pattern on it that I used on her sister's quilt,
which I think was a heart and loop design, but I need to double-check that. This is one rainy weekend, so if the baseball game we have tickets to for tomorrow afternoon is rained out like tonight's was, then maybe I could get the center section finished tomorrow. That would be quite an accomplishment for me! If I do too much hand-quilting at one time I regret it later with achy shoulders and thumbs.
I finally finished the Orange Crush top late last night so it is ready to take to the Bonnie Hunter workshop this weekend in Lexington. VA. 
I always seem to delay putting on borders because I think they will cause me problems but I was working under a deadline so I just kept going. The corners are extra units that I had made for the center of the quilt, and the pieces in the middle of each green border were for the corners as Bonnie had originally designed the quilt, but I didn't need them for that with the arrangement of the blocks that I used.
The next question of course is how to quilt it. If I were to do it on my Brother I would just outline the orange and green blocks, and maybe a line thru the light diagonal lines, but I could also get someone to do it on a longarm. It sounds like DH likes it, so it may be one that we actually use. I had no plans for it when I started making it, and of course since it was a mystery quilt I didn't know what it would look like in the end. I was drawn to it in the beginning because of the name - orange crush used to be my favorite soft drink when I was growing up. I bought some of them when I started making this quilt, but it didn't taste as good as I remembered.
After I finished the borders on the Orange Crush last night I started cutting out more 8 1/2" blocks for the Scrappy Mountain Majesties that Bonnie is teaching at the workshop this weekend. She is doing this workshop for the Rockbridge Pieceworkers Quilt Guild, the guild that I belonged to when I lived in Lexington. I was the program co-chair, and arranged for this workshop about 1 1/2 years ago. Even that far out, Bonnie's schedule was pretty well booked, but we were able to get a date in between some of her other trips since we are pretty close to her. So far I have 56 different "darks" that are mostly Christmas fabrics. 
When I started cutting the "lights" it looked like some of them had slipped into my quilting room without stopping in the laundry room first so I am washing and drying them now. I may be sharing some of what I have with Erin, so I will take all that I have of these fabrics to see what she wants to use. We need 32 of each for a lap size and 66 of each for a full size - guess I'm aiming for something in between. I may decide when I start assembling the blocks that some don't work - but if they don't work on the front they could work on the back - right Bonnie?
This will be a test to see if I remember how to do a blog entry and post pictures to it. Yes, again it has been a long time, but I may be back on the blogging track now. Since my last entry in May our family had our annual vacation in Hatteras, shortened by my mother-in-law's death, my hubby retired, and we moved to GA from VA, attended about 20 Braves games, had a mini-family reunion at our house in September, had overnight guests 3 times, went to Seattle to visit our youngest daughter, took a cruise before Thanksgiving, had various combinations of our kids at our house several times (including all 3 families with the 5 grandkids the day after Christmas), attended a 3+ day quilting retreat in north GA, cheered our nephew in several high school wrestling matches, and went to Johnson City, TN where my mom lives 4 times, including last week for the graveside service of one of her sisters. I did very little in my roomy and bright quilting room until after the cruise, but since then I have been busier in there. More about those projects in the next few posts. I have decided that rather than make this a longer post by including those projects, I'll just start with where I am today and work backward, and forward, later.I started the Orange Crush mystery with Bonnie Hunter over 2 1/2 years ago. It calls for 2 main blocks, and got enough of those done to make a decent-sized lap quilt, and had started to assemble them. Here is the original plan for my layout. 
Before getting very far along with putting the rows together I saw a different layout that I have since decided I like better. I hadn't done any more on this quilt until today. I am planning to attend a workshop next month that Bonnie Hunter is giving for the guild in VA that I was a member of, and I want to be able to take this quilt top sewn together. So today I laid out the new arrangement and took apart some of the diagonal strips that I had already sewn together in the old arrangement. Here is what I have laid out so far. 
Yes, my "design wall" is still the floor. I think I know where I want to put it, and I have something that I think will work for it, I just haven't gotten it all together yet. More on that later too. I've added some more blocks to this layout since I took the picture earlier tonight, and now only need to make 12 more orange blocks and 1 more green one to make it 7 x 9. I think the border will be a narrow strip of the black, then a wider strip of the green with some of the leftover pieces in the middle of each side like I had laid out in the first picture. I'm a ways from that though. First I need to make the rest of the blocks and re-arrange what I have a bit so that I don't have like fabrics touching and so that the light blue centers of the orange blocks are more randomly placed. So now I have a project I am excited about again - and a deadline for completion of it. Sometimes that is just what we need to get going again, isn't it?
I have been working the last few days on several different projects. One is my first string quilt. I have suggested this as the next project for the Senior Center quilters, so I am working on an example. No surprise - mine is yellows and blues with a few teals and golds thrown in. 
My guild had a work day Saturday where most of us worked on string quilt blocks that were more scrappy than this, but like mine they did have the same color thru the center of each block. I only have enough of the dark blue fabric to make 3 more 4-block units, then I will use a different fabric or 2 and mix them up, but I do plan to have all blues in the corners so that the centers of the big diamonds will be blue. The blocks could certainly be different sizes, but I am squaring mine up to 10". I am trying to make my stripes varying widths so I don't have anything to match up except the center dark blue stripes.
I've been working on a secret quilted wall hanging over the last week - not ready to show it, but here is a fabric basket I made yesterday to go with it. 
I'd been seeing these on Vera's blog and thought they were really cute, so I went to Pink Penguin and printed the directions. I'm sure I will be making more of these! It is about 4" x 6" and 4" tall, not counting the handles. Thank you Vera for posting your pictures!
Recently Carol Doak started a new BOM on her Yahoo Group - here is my October one. 
Each block will be a 7" square. I already have plans for whipping up another one with a different kind of tree and a creek instead of a road. She has already given us the November one, but I am not looking at it, or the pictures that others have already posted, until Nov 1.Friday I used a friend's long-arm machine to quilt the Senior Center's first Turning Twenty quilt. I had practiced on it a couple of times and selected the stars and loops pantograph to do on this quilt. I got there about 1:00, chatted for awhile and then we began loading the quilt. When I got down to the actual quilting it took about 15 minutes to do a pass across the quilt, then about 10 minutes to reposition, etc. We were taking it off the machine by 8:30, and we had taken several breaks. It is just my first attempt, but not too bad. I thought this pantograph allowed a bit of freedom about exactly where you put the loops, as long as they don't run into the stars! 
Here is the back of the same quilt 
My Guild, Rockbridge Pieceworkers Quilt Guild, has a quilt show as part of the Rockbridge Regional Fair in July. I joined the guild in August 2006, but was not ready to put anything in last year's show. This year I put two of my quilts in the show - the T-shirt quilt 
and the Butterflies and Hydrangeas quilt 
. Neither of them won a prize, but it was neat to see them displayed in a public place. The quilting group that I lead at our local Senior Center also put a quilt in the show that several of us worked on, so that was neat for those ladies to see their handiwork on display. 
For me the best part of the quilt show was that our youngest daughter entered 5 of her quilted wallhangings in the show. I am showing them here with their labels so you can see what she said about each one. She is in her second year of working on organic farms in the Columbia County, New York area. "Flame," 
"Chocolate," 
"Bodo," 
"Wiltsie Bridge," 
and "El Corazon." 
She has painted on some of them, and I think just did a terrific job on them. She has an art background, but has only been quilting for a couple of years. Allie just recently finished a quilt for the daughter of her current employers that they commissioned her to make for their daughter's wedding. Here is a picture of her and my hubby with that quilt -
She designed the quilt herself, cut out all those orange flowers from some batik fabric and machine appliqued them on, machine quilted the quilt and included some botanical designs in the quilting and has a quote from Khalil Gibran quilted in cursive writing around the border - 
Quite an amazing job I thought! The couple did not see the quilt until the reception, where it was hanging up for all to see.
I recently volunteered to be on a committee for my guild to come up with some ideas for having small group experiences within a large guild. How do you put people together diplomatically, or do you let them put themselves together by interest group, geographically, etc. And are there other ways of having the large group seem small enough to make friends and have a chance to enjoy being with each other? At the moment our guild has 63 members, and probably 20 of these have joined in the last 2 years or less. If everyone on the rolls came to our monthly meeting it would be standing room only. We are currently using a place for our guild retreat that can only hold 22 sewing machines, and some people are unhappy about that. Some have suggested that we limit our size to 65 - but several of us are opposed to that at this time. If any of you have ideas about our concerns please let me know. Our committee is having its organizational meeting this Saturday, but our investigations into this issue will be going on for awhile.
Our guild had a workshop yesterday after our meeting. We learned how to make the blocks shown in this photo. 
These 8 blocks have not been sewn together yet - I want to wait on that until I have made more of them. It has been challenging to find fabrics that blend together and ones that have 3 in light, medium and dark values in each color. The pattern calls for making a quilt that is about 47" x 58," so I have 56 more blocks to add to these 8. The setting triangles would only be at top and bottom of the design. I probably won't be adding more to these until after Christmas since it seems that I keep on adding project to my list of things to finish by then!
