Our Frayed Edge Quilt Finished - Now It's "Bonnie Week"

I managed to get our frayed edge quilt finished - and washed, dried and vacuumed - in time for the guild meeting on Thursday. Here is the front   and the back. And as soon as I got home from the meeting we covered up with it on the couch to read a bit - it was a chilly and rainy day here on Thursday.  That night we went to see a local production of To Kill a Mockingbird. Friday I tried to catch up on some email and chores, then DD#2, SIL and Reilly came over for dinner - cornbread and minestrone soup made in the crockpot. Don't you love crockpot cooking!

Yesterday we were up early to go to nephew's wrestling regionals - over an hour north of here, but well worth the trip because he won both matches yesterday and is now the heavyweight champion of his AAAA region - way to go Eric! Unfortunately we did not get to see his championship match as we had reservations for the Braves 400 Fan Club Gameboree at the Georgia World Congress Center. It was a fun evening celebrating Bobby Cox, the recently retired Braves' manager.


I say this is "Bonnie Week" because my former guild in Lexington, VA is having Bonnie Hunter give a lecture and workshop this coming Friday and Saturday. She is doing a workshop on the Scrappy Mountain Majesties pattern. I am planning to make mine a Christmas theme, using these and few more fat quarters I picked up at A Scarlet Thread this week.    We are to have our fabrics cut into 8 1/2" squares - 32 lights and 32 darks for the lap size, 66 of each for the full size. I'm aiming for at least the lap size, or maybe a bit bigger. I also still need to finish the borders on my Orange Crush top - one of her mystery quilts that I want to show her. And I will be bringing my BargelloBowl quilt - a Bonnie project from 3 Super Bowls ago. I'll be leaving here Thursday to go to my mom's in east TN before going on up to Lexington on Friday. I'm spending Friday night with Erin - will we get any sleep??  The workshop is Saturday, then I'll go back to my mom's that night, and back home on Sunday.  Hoping for good weather all the way up and back, but the forecast for Thursday is a little dicey right now.


Here is what I am thinking for the borders of the Orange Crush quilt -  I've got the black border on one side, and the others are cut out ready to sew on. For the corners I am planning on using some of the extra little blocks you see there, and maybe some of them in the middle of the green floral border as well. Not sure about that, I'll have to see what it looks like when i get the black border on. Also not sure about the binding, but that doesn't have to be decided yet since I don't know what I will back it with, or how I will quilt it!

Blog Updates and Another Frayed-edge Quilt

Since I decided to try to keep my blog more up-to-date I have also made some changes in the blog's appearance as well.

• Changed the template and background to something more cheery
• Updated My Playlist - added some songs, deleted some that weren't available any longer from Playlist.  This took way longer than you'd think, but I listen to it every day while doing other things online. ***If you don't want to hear my music just turn your volume down.***
• Added icon for Quilting Bloggers after seeing it on Nann's blog
• Added icon for the Weekly Themed Quilt Contest that Quilting Gallery holds
• Added my Blue BargelloBowl to the above-mentioned contest since the theme for this week is bargello quilts
• Updated the list of blogs I am following, and re-organized them with help from Erin - thanks again for that help Erin
• Took off the 2009 list of finished projects and added the short list of 2010 finished project.

For the last two days I've been working on a new frayed-edge quilt for Lily, our youngest great-niece, who was born January 4.  Her room is purple, so I found a couple of purple fabrics to add to some I have used in previous baby quilts. Here is what I have so far - front side and back side. In the second picture you can see the plan for the rest of the back.  I am hoping to have it finished in time to give it to the grandparents Saturday, but as you can see I still have 5 rows to go, then a couple of washings and dryings. I am clipping it as I go, so I won't have all the clipping to do at the end.  Here are my two Fiskars clippers I use for frayed-edge quilts. The ones on the right are some I bought at JoAnn's Monday.  The older pair have clipped several quilts and now the little orange latch doesn't work so well anymore.  Even though these are designed for ease of use with arthritic hands, I still need a rest after using them for 30 minutes or so, so alternating sewing and clipping works well.

Honorable Mention

Our guild had a show July 14-18 and I entered 4 of my quilts - Fallen Leaves , BargelloBowl , Simplified Log Cabin and Say it With Flowers . Much to my surprise I got an Honorable Mention ribbon for the Say it With Flowers. I entered it in the handquilted category - I made it for my mom in '06-'07. I think it was the second handquilted one that I have finished. The comments from the judge were interesting. She thought my triangle points need improvement, and that my handquilting needed to be more consistent in size and space between - I thought the points were pretty darn good, and it was only my 2nd handquilted piece so I thought it was pretty good. She did like the theme fabric and felt the colors were well coordinated - I should give all credit to the fabric designer -- this was a kit that I bought so all the fabrics were in one collection from Northcott I think. She did like the checkerboard border - I was pleased with the way it turned out, and it was easier than I thought it would be. She also said "Excellent handling of difficult binding fabric choice - very good binding corners." That was satisfying because it was hard to do - the binding is a strip of the fabric that has a rope design that I used as the top of the binding and right beside that are some strips that show up on the binding on the back - so it was nice that she noticed that. It is instructive to get the judge's comments, but you need a bit of a thick skin. The important thing for me remains to be that I make quilts that I like, in fabrics that I like, that suit the person I am making them for if that is the purpose. My mom says she likes this quilt - and it will shortly be back in her living room - although this morning I was wrapped up in it a bit while working on this blog entry. It was a cool and foggy morning in central VA - a typical August morning that reminds us that summer is fading.

Catching Up for the Last Two Months!

I HAVE been quilting during the last 2 months, just not blogging about it. I finished the "Simplified Log Cabin" a few weeks back and last week I went to GA to see our kids and grands and also to take a class in using the Handiquilter at A Scarlet Thread in McDonough. After taking the class I rented time on the machine for the rest of that day and most of the next day. During that time I was able to get a comfort quilt done that I started 2 years ago - as well as my "Simplified Log Cabin" and the "BargelloBowl" that I pieced on Super Bowl Sunday 2008 (a Bonnie Hunter project) These last 2 will stay at our house - I am hoping to get them bound and labelled in time to put them in the quilt show our guild has in July. I learned a lot from Kathy, the Handiquilter teacher at A Scarlet Thread, and had fun using the machine. Thanks so much to Wendy for helping me out when I had little boo-boos! I am not planning to buy one anytime soon as I have no room for it, but it sure does allow this hand-quilter to get some tops done more quickly!

Our guild had a retreat 2 weeks ago. It was held at the Virginia Horse Center in town, but it still felt like a get-away with 20+ quilting friends. Friday we had a class taught by Augusta Cole about making what she called Batik Beauty. We made 9-patch blocks to look like half-square triangles and saw various ways to assemble them. I have 9 blocks made so far and am thinking that I will put them together like this - The picture of the red and white quilt is in Karen Combs' Combing Through Your Scraps - called Star Puzzle. I took a class from Karen Combs thru Quilt University 4 years ago when I first got back into quilting - it was called Combing Through Your Scraps, but at that time I didn't realize she had a book by that name. I never finished that quilt, but I did learn a lot from her. We all enjoyed Augusta's class, as well as her lecture on tips the following morning, and hope she will come back for a guild meeting next year. One of the most helpful things she showed us was how to use Eleanor Burns' Triangle Square Up Ruler - a great ruler for squaring up HST's! And most of us bought one from her too!

Saturday afternoon at our retreat one of our members showed us how to make a folded log cabin square using iron-on templates from Foldy Stuff. Here are the two I have done so far - It is fun to do, and goes pretty fast once you have your strips cut. Of course it took me longer than most of the others because I was trying to use different fabrics in each block, or at least putting the fabrics in different places - typical of the way I seem to do things -- making them more difficult than is wise! A few of my quilting friends were surprised that I was using colors that were not blue and yellow, but I have lots of black/white and white/black fabrics left from the quilt I made for Lillian.

I am the program co-chair for the guild for the next two years. We are planning a challenge for our ladies that will begin in June. I don't want to give anything away in case some of them are reading this - but here is a picture of the pieces of a block that is involved in the challenge - More to follow in mid-June!

Center of BargelloBowl is Finished!

I was up until 3 am, but did get the center of my BargelloBowl finished. It is 48 1/2 by 64 1/2" - each square is 2", so there are 768 pieces in it! That is not many pieces for one of Bonnie's scrappy quilts, and with only 32 different fabrics I'm not sure it qualifies as "scrappy." I am very happy with it, and am now thinking about borders and binding, and then quilting. For the border I am thinking of using the purple "Raindrops" with maybe squares or rectangles of the other fabrics arranged to look like they are floating on the purple. Not sure how to do that yet, but I am thinking about it. This was a fun quilt to do, a design that I had wanted to do for a long time, and pretty quick, though several others on QuiltvilleChat got finished way before me! Getting the intersections to all match up worked well most of the time, but at 3 a.m. I am less of a perfectionist! I hope that I find the time to do other bargellos. I have a book of bargello designs in needlepoint from 1967 - might be fun sometime to convert some of those to quilting. I also ordered the Twisted Bargello pattern that so many on QuiltvilleChat have talking about.

My fabrics for the BargelloBowl quilt

I now have my fabrics cut for the BargelloBowl quilt. I have agonized over the fabrics I wanted to use for way too long - after all it is supposed to be a scrappy quilt, right? Well, I decided to use teals, purples and blues and only 32 fabrics, so each fabric will go completely across the quilt. Here are some pictures of my run. I just laid out the strips on top of each other to get the general idea of how it will look. They are shown in order from top to bottom.





Now I need to start sewing the 4 groups together. It's a good day for staying inside here - freezing rain, ice and sleet apparently this morning and even though the temp is 37 now there is still ice on the trees and bushes. I do have to go out later for hair appt, but I'll get some strips together before then I hope.

BargelloBowl '08

One of the Yahoo Groups I belong to is QuiltvilleChat, hosted by Bonnie Hunter She is one busy lady, but has decided in the midst of having packers come next week to move her family from SC to NC that she wants to do a quilt on Sunday during the Super Bowl, and she has invited the members of her Chat group to join in. She/They/We will be making her Scrappy Bargello quilt in a lap size. For that we need to have 128 strips - 2 1/2" wide by 16" long. I was undecided about whether to join in or not, but after seeing this logo that one of the members designed today I thought I just really NEED to do this! I have not made a bargello before, even though I have collected a lot of fabrics with that design in mind. Not sure how scrappy I will make mine - but I have a few days to decide. Anyone want to join in??