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!

Lily's Frayed Edge Quilt Delivered

I finished Lily's frayed edge quilt and took it to the new mom Wednesday night. Here is the front, and the back, and the label. We were all at my nephew Eric's Senior Night for wrestling at his high school. He won his match in overtime - very exciting! Here is the new mom with the quilt.   She posted on my FaceBook page the next day that her 7-year-old son was wrapped up in it and wanted her to tell me that it is "the softest blanket ever." That's pretty cool!  Here is Brooke with her sister, her mom and aunt with the quilt - I'm holding Lily.

After the wrestling match we drove to my daughter's house in Marietta to spend the night, then yesterday she and I quilted together. She is working on her first quilt - she blogged about it here a few months ago. It is the Bundle of Bricks pattern - looks like a good one for a beginner because there are no seams to match until she sews the rows together. I worked on our frayed edge quilt, and now have the bottom 4 rows sewn together. Becky got at least half of her blocks chain-pieced, pressed and trimmed.   Here we are with our projects. We've not worked together like this on quilt projects before - hope we can do it again soon, but she is a lawyer who works out of her home and she just got a project that will keep her busy the next 3 weeks.

My next goal is to finish our rag quilt by next Thursday when my guild meets so I can take it to Show and Tell. Then I will go back the Orange Crush to get the borders finished in time for my old guild's Bonnie Hunter workshop February 11-12.

Snip, Snip, Snip - and some family time

The frayed edge quilt for Lily has just come out of the dryer after two rounds of washing and drying to make sure it is nice and fluffy.  All it needs now is the label and I am waiting confirmation on her full name before printing it on the label material. Here it is when I was still snipping.   I had hoped to get it finished by Friday so I could deliver it to the grandparents yesterday but that didn't happen. We'll see them again Wednesday so I'll deliver it then. While I was making this one I kept thinking that I wanted to make a big one for us. I have a lot of the squares cut for one similar to this one  that I made for the most cold-natured of our daughters and her hubby 2 years ago. In fact, since I started this blog entry I have laid out the front of a slightly smaller one for us. The big challenge will be what to put on the back of ours since I have run out of some of the fabrics I used on the front.  In fact, with two of the diagonal lines I alternated two similar fabrics on the front. Can you tell which ones they are?  This is the top part of the quilt   and here is the bottom part of it - my table is in the way of putting it all together in one place.   This one is on my "design floor" since my "design bed" in the guest room still has the orange crush quilt on it and the design wall I plan to hang up has the quilt from a retreat I went to in November still on it. How many more spaces can I find to lay out quilts on before I finish up some of them? Well, the plan is to work on this frayed edge quilt this week, then finish the top of the orange crush the next week. As long as I have it finished in time for the Bonnie Hunter workshop I'm taking with my old guild in Virginia of February 11 and 12 I'll be fine. 


As I look at the pictures above, I see that I have a couple of blocks out of place - why is it that you can see errors in a picture easier than you can see it just looking at it?


My oldest daughter has started working on her first quilt and we are planning to get together to sew on Thursday.  She is an attorney who works from home on a contract basis with other attorneys. The work is not as steady as working in a firm, which she did for several years, but her time is much more flexible, and allows her to volunteer in her son's kindergarten class. Her two younger ones go to day-care, so we should have some uninterrupted time to sew, then time to visit with them when they come home from school. Sounds like great fun to me. If I can get at least some of my rows of this quilt sewn together by then I could begin sewing the rows to each other while I am there. Always helps to have a goal, even if sometimes you don't reach it.


We were with this daughter and her family Friday night and Saturday morning. It takes a little more than an hour on a good traffic day to get from our house to theirs on the north side of Atlanta. My hubby and my daughter and all of her family participated in the Polar Bear Run (5K for Dave and Becky, 2K for her husband and son, cub runs for the little girls) Saturday morning at a church near her house. It was the first time our family had done anything like that with 3 generations participating - we hope it won't be the last!


After the run we came back down to our county to go to our nephew's wrestling match. He is a high school senior, and we have been attending several of his matches. We are all hoping he makes it to the state championships.


Friday I was able to help out the daughter who lives about 10 minutes from us. Their heat went out Thursday night, and I was able to go over to the house to let in the repairman on Friday so they didn't have to take off from work. Then that afternoon I picked up their 18-month old from her babysitter and met her mom at the doctor's office for her well-baby check-up so she didn't have to try to leave early from her teaching job to get to the appointment on time.


I am SO glad that we are able to do all these things for and with our family down here!

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.

Orange Crush Ready for Borders

It took me longer to finish the body of the Orange Crush quilt than I had hoped, but I finished it last night while going back and forth to watch parts of the Falcons game - toward the end I didn't have to watch so much 'cause they got crushed by the Packers. Hubby was at the game - guess he won't be so happy when he gets home.


I think I will use 2 borders - a narrow one in the black print that is in all the green/black blocks, and a wider one in the green print, with some of the leftover pieces in the middle of each side, and maybe some cornerstones from some leftover pieces as well.  I'll have to see how much I have of the green fabric before deciding for sure. I think if I use those two colors it will bring them out in the body of the quilt, and tone down the orange just a bit. Might try using some of the pale blues for the binding.  It will take awhile for me to think more about the borders.


In the meantime I will be working on a frayed-edge flannel baby quilt for a new great-niece born about 10 days ago. I've made one for each of our youngest 3 great nieces and nephew - for the oldest great-nephew I knitted a blanket.  Here is one of the ones I made -   I'm hoping I have enough of the teddy bear fabric to fussy cut some to use in the newest one too. Most of them have the same arrangement on the reverse side, but the for the last one I made I did something different because I didn't have enough of some of the fabrics to use the same pieces on the back -   I may make this newest one in a similar way. I have to go shopping for more flannel on Monday - Lily has a purple room and so I need more purple in her quilt.

Mid-January Update

Although I did not make it an "official" New Year's resolution, I think I am going to be trying harder to finish up a few more projects this year than in previous years. So I guess my first "finish" would count as one of these, even though I only started it on Dec. 27. A bit of background - our Christmas was protracted this past year since I was sick on Christmas Eve evening and Christmas Day and the next day was just beginning to get better. By that night DH was sick and he ws just beginning to get better by Sunday. During this time we missed the Christmas Day gathering at his mom's house, that we had only missed 2 times until this year in the 33 years we've been married, and we had to postpone the gathering with our kids until New Year's Day. His brother offered us 2 tickets to the Falcons game that Sunday but we had to pass on that too - DH barely felt like watching it from the couch. We were at the home of one of our daughters and her husband - They are newly pregnant and we were all so afraid she would get the stomach bug we both had, but thankfully she didn't. On Saturday I was ready for some retail therapy so I went to A Scarlet Thread, a great quilt shop in McDonough, GA where we were staying. Along with a "few" fat quarters, a Rowenta iron, and 2 pillowcase kits (see the previous post for one of the Spiderman pillowcases) I also got a cutting mat and rotary ruler to leave at their house. That way, when I am there from now on I won't have to worry about bringing a mat from home and have it warp - ask me how I know that happens - and I can work on a greater variety of projects. With the mat and rotary ruler I was able to cut out all the 6" squares for a rag quilt for this daughter and her husband, plus enough to get started on one for us. On my previous post I have pictures of the first 5 rows of it, but now it is finished and UPS will deliver it to them tomorrow. Here it is on our couch and here is a close-up - I did try it out for a few minutes and it is very comfy - hopefully it will help keep them warm in this cold weather that even GA is feeling. I think DH is glad to be rid of all the little "sprigs," as he calls them, that are a necessary by-product of a rag quilt, but I do plan sometime to make one for us too - and next time I will try to clip as I go so i don't have 15 rows to clip at one time! Washing it at a laudromat the first time was a good idea, but I was able to do it a second time in my washer. It is about 60" x 75" and has a square of white flannel in each square so is pretty heavy.

I also made a pillowcase for me last week to demo it to the Senior Center quilting group that I lead - Not actually quilting, but since I used some of my quilting fabric I'm considering it a project finished. This pattern is really easy to do. I had not made pillowcases until these, so don't know if the way described in this pattern is typical or not. It has you sewing the border, the body of the pillowcase, a folded strip of accent fabric, and the other edge of the border all at one time (with the body of the pillowcase rolled up so that you can reach the other edge of the border). This makes a tube sort of thing that you turn inside out, then make French seams across the bottom and up the side and Voila!! - done!! You could also serge the seams but since I don't have a serger I'll stick with the French seams.

My next project will be to try to finish Lillian's quilt - 10 blocks to go with the hand quilting, and the rest of the boders. I will be trying to do 2 more this afternoon/evening. If I could do 2/day all next week I might be finished by the end of the weekend, but I'm not sure my wrists and thumbs will hold up to that much quilting.

While in the midst of writing this post I have had a couple of welcome interruptions - youngest DD who is also a quilter has emailed me for advice about where to get some wide backing for a large quilt she is making as a commissioned work for a niece of her employers in the Hudson Valley of NY, and while I was replying to her email my oldest daughter called while on her way to a quilt shop in Marietta, GA. So now oldest daughter is looking for wide backing fabrics for youngest daughter and I've had a nice conversation with both of them! Oldest daughter has recently gotten back into sewing a bit. She made some neat gift bags for Christmas, and is now working on a dress for her middle daughter, and we even discussed how to use some of her scraps to make a kind of crazy quilt looking bibs for her baby. As a mother of 3 under the age of five and a practicing attorney, she is doing well to even find her sewing machine!!

After Holiday Update - More Paper-pieced Ornaments, Table Runner, Pillowcases, etc

How did it get to be January so soon? My blog definitely needs some updating on projects I finished last month. I did make more of the paper-pieced Christmas ornaments - These are the 4 paper-pieced bow ornaments - purple for DGD Reba, red for DGD Lillian, the other two for great nieces Lauren and Sofie. Here are the 6 gift package ornaments - soccer balls for DGS Atticus, snowmen for DD Kristi and DSIL Micheal, baseballs for great nephew Anthony, stars on blue for us, Spiderman for DGS Jack, and other stars on blue for a friend at work. And the green Christmas tree that was in my previous post about the ornaments I sent to DD Allie. They are all made from Carol Doak's paper-pieced patterns, and all but the tree have a pocket in the back for putting a little something in.

DD Kristi requested a table runner for Christmas, and after looking for awhile and not finding what I liked I decided to make this one for them - It is made using some flannels that I had purchased a couple of years ago to make her a rag quilt, but hadn't made it yet. I designed it based on their table measurements - it is about 70+" long and 14" or so wide. Here is a close-up showing the backing - These fabrics are from the "Let it Snow" collection by Maywood. I liked it so much while working with it that I bought more of the pieces I could find online to make a rag quilt for Kristi and Micheal and also one for us. Some of the fabrics that I ordered turned out to not be flannel - because I didn't read the description carefully enough - but I think I have enough for 2 throws. I have started on theirs and have enough blocks cut for the beginning of ours, but will finish theirs first. Here are the first 5 rows of theirs (front view) - and back view - I like to stagger the rows so the intersections are not so bulky. I think theirs will be 15 rows long and ours will be a bit longer.

I also completed 2 projects that weren't quilting. I made several felt food items for Jack and Reba's play kitchen - some of them are shown here in the kitchen - Altogether I made 2 donuts, 2 pancakes, 2 strips of bacon, 2 fried eggs, 2 strawberries, 2 sandwiches with 2 pieces of bread each (1 white and 1 wheat) with 2 colors of lettuce, 2 colors of cheese, 2 tomato slices, a slice of ham and a slice of roast beef, 1 apple, 1 pear and 1 banana. I made all of these from kits I bought at Lily Bean Market I have some other felt food patterns but I thought I'd stop here and see how they go over before I make more. I'd never even heard of felt food before last month, but there are LOTS of patterns out there!

I thought this would be the end of my projects for Christmas, but I was at a quilt shop a few days before we had our Christmas with our kids and saw some kits for Spiderman pillowcases. I've never made pillowcases, but it sounded pretty easy so I got 2 and made one each for DGS Atticus and Jack - here is Atticus with his - I did some more hand-quilting on Lillian's quilt but have not finished it yet. I have 12 more blocks to do and the borders that are on the edges by those blocks. I have finished the borders on one end and part way up the sides. I can work on it for a while some days, but not every day because it hurts my wrists/thumbs too much. I did have it with us while we were in GA last month and took a picture of her with it - She seems to be looking at it pretty intently!

New Granddaughter and Quilting Progress

My quilting has taken a back seat since August 13 when I left here to go to Johnson City, TN to visit my mom for the night, then on to Marietta, GA to stay with our oldest daughter and her family. They were expecting their 3rd child on August 16 and needed some help getting ready and someone to stay with the older two while they were at the hospital. Lillian arrives Saturday afternoon just a few minutes before I got to the hospital. I would have loved to be there for the arrival, but was staying with the siblings. Our middle daughter and her husband came up to help with the kids, but I didn't leave quite soon enough after they got there. I did get to hold Lillian a few minutes after I got there and later that afternoon this picture was taken of me with the three siblings. If you look closely you can see that Jack and Reba were just as interested in Mom's crackers as in Lillian! After Lillian and her mom came home from the hospital my son and his son, Atticus, came from Athens, GA to visit - here are cousins Atticus and Jack in the Disneyland t-shirts we bought them . Reba wanted me to take pictures of her too, so here is one of the best ones - .
I had time for dinner at a cute little restaurant, The Fickle Pickle in Roswell, with my nephew, his wife and their new baby, Sofie. Here they are with the quilt I had just given them for her - Yes, Sofie has red hair - hopefully it will be as beautiful as her mom's!
I did get a little quilting done while I was in GA. I have started a quilt for Lillian - I have eight more stars to piece and the outside border to finish piecing. Those stars are hard for me to get just right, so I have taken a little break from it and have been working on my Grandmother's Flower Garden. I now have 25 out of probably 91 flowers - with this on our bed I have a better idea of how far I have to go! I am sure after this weekend I will be getting back to Lillian's quilt, but this weekend we are going to DC to see 2 Braves' games, then back home Sunday night and the probably to Richmond for the last Richmond Braves' game Monday afternoon. I see more GFG flowers being made on these trips!